How did revolutions bring down empires and change societies around the world?

Welcome back!

For this project we dove into revolutions of the past, specifically The Russian Revolution, the French Revolution, the American Revolution and the Haitian revolution. The original plan was to put your chosen historical revolution on trial, to determine if the revolution was effective or ineffective on improving the lives of the people.

After participating in a class simulation of an unjust, inequitable society, we experienced a few reasons a revolution could begin. Economical crisis, class divisions, the senses of being wronged by the government and incompetent rulers are all underlying symptoms of a revolution.

Then we chose a revolution to do our entire project about. I chose the Haitian revolution; a little bit less known about, also the only revolution led and won by enslaved people. Then it was full steam ahead research, to understand the conditions and impacts of the revolution. We made graphic organizers to present our revolution information. You can read through bits of mine to learn more about the revolution!  Let’s just say I wasn’t getting much done each class, even though I was working on it, and I ended up handing this in a week late.

 Then each revolution group was assigned a side: prosecution or defence of the revolution – for  your revolution’s mock trial. 

My group collaborated to gather evidence and build arguments to show the ways in which the Haitian revolution did not improve conditions for the people of Haiti. We made an affidavit. This was a tough part because it felt as though we were repeating the same argument in different ways.

Here was an argument that I made. To craft this argument, I had to compare and contrast changes and continuities of/after the revolution. I also had to base my argument off of a primary source document. I used the Haitian Declaration of Independence of 1804, as my primary source, although I used a translated version because it was a bit hard to read the tiny French print.

Then it was announced to us that we wouldn’t have time, to actually put our revolutions on a mock trial, and our project was going to pivot. Dramatically. Our short solution to all our problems were to create a court cam type of film, with evidence, arguments, and witnesses. Here’s my group’s final video stating that the Haitian revolution was ineffective.

Now to determine the effectiveness of this project…

Well to be honest I don’t think this project was very effective for my learning and not a great use of my time. I admit, historical revolutions are complex, and usually involve lots of countries, violence, important historical figures, and underlying motives. It would be hard to become an expert in each of the 4 studied Revolutions.  I do feel confident in my knowledge on the Haitian revolution, but if you quizzed me on the French revolution, or the Russian revolution for example, I could only give you very little information, the surface level knowledge and facts. Like if revolutions were like onions; I’d only be able to give you the skin/husk of the onion.

I’m not sure if the intent behind this project was to learn about all 4 of these revolutions, but I certainly didn’t. A couple reasons why our project was derailed:

First our socials teacher left for his short paternity leave halfway through this project, and left us with a few different substitute teachers. Sure, the substitute teachers gave us our instructions, and tried to answer our questions to their extent, but they never really taught us any lessons. It was mostly a self guided research driven project. I think it would’ve have helped us learn more, if we still had a class lesson every once in a while, to re-collect, re-group.

Second of all, maker and winter exhibition work, kept taking away from this project. The tight timeline of this project with the big winter exhibition coming up and no Mr. Harris, it was highly unlikely that we were going to be putting on a “Revolutions on trial” live court showcase for an audience, like the grade 10’s showcased at last year’s winter exhibition (2021), when they where in grade 9. We were going to be showcasing our maker documentary films at the exhibition instead. I wasn’t disappointed about this, because I knew it was a lot of work to put on (and I still had to finish my maker work), but our solution of making effective or ineffective revolution videos was a bit lame compared to what the grade 10’s got to do. Starting with taking away socials time to watch avatar for maker, and then using more time as exhibition preparation time, this project was cut short, and so were our learnings, in my opinion.

I still takeaway new learnings and skills, like learning to craft an argument, and examining primary source documents.

Anyways, thanks for reading, and happy 2023!