This was our first Socials unit as grade 10’s and it was everything to do with World War 1. For the unit we were basing everything off of Canada, it’s involvement, how it effected our countries identity and what was going on with Canada at the time.
We started off almost right where we left off our history lessons in grade 9, right before the war started and what our nation was doing at the time. We were still a fairly new country and we were trying to figure some things out. Canada was in the middle of what’s known as the “Laurier Era”, since Wilfrid Laurier had been elected and many changes were happening across the country due to the rising tensions between the French Canadians and English Canadians.
The next step in history is where we start to enter the war. We watched a couple of videos in class for some information so I thought it might be helpful for you to have that as well. You know, if you feel like watching..
Since we were right at the time when the war was starting we learned about all of the reasons and theories for the event that started the Great War. For this new section in the unit we were split up into groups and were told to come up with what we thought was the main reason that WW1 began. I was with Mimi and Izzy. I’ve already made a post about this mini project which you can read below.
And just in case you didn’t want to read through all of that here’s just the video.
Next we moved on to Canada’s part in the war. Why they joined and what their involvement was, this would lead us into our main project for the unit. Our project started off, as always, with a driving question. How did WW1 shape Canada’s identity as a nation? How were we going to answer this question? If you’ve read my Camp Capilano post you would have a pretty strong guess, a podcast.
More importantly, how did one specific soldier who fought in the war effect Canada’s identity. Of course not every solider could directly effect Canada as a nation, but they could contribute to an idea or fill the roll of something that changed in Canada after the war. To kick things off we of course had to start with some research. We were told to use the soldier archives which had documents of every soldier that fought in World War One. However I couldn’t find one that interested me enough on there that had enough
information worthy of a full podcast so i extended my research and came across Francis Pegahmagabow. An aboriginal soldier who was the most effective sniper in the war with 378 kills. He would also take the tasks that no other soldier wanted, the ones going out to no mans land just to sit there and wait for Germans to cross their path. He broke all lines of discrimination from that time, he proved to everyone that minorities and Aboriginals were just as important and could do things just as well although they didn’t look the part.
After I’d learned all of that it was time to get to the podcasting. As always you have to follow some sort of script when creating a podcast or video, this was meant to be a 5-6 minute podcast, which is about 600 to maybe 1000 words depending on the speed and how many pauses you incorporate. I started off with a script of 1700 words…
There you can see all the comments and critique I received from my teacher but we also did some peer critique. I was paired with Mimi once again and here’s what she had to say.
The main idea I took away from both critiques was the need to cut down my length and information. This was probably my biggest struggle for this project since this soldier had such a huge impact and has such an amazing story I just wanted to tell all of it. With that said I did in fact have to cut some information down so I could do my best to try and keep it within the time limit.
So this was draft one and it was still 7 and a half minutes and that’s with me speaking extremely fast and taking no pauses whatsoever. We also ran through some peer critique for this draft and this time I was paired with Hannah.
In summary, this critique was asking me to change exactly everything that I already believed needed to be changed, the speed of my voice, take more pauses, and cut down on even more information. Before any of the class could move on to our next draft however, our teachers believed we needed to change our style of podcast, some of our tone and especially our hooks. So we were assigned the task to only create the first 30 seconds to our podcast as our intro. We would then have these critiqued since it would be used to engage the listener and be the first thing that anyone heard while listening.
The only thing I was told to change here was the volume of the introduction music as to not suddenly have a loud change, “Don’t blast me with music!” -Ms Maxwell. After I took this feedback and the ones from my first dull draft, I’d managed to finally come up with my final draft of this project. I love studying the wars and even more so when I find a soldier as interesting as Francis Pegahmagabow to tell a story about and research.
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