Have you ever braved the battlefield? Fought for the future and your rights, and to forever change the nation you live in? In our latest project, we were immersed in the concept and realities of revolutions, and how the actions that were taken in the past still affect us today. 

We were first introduced to the concept of revolutions by our first project, which was based around the book “Animal Farm” by George Orwell. We read this book as a class, and had multiple discussions about the author’s intent and the hidden meaning behind the events in the book. The story itself is actually a metaphor for the Russian revolution, and revolves around a farm on which the animals stage a rebellion and and take new leadership. Unfortunately, the pigs begin to abuse their power, and eventually lead the farm to downfall. This represents how after a revolution, affairs often return to the way they were before, with slight changes. 

While reading the book “Animal Farm”, we were asked to apply a theory called the “Crane Brinton” theory, which breaks a revolution into four stages: Incubation, Moderate, Crisis, and Recovery. You can find a detailed list explanation of what these stages mean on my infographic. The importance of learning this extended not just through this project, but also to examining any historical event. The format that we used for the book chats really allowed us to connect animal farm to all of our revolutions. 

After the book chats, we began our work on our infographics. I was assigned the Meiji revolution, which took place in Japan in 1868. In this project, we took our knowledge of the Crane Brinton theory and applied it to our revolution, while also incorporating some fun facts and bits about the culture of Japan! We became experts on our revolutions, and our groups started to consider how we could tell the story of our revolution at the exhibition. If you want to view my infographic, click this button:

The final project that we worked on for the exhibition was called “Metaphor Machines,” and we were tasked with creating Rube Goldberg machines which represented a revolution. This was a daunting challenge, as we had to bring most of the materials, organize our group, and make sure that it would make sense to the audience. Our final setup was very heavily inspired by Japanese culture, and it took weeks to create!

To go along with the machine, we also created a documentary that showed the process of creating our machine, as well as us explaining the meaning behind our connections. Despite the many bumps in the road, my group members made it easy! My group was Sydnee, Melissa, Alex, Bobby, Sebastian, and me (to visit their blog posts you can click their names).

Be sure to check out the documentary below. Thank you for reading, and have a great day!

This is a picture of our finished product.