So recently in PLP we just finished our unit on the interwar period. It was based primarily around Vancouver compared to the last unit where we looked at how Canada effected WWI. For this unit we worked in groups create a podcast, a behind-the-scenes video, and an essay.

To start off the unit we went on a field trip to the Museum of Vancouver. We had a great opportunity there to learn about the good and the bad history of Vancouver. The goal of the trip was to find a few topics you were interested in, for example labour rights, or city growth. We had to pick 3 topics we were interested in so that our teacher could put us into groups.

Once we had picked our topics we had to dig deeper into them. We had to try and find something small and specific that we could base our podcast around. I was put into the labour rights group along with Sam, Will, and Kyle. We decided that our more specific topic would be about the wages and rights Asian immigrants had as workers.

Throughout the unit each group was assigned a book relative to their topic. We got given Nickel and Dimed written by Barbara Ehrenreich. It was a book published I believe in the 90s. It is about an average middle class person who was given a work assignment to go and act as a low wage worker only getting paid what would be a minimum wage job today. Most of her jobs would only pay around $6/hr. All 4 of us in my group strongly disliked the book. It was very repetitive as she just went from job to job complaining most of the time. Every week we would have a discussion within our groups about the book. Our teacher wanted us to refer to this as a “book club” rather than a novel study to try and keep the mood more positive about the whole thing.

Now that we had started learning more about our topic we finally got to work on writing a script for our podcast. We wrote a lot, however the order and way we had written it just wasn’t right. So we had to go back and revise it. Our script mostly consisted of information about the Canadian Pacific Railway (which Chinese and other Asian immigrants worked on a lot) and other bits of information about Asian workers during the interwar period.

Once our script was approved we got to work recording the podcast. We used the recording studio in the band room at Seycove. It has a very high quality mic in there and also has good software to record into. This meant we could have a very nice sounding podcast.

Our first draft didn’t end up having an interview in it. The reason behind that was Kyle was originally going to do the interview, but he had been away in Korea while we worked on the podcast.

We decided that for the podcast we would leave Kyle out of it and get everything done ourselves, but still gave Kyle for the other aspects of the project. Luckily for us, our planning 10 class just had a guest speaker come in from Work Safe BC. So Sam had the great idea of interviewing her to see if there was anything she knew about labour rights back in the interwar period. We also re-recorded a few bits where the audio was a bit off in the first draft.

Throughout the creation of the podcast (and on the field study) we were supposed to be filming or timelapsing the work we had done so that we could make a behind the scenes video. However we kind of forgot about that and had to improvise by recording a bunch of shots of me working in the recording studio the day before it was due. Even though the video is scripted it still works as a decent video as it shows the work we had to do to create the podcast.

The last aspect of the unit was to write an essay about our topic. Every student had to write their own essay about a topic their group had come up with together. My group decided that we would write about the “Fight For 15”, which is the campaign to increase the minimum wage to $15/hr that is currently going on in BC. Kyle and I wrote negatively about it, saying that we thought that minimum wage didn’t need to increase. Sam and Will however wrote that they believed the increase should happen. Once we had all written our essays we had to agree on which side we were on. After around a half hour debate we decided to go for the “Fight For 15”. We needed to select a side because as a group we then had to write a letter to Terry Beech who is an MP for Burnaby North and Seymour. Our letter stated that we hoped he would fight to increase the minimum wage if he ever had the opportunity.

Overall this was one of the biggest units we have done so far in PLP. I enjoyed the unit and learned a lot from it. I also feel as though I am a lot more educated about labour rights and how tough it was for those struggling to live back in the 1900s.