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

Welcome back, to the final blog post of PLP 11. The main project we did was Cat and Maus, which I’ll explain soon, but this blog post will also be going into our Spring Exhibition, and a whole other PLP-ish class I haven’t mentioned in my blog yet.

Cat and Maus was our last Humanities project, which we mostly spent analyzing The Holocaust. The Holocaust is an extremely sensitive topic so we had to treat this process with the utmost seriousness. Before the project, I felt like I already had a good understanding of The Holocaust, but I learned so much in this project, which was both interesting to me on an educational level, but also upsetting on an emotional level. 

Another reason that made this project quite disturbing, other than the subject matter, was the reason why we were doing it in the first place. Antisemitism is rapidly increasing across the world. According to the FBI, antisemitism is reaching a “historic level” in the US. We have also unfortunately seen antisemitic incidents increasing in our community and our school, so we felt it was very important to educate ourselves on this topic, to teach ourselves and share the knowledge with others.

Our main research tool was Maus, by Art Spiegelman. I know I’ve said this a lot recently, but I really think Maus is the best book we’ve read in PLP. Maus is an avant-garde comic book about the author interviewing his father, Vladek Spiegelman, about his experiences in The Holocaust. This sounds like a weird way to tell such a dark story, but it works amazingly. I could go on and on about the importance of Maus, but I already did. Click here to read a literary critique I made.

Another amazing resource was the classic 1993 film Schindler’s List. I consider myself a bit of a film enthusiast but I had never seen Schindler’s List before, but I can easily say this is the best movie I have seen with PLP. I found the movie to be an excellent storytelling device, through its depictions of historical events and the heavy emotional weight it puts on the audience, as well as its masterful filmmaking techniques.

We looked at several other sources on The Holocaust, from both analytical documents and personal testimonies. We were tasked with writing a Holocaust Content Reflection on one resource we found particularly useful. I decided to write mine on The Holocaust in Pictures, an article covering a timeline of persecution told through photographs. Click here for my reflection.

Perhaps the most impactful resources were the personal testimonies we heard. First, we watched several interviews from the Shoah Foundation with Holocaust survivors, detailing their stories. Next, Ms. Madsen invited her friend, a local librarian to come speak to our class about 2 of her great-grandparents, one of whom survived the Holocaust, and one who did not. Lastly, we went on a field trip to the University of British Columbia for the annual Holocaust Symposium, where we got to hear the story of an actual Holocaust survivor, and we watched a short film similar to Maus, about a filmmaker interviewing his Holocaust-survivor grandmother. All in all, I found these testimonies extremely valuable in emphasizing the reality of these horrible events.

By now, it was time to begin working on our final project for the Spring Exhibition. We felt that The Holocaust was an extremely sensitive topic and may be too dark for the audience, so we had to pivot a bit, and focus on up-standers and activists who created positive change in history.

At first our instructions were clear: We were to work with a partner to research an activist and create a multi-modal (multiple forms of communication) presentation on said activist. Max and I decided we wanted to cover Abbie Hoffman, a leader in the anti-Vietnam War and Counterculture movements of the 1960s. Max knew nothing about him, so I brought him on board with 2 reasons: 1. He is depicted in the 2020 film Trial of the Chicago Seven by Sacha Baron Cohen (the GOAT actor) and 2: His comedic performance-based peaceful protests. Max was on board so we decided to create a ‘Zine, similar to actual Zines made in the 60s by the Yippies.

But very soon, conflict would arise regarding this project, and our other major class; BC First Peoples.

I haven’t talked bout BC First Peoples on my blog before, so I’ll give a quick rundown. Last year, the Province of British Columbia created a mandatory course on the history of the Indigenous peoples of the province. Technically, it’s not a PLP course, but it was taught to us by Mr. Hughes, and we still incorporated several PLP elements into our version of the course, one of which being an end-of-the-year exhibition. Over the last 5 months, we have covered several topics, such as Rights, Names and Place Names, Stories and Storytelling, Food, Health, and Wellness, and more. We organized our learning in Craft, through a commonplace-book-like system. The 3 assignments from the course I would say I’m the most proud of are all videos: an animated explainer video on the Klahoose First Nation, another explainer video on the Indian Act, and a puppet video about the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

You may be wondering “Sepaus, how does your BCFP class tie into the rest of this blog post?” The answer to that question is a bit complicated. The BCFP Exhibition was scheduled to take place in-school the day after our PLP Exhibition, so the teachers decided, with 1 week till launch, we would combine both our Humanities projects and our BCFP projects. This was both good and bad for me. It was bad because I had already started planning for different project for the BCFP exhibition, and I didn’t have a lot of time to adapt. It was good however, because I didn’t really like my idea for the BCFP project.

Originally, the Humanities project was to be in partners, and our BCFP project was to be individual. Since we were combining our projects, Max and I had to find some kind of connection between all 3 of our projects. I was originally planning to make my BCFP project on Food, Health, and Wellness, and Max was covering Acknowledging Rights, which we found pretty hard to connect to Abbie Hoffman. We decided to scrap our BCFP projects, and instead, use our ‘Zine to explain the similarities and connections between the Vietnam War and Canada’s Residential School System. We expanded our Zine to cover both topics, and we also built an interactive memorial to create an experience the audience could be a part of. The memorial was quite simple: we took a couple of pairs of shoes, courtesy of Max’s cousins, and filled them with flowers. Children’s shoes have recently become a memorial symbol for the children who died in the Residential School System, and the flowers come from anti-Vietnam War protests, were protesters would place flowers inside the barrels of rifles of police officers or National Guardsmen. We made this memorial interactive, by including a station for visitors to cutout paper shapes, write a message, and place it on the memorial. Click here to read the Zine.

The 2 Exhibition days came and I would say it was a big success. I felt like this was the most impressive exhibition to the audience I have ever made and probably my favourite exhibition project. It was a bit more challenging than most other exhibitions because it was 2 days, and I was worried that the flowers would die because they weren’t in great condition when we bought them, but I’m writing this blog post about a week later and the flowers are still doing good.

To answer the driving question from Cat and Maus, multi-modal communication can enhance our ability to humanize and understand complex issues by using mixed media to provide context and creates an emotional connection with the audience. I found during the building-knowledge phase of Cat and Maus, that different forms of media impacted me in different ways. Written pieces gave me factual evidence, photos and videos showcased that evidence, and human-to-human interactions showed the impact of the evidence.