Discussion is a fundamental part of learning, in my opinion. One of the best ways to show discussion, is to record it! That’s what we did with our podcasts over the past few weeks.

Amelia B and I recorded a podcast about Jewish life and tradition in Canada, which you can listen to here.

This unit focused on comprehension of text and video, and discussion is a great way to understand texts and videos further. But just what did we discuss this unit?

Well, one of the things we discussed was our novel study. To be honest, this was my favourite novel study I’ve ever done. The book, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie, was an engaging and interesting story about a First Nations boy in Spokane, Washington, who goes to school outside of his reservation. But the best part about this novel study was the discussion element. For past novel studies, we’ve split into groups and each been assigned a different task. This time, because our class is so small, we don’t have to split up. We also didn’t assign tasks; everyone had the same task, which was to come up with a few questions about the section of the book we had read. That meant that everyone got a chance to discuss and share their thoughts, and it was incredibly valuable to hear everyone’s thoughts and questions. These discussion sessions helped me to a deeper understanding of the novel.

The actual project, or thing we created, for this unit, was a podcast! We used six milestones throughout this project, to chart our progress. Now, there are many different types of podcasts, so our first milestone was to listen to one and describe it. I listened to Episode 195, called Barry Sonnenfeld Calling, of the NPR podcast Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. This podcast is structured like a game show, and I really enjoyed listening to it.

For the next milestone, we moved onto researching the topics of our podcast. The driving question for this unit was ‘How did lives and conditions change and stay the same after World War 2?’  I worked with Amelia B, and we focused on how traditions and culture has changed for Jewish Canadians since World War 2. We spent some time doing research, but that wasn’t enough. For the third milestone, we wrote the script, but we need more information. To really learn how traditions and culture have changed, we reached out into our community and interviewed Emily, a Jewish woman from North Vancouver. We asked her some questions about Jewish tradition, which you can hear in the podcast above. Her interview was very informative and we’re really grateful to her!

The next milestone was recording, editing, and submitting the podcast. This may sound like several different parts of the project, but really we were editing and recording at the same time. Every time we recorded a new piece of the podcast, we edited everything around it into GarageBand to make it fit and sound good. We also created music for it; I made the intro music, and Amelia B made the other music cues. Once everything was recorded and edited in, we posted it!

One of the last milestones was a response to The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian. I wrote about how the book gave me an insight into First Nations Reserves that I didn’t have before.

The final milestone was this blog post!

I think that I was really able to learn from this project because of how open it was. Both the novel study and the podcast itself were very open-ended, and we could choose and impact the direction of the project. That’s a good quality in a project, and I think it led to a great final product!

Thanks for reading my blog post!