How do you manage to burn yourself, stab yourself, and create a system to connect wires to each other for a social studies project? To find out, use those handy eyes of yours (the things on each side of the bridge of your nose), and look this way ↓
I say salutations to my fellow penguins reading this (and humans I suppose), as we dive into a project a few of Canada’s worst moments and how they are reconciled and learned from, as well as a little bit about discovering and setting my own boundaries.
Our focus for this project was “How can we keep an apology alive so that the wrongs of the past are remembered—and not repeated—today”, and you can see me discover this throughout the post, and then at the end, I’ll give my answer.
We began this project with a quick activity where we tried to commemorate certain historical tragic events with some quickly constructed memorials, which was a nice jumpstart into learning about monuments and memorials, which is what came after along with learning where story played a role in these events and memorials.
We then went into a bit of history on the history of our home, British Columbia, and how it came to be. Here is what we learned:
We then learnt about and analyzed some of the biggest wrongdoings by the Canadian government in history: Asiatic exclusion, Japanese internment in WWII, and the Komagata Maru incident. We also learned about what an apology is, so have a look at that below:
I did honestly find it jarring that I had never heard of some of these events before; despite being a Canadian citizen who has lived in Canada as long as I can remember, I had never heard of the Komagata Maru incident for example, and with the role it played in challenging Canada’s discriminatory intentions at the time and shaping a better future I now find this kind of odd. However I am pleased to the lengths at which these things were taught to us, showing how Canada truly has a commitment to remembering and learning from the past.
As an accompaniment to our other learning in this project, we read and studied Obason by Joy Kogawa. Obason is a book about a young Japanese girl and her family during Japanese internment in Canada and their journey and experiences though it. It gave me new perspective on what this event was like, as well as some more information about the topic. I’m going to personally rate the book a 7 / 10.
We were then assigned (with some choice), our case study for this project. My preference was the Komagata Maru, and this was luckily what my group was assigned to. Here is a more in-depth overview of the topic that I created:
Smart Brevity_The Komagata Maru
After some brainstorming, we had a basic idea for what we were going to make for our final product, which was in the style of a pitch of a memorial to commemorate the events of our case study. We decided we were going to have a wireframe boat supported by hands raised out of a rock pond. I know this may seem a little confusing, but it’s laced with metaphors, so here was my explanation.
We were also tasked with creating a prototype of what this would look like. It was a lot of work to figure how to create this in a way that would communicate our vision to others but I think we pulled it off.
My group with the finished memorial pitch (I am in the middle)
But its creation was not without struggles, as each group member was tasked with creating one section of our memorial prototype. I said I would create the wireframe boat, and as my teacher pointed out on more than one occasion, I probably made it a little more difficult on myself than it had to be.
I designed and 3-d printed an entire system specifically to join the type of wire I was using together in a modular way. After the many iterations of that, I still had to build the boat, but I got away with just a few small burns and a small cut. (I’m not great with hot glue)
… but I think it looked alright. I also ended up 3d printing the hands, and we were having trouble sculpting them.
All in all I think this was a very informative project that taught some useful information and skills, and I learnt how an apology can be kept alive though careful and methodical storytelling and symbolism to create a monument that resonates with and helps heal those involved.
Overall I give this project an 8 / 10. See y’all in the next one.
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