Hello and welcome to my final humanities post!
The driving question:
How can we make the contrasting narratives of war come alive for an audience?
This project was all about World War 1. The end goal of the project was to have an artifact to display at the Spring Exhibition, which was museum themed.
To start we learned about how museums tell stories. I didn’t go but there was a trip to Monova, the museum of North Vancouver. Here are some notes I took on how museums tell stories:
Next, we learned about the contrasting narratives of war. The side of war that propaganda shows (easy, quick, and heroic to fight for your country) and the realities of war (horrible conditions, diseases, malnutrition, etc.). In this we did a deeper dive on how the war started and Canada’s part in the war. We then got into groups, picked a topic and made a keynote presentation to present to the class (I was with Kira)
After that, we learned more about propaganda, conscription, and internment. We also learned about ethical judgment.
To end off this keystone, we wrote a paragraph on the contrasting narratives of war.
To begin preparing for the exhibition, the class was divided into two groups, and given a theme. My groups theme was traditional perceptions of women vs their role in WW1. We started planning out what our exhibit could be. Ms. Madsen made it clear that we could not work together, but Kira and I wanted to, so we decided to both make murals, one showing traditional roles of women, and the other showing WW1. This way, we weren’t working on the same mural, but we were still doing the same thing, so we could both help each other. Loophole.
Kira and I began working on our murals. I chose to do the traditional roles of women. Since women were mostly stay at home wives back then, and couldn’t get jobs or vote, I found a photo of a woman hanging up laundry, showing that they did domestic work.
We projected the image on the wall and taped up a big sheet of black paper and tranced the photo because it was too hard to free hand it.
Then I cut out triangles to fit, and made it look sort of like stained glass. Here is the final result:
Now for the reflection on the Exhibition!
This exhibition was really fun (though chaotic), and we got burritos for dinner this time instead of pizza like we usually have.
Here’s a picture of Kira and I’s murals:
Also, here is the title card we displayed to tell people what our project was about:
I’m really proud of how I did this exhibition. I talked with a lot of people, and had tons of good conversations with people, which is a lot different than just talking at people like at most exhibitions. Everyone seemed to really like our murals, they even took pictures of out work. I think it was a great topic to discuss with others and could help start a discussion about women’s roles and rights in society back then, and now.
Now to answer the driving question. I think to make anything come alive for an audience, you need to make it stand out, make it engaging and make a connection between the piece and the audience. By doing this, you’ll make it come alive, and turn it into something people can relate to, appreciate and understand.
Thank you for reading!