Sins of The City

Since our last big project about World War One, we started a new unit called Sins of the City. This unit was about the differences and similarities of the lives of people during the interwar years (1920 to late 1930s) in Vancouver. Our unit was based around the question “Through the emergence and growth of Vancouver, was the experience the same for everyone?”

We started off this unit with a trip to the Museum of Vancouver (MOV), where we walked around different exhibits. These exhibits showed us the history of our own city all the way from when Europeans first settled in Vancouver to almost modern day. There were so many cool exhibits that we looked at but one of the exhibits our class mainly focused on was City on Edge. This particular exhibit would help us for this unit and was one of the reasons we went to the MOV. This helped us to find inspiration for our big project of the unit, so throughout the museum we had to find subjects that we found interesting and meaningful to us individually. I was very interested in the part of the museum that had to do with human rights as this is something that really speaks to me.

Once we returned back from the museum we then wrote down which big ideas we were interested in, to help our teacher decide our groups for our Sins of the City Project. This project consists of creating a podcast that is entertaining, informative and teaches people about a topic in Vancouver’s past. Each group would have to create an 8-9 minutes podcast and have to include some sort of interview to have other people’s opinions and ideas.

The project groups consisted of 5 groups including rights in Vancouver, immigration rights, aboriginal rights, city development and city growth. I was placed in the aboriginal rights group which I was happy about as it’s something I was wanting to learn more about and was really interested in.

Each group started off by coming up with a podcast topic to pitch to our teacher. For my group it was difficult as some of the topics regarding aboriginal rights during the 1920-1930 are a little bit of a touchy subject and are difficult to talk about. After discussing with each other and getting feedback from our teacher we decided to make our topic based on the TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commissions). We also included a brief history of residential schools then followed up with how the TRC has helped with aboriginal rights.

Once we got approval for our topic we started writing our first draft of our script. To do this we decided to split the script up into parts and each do sections individually, this didn’t work as well as we thought it might. The reason for this is most likely we didn’t communicate well enough with each other as the script ended up not flowing together smoothly. This also lead to some parts of the script being too short about certain things and other parts being too long. Here is our first draft of our script:

After completing this draft of our script we then went onto critique and gave feedback to other group’s and their scripts. We did this by being split into pairs and then we had to read over their script and discuss what we liked and things we thought the other person’s script could improve upon. We also got feedback from our teacher including corrections such grammar mistakes and punctuation errors.

With this feedback we went on to edit our script as well as create the first 30 seconds of our podcast. On top of doing these first couple of steps for our big unit project we also started reading a book. We were each assigned to a non fiction narrative and every week we would meet up for a mini book club and discuss what we read. The book I read was called The Right To Be Cold By Sheila Watt Cloutier, an Inuit woman from northern Canada. The book follows her life and her story, to protect the world from global warming. The people in many First Nations communities are being affected by global warming because it not only makes it hard for them to go and catch food due to arctic melting.

Although I found the overall idea of this book quite interesting, at times certain parts would seem to last way too long and would be talked about over the span of a 50 page chapter when it could have been shorter. Once we discussed what we thought about the book we then had to write down a reading response for each section of the book ( we split the book into four sections). Here are my reading responses:

 

As I was talking about before the reading responses, the next step of our project was to create a 30 second introduction for our podcast. We did this to show the rest of the class the theme we were going for and how our podcast might look like as well as get feedback from the class. For this intro each of my group members separately recorded our audio then I put them all together and added our own music in Garage band. Although there were definitely improvements that could have been made, I was proud of the quality of sound and music we created. But one thing our classmates and teacher told us that we could improve upon was probably coming up with a more engaging introduction with a hook to draw in the listeners.

This is the our first 30 seconds:

After completing the first 30 seconds, we then had to start working on the first draft of our actual podcast. To do this we cut out a couple parts of our script on residential schools and focussed more on the TRC. We also added in an interview that one of our group members was able to do with Joy Cramer, the director of indigenous programs at the SFU Beedie School of Business and is from the Sagkeeng First Nations in Manitoba. This interview was amazing and helped back up certain facts we stated, it also flowed very nicely from our voice to the interviewee. I was very proud of my group’s first draft and my editing of this first draft. Here is the first draft of the podcast:

As our first draft was pretty good, we didn’t have to do any major edits to the video, only slight changes to make it sound and flow better. I am very proud of our final draft and the way my group worked together as I felt we each did fairly equal parts in making our final draft. After doing these small edits, we would send the final draft to our interviewee to try and get some critique on the final product. Some of the apps I used throughout the creation of this podcast included iMovie, GarageBand, and Ferrite. Also for our final draft we uploaded our podcast to SoundCloud.

Here is our final draft:

After emailing our interviewee we ended up hearing back but not receiving any critique at the time. Hopefully Joy Cramer enjoyed our podcast as she helped to make it so great.

As this unit was coming to a close with our podcast practically finished, one of our final assignments was a literary essay which we would be writing in class over the span of two classes. This essay would be about each of the podcast group’s topic which for my group the topic was aboriginal rights. We would be writing this essay about a modern day issue and something we would like to change within the topic of aboriginal rights in our community. We wrote this essay in letter form so that in the end we would send it off to someone who could hopefully enforce what we are trying to implement. For my group we decided to write our essay about having more education about modern day stereotypes and issues aboriginal people face in order to reduce the amount of discrimination from non aboriginal people. When we each wrote our essays it was a little difficult for me as the first class we were given to write the essay I was away at a basketball tournament. Therefore I only had one class to write the first draft which was a little stressful and I didn’t write as much as I would have liked to. After getting feedback on the essay I went back and revised my work and was a lot more proud of the quality of work I produced, here are my first and second draft:

Once we completed the letter which was a mix of all three of our essays, we then sent it off to Brad Baker, the administrator of First Nations education. We received a response and will be meeting with him on the 11th of January.

Overall I think this was a very fun and educational unit that really let us each research and make a podcast about something we were interested in and wanted to learn more about which I really like to do. Hopefully when meeting with Brad Baker, we will get to add our education ideas into the BC curriculum or get a chance to discuss different opinions as this would be an amazing experience. So far I think this has been my favourite project and has taught me so much information about aboriginal rights not only in the past but also what is to come in future years with Canada on a path to reconciliation.