We have reached the end…

 The end of this project that is. It’s been a while since my last Humanities post, but here we are wrapping up our last Humanities project of the year. This project was a deep dive into the contrasting narratives of World War 1. The driving question was, “How can we make the contrasting narratives of war come alive for an audience?” The final product for this project was our own curated museum exhibits, which we presented at the year-end Spring Exhibition!!

Follow along as I take you through our project path, how we curated a museum-like experience, and what I created for my final product.

It feels like it’s been forever since we launched into this project, although it was actually just a month ago. We started this project with a field trip to the MONOVA (Museum Of North Vancouver). The goal of this outing was to understand how museums tell stories, and how museum curators bring those stories to life. Also, to provide us with exhibit inspiration for our Spring Exhibition!! 

I had never been to this museum! It was a fairly new one, so it was the first time for most of my classmates as well. I was a bit surprised at how small the museum was, but it made for a quaint, connected experience. I think it is smaller because it just focuses on North Vancouver’s History. The layout of the museum was very interesting. Instead of being arranged chronologically, it was curated to be a thematic museum experience. This makes it more open for learning, and appeals to different audiences.

Back in class, we reflected on our museum experience by answering a few questions and taking some museum notes. Here are my notes:

Then we shifted our thinking from museums to World War 1. We learned an acronym that represented the causes of the Great War: M.A.N.I.A.

Militarism— A massive buildup of armed forces to deter rivals (Arms Race)

Alliances— Signed treaties with other nations involved, that pledges to defend the other if attacked by an aggressor. 

Nationalism— pride and patriotism in one’s national identity, a major cause of international tension.

Imperialism— The want for more colonies/ territory.

Assassination— The spark of WW1. Heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife Sophie get assassinated. Shot by Gravrillo Princip on June 28,1914.

We ranked each, from not at all important to most important. In my opinion, alliances were the most important. By 1914, all the major powers were linked by a system of alliances. Without the alliances, we might not have ever had World War 1. Alliances are what spread, fuelled, and advanced the war. 

All these underlying conditions and chains of events lead to a massive buildup in tension until it was ready to explode. And the assignation of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was the perfect spark to set it in motion. On July 28, 1914, The First World War began, with the Triple Entente (United Kingdom, France, and Russia) and other nations (e.g., Canada and Australia) against the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Italy). And so it began…

Now that we knew how the war broke out, it was time to learn about Canada’s role. We watched The Story of Us, an overview of our role in the war.

We learned about Trench Warfare, weapons used in world war 1, medicine, planes, tanks, and ships, PTSD (shell shock), and women and minorities in the war.

We then worked on ethical judgment. We use ethical judgment to determine if something is fair or justifiable. We use our historical perspective to decide if it was a fair strategy at the time. Some topics we looked at were: Government’s use of propaganda, Conscription, and Internment Camps during the war.

We had to choose a topic of interest and use our ethical judgment strategies to determine if it was fair, and justifiable, at the time. I chose the government’s use of propaganda. 

As a continuation of this exercise, we each wrote a paragraph on the competing narratives of war. There were 3 topics to choose from— I chose the myth vs reality of war because then I could use my ethical judgment sheet on propaganda as examples in my paragraph. Overall, I’m super proud of how it turned out, so give it a read!

And now, it was time for our final products!

I was in the myth vs reality group. Other groups were the traditional perception of women vs their role in the war and innovation vs destruction.

We were to put on a museum-like experience for the guests coming to see our work at the 2023 Spring Exhibition, so we had to have a variety of exhibits. Some people made physical artifacts and models, some people did art, digital exhibits, and interactive exhibits, and there was even some live acting. I made an interactive digital exhibit. It was a slider, that the audience members could slide to see the contrasting narratives. Lucky for you, since it’s a digital exhibit, you can see it too!

Here’s my explanatory panel and the interactive sliders that I presented at the Spring Exhibition!

The first slider represents the general glorification of the War. “I’m going to be a hero”. How it was advertised as being a “heroic, patriotic adventure”, that would only last a few months, “Be back by Christmas”. And then you slide to see the reality of war: how it was a muddy, blood-bath, where soldiers were dying of disease in the trenches, their feet rotting away because of trench foot. Terrible living conditions. Soldiers were starving, traumatized, rotting away… A really sad reality. And the war lasted 4 years, instead of a couple of months. I’m sure if war was advertised like this, nobody would want to go. Yet we still have a war to this day (ex: the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia)… even when we know the sad realities of it. 

The second slider represents the pilots’ role in the war. How if you had 5 or more kills you were a flying ace, whereas the reality was it was a very harsh, unforgiving, job, where most pilots died in training, before they even got to battle.

So anyways, that was me trying to keep my explanation concise.

All in all, I thought this was a very successful project. There was a bit more freedom in what you created, so that allowed people to play on their interests, which I found made it easier to talk about to audiences at the Spring Exhibition. It was a tad repetitive, but exhibitions usually are. The highlights of the Spring Exhibition for me was when my parents tried Charlie’s military boot camp/ push-up station, to see if you were fit enough for the war. You were encouraged to try and meet the military requirements, with no weight, 15 lbs, or 30 lbs on your back. Another highlight was taking a break and seeing what the other grade levels were working on because otherwise, we don’t know. I went to see some grade 11’s work on school and education re-imagined, and I was super impressed. And then I traveled through the grade 12’s tour, and I loved the interactive bits, and how they connected to real-life topics. 

If we were to do it all over again, I think we needed to do our peer critique earlier so we had more time to revise our work before the exhibition. Also assigning direct responsible Individuals so we weren’t as scrambled when setting up for the exhibition. This is all part of the process though; learning from your mistakes, so that you can grow for the future.

Thanks for reading! See you soon for my T-POL!