Three blog posts published in one day? You guys are getting a lot of content out of me! Whats up guys welcome back to the blog of Malaika! Today we are talking about our latest humanities project entitled: Let’s get Riel! This project revolves around (you can probably guess)…. the one, the only, Louis Riel! This man has raised many arguments, debates, and his actions have become a very controversial topic to talk about. Of course Ms. Maxwell saw this as the perfect opportunity to start a project on this topic. Our main goal was, in partners, choose an incident similar to this, and show how just or unjust the circumstances were. My partner, Anders, and I decided to pick the Komagata Maru incident, which took place in 1914. We were required to create and select 3 pictures and create a caption which would then be posted on our class instagram page! While this was all happening, we were keeping up with the story of Louis Riel, who was our main character throughout this project. We read a comic book, watched videos and even wrote summaries on him.

TOTAL COMPETENCIES BEING ASSESSED:

Connect: How do I understand my own and others’ personal connection to texts I read, listen, and view?

Understand Ethical Dimensions: How do we decide if the actions and decisions in the past were fair or unjust, or should or should not have been taken?

While reading PART ONE of this Louis Riel comic, Anders and I got together and chose an incident, which ended up being the Komagata Maru. It was interesting to me the moment I learnt what it was about and I was eager to dive deeper! But before starting our research on our incident, we needed to get familiar with an event happening today that related to our driving question: How can we present past actions and decisions through images to help us make decisions of what is fair or unjust? This is where Milestone One comes into play.

Milestone One: Response to Current News, Image, Podcast

Competency Being Assessed: Connect & Understand Ethical Dimensions

Starting of our first milestone, was earning about the Wet’suwet’en movement regarding the pipeline, addressing the protesting, and using this as an example to what we were going to do with our partners in the near future. All of these milestones involved the same two competencies, which some may think is boring but actually it gives you a good chance to practice this competency over and over to keep it at an accomplished or even extending level!

I went onto Apple News and checked what were the latest stories regarding the First Nations. There was one story that interested me, which was all about promises made by officials to a certain First Nation clan, and the article/video was about how that clan was voicing their concerns on hoping the deals are followed through. I connected with this story by writing a small summary consisting of the important details of this story.

I think I identified and connected quite well with this milestone, and I learnt about the argument that could be posed from both sides. I feel like I could clearly give an answer to the Understand Ethical Dimensions competency but obviously I had a long way to go, and as of then I had just scratched the surface.

Milestone Two: Partner Research is due on individual stories

Competency Being Assessed: Connect and Understand Ethical Dimensions

As you can tell from the title of this milestone we required partners for this. During the transition from milestone one and two, we finished PART ONE of the Louis Riel Comic. I feel PART ONE was easy to follow and there weren’t many crazy components to keep track of. With PART ONE complete, PART TWO was assigned on the day we acquired our partners. My partner, Anders, and I made the decisions to choose the *Komagata Maru* event. Immediately we created a shared document and started adding all the information and research we had on this event. At first it was a mess, bu the slowly organized it to make it look…okay. MLA citations and an Ethical Decision Making worksheet was also assigned to be done. This helped us further our knowledge and practice our Understand Ethical Dimension competency. We also created a mind-map of questions just for reference.

At this point: PART TWO? Complete. PART THREE? Started in progress.

Milestone Three: First Draft of Images and Captions

Competencies Being Assessed: Connect & Understand Ethical Dimensions

Now that we were aware of most, if not all, aspects of our event, we started developing 3 images that we would post along with a caption, that describes and reveals the story of the event and a historical individual. This would, in turn, pose questions about actions and decisions made at that time during that incident.

Anders and I created a draw on image:

A quote:

And a graphic design:

We thought these would help tell the story better and help create clear questions as to what decisions and actions took place. I feel we demonstrated Connect well through this milestone. I liked how Anders and I connected, communicated and collaborated with each other to accomplish, if not extend the expectations on our Connect Competency which I’m really proud of! My Understand Ethical Dimension competency hasn’t been officially marked, but I feel that I deserve an accomplished. We created images and a clear caption to help decide if those decisions that the Canadians made was fair or unjust.

Milestone Four: Partners Pitch to Class

Competencies Being Assessed: Connect & Understand Ethical Dimensions

Presenting to the class was up next, and each partner-group stood up and presented their caption and 3 images they created. Each group pitched ethical decision making questions and conclusions to those questions. Our question included:

According to the law this was a fair decision to make, but ethically wrong. If you were one of the people making this decision at the time, knowing this, what would you have done?

THE COMIC

Around this time we finished our comic with a 1 page response, on the controversial question, was this man truly a villain or hero? I could’ve written this from either point of view, but during the debate we held, where the class was split into two to debate if he was a hero or villain, I was on the con side of Riel’s death. For a change I decided to write from the other point of view. That his death was justified, and that he was a villain of a person. Looking at this from a different point of view was refreshing, because I got to research a whole new side of this topic. I read many articles (that were very clearly biased against Riel), which was a different but fun experience.

Milestone 6: Reflective Learning Portfolio Post

Competencies Being Assessed: Connect & Understand Ethical Dimensions

This post is the last milestone of this project and with that I want to acknowledge my competencies one last time. We only had two main competencies throughout this project and they were repetitive, so we had multiple chances to perform. I feel overall that I accomplished the Understand Ethical Dimensions and I feel that Anders and I extended our Connect competency.

Above you can see our final caption and hashtags we added that we think tell our story through text. @ethicaldimensions2020 is our class instagram, and if you want to check out all the other partners’ posts check their stories out there!

Thank you for reading my post and see you next time!

~Malaika