Hello readers, and welcome back to the blog. Today’s post is about our most recent project in humanities, “Cat and Maus.” In this project, we dived into the topic of the holocaust. This is a complicated event to understand that has many layers to it. In order to develop and understanding of the event, we read the book “Maus,” by Art Spiegelman. This is a comic style book which details the harsh realities of the holocaust in Eastern Europe. 

Driving Question:

How can multi-modal communication enhance our ability to humanize and understand complex issues?

In this project, we heard from multiple speakers and used various resources to understand the big ideas of the holocaust. As I mentioned, the book was helpful, and we also heard from a speaker who’s family was directly affected. Most of these resources were shocking, and brought out the true brutality of this event. As one of our first activities, we wrote a reflection on the holocaust, based on the resources we discovered in class. In this I wrote about my thoughts and connected the resources to one another. I also explained how each told it’s own important story. 

We did a field trip as part of this project to the Holocaust Symposium at UBC. This was a day trip where we listened to multiple speakers, one of which a holocaust survivor who lived through the terrible event.  Here’s some photos of the symposium:

I thought the presentation would be more hands on, but I still learned lots and had a good time at the UBC campus.

Near the end of the project, we watched “Schindlers list.”

This movie was great, and it documented the events of the holocaust very well. In an event full of negative figures, Oskar Schindler was one of the few good ones. 

Final product:

For this project our final product was initially supposed to be about an upstander in history and how they contributed their efforts to philanthropy. But, the teachers pivoted and made it a combined product with our BCFP exhibition. In my BCFP post, I go into more detail about the exhibition. Go give it a read!

For the exhibiton, I chose to talk about the importance of indigenous lands, and focused on Indian arm. I pivoted from talking about the humanities material, and solely talked about BCFP. 

Here’s a photo of my final product:

In summary, this project was interesting and presenting lots of shocking details about human history. There has been many holocausts such as this in our history, but none this brutal or done with modern technology such as this. This was one of my first times learning about the holocaust in school. Thanks for reading my post!