Hey y’all, welcome back to my blog! In this post I will be talking about our most recent humanities 10 project, This is Us. In this project we learned all about Canadian identity and diversity.
The first thing we did for this project was answering our launch question to try to dig up future inquiries about Canadian identity. The question was, “Why does it matter to think about who we are as Canadians?”
My answer was:
“I think it’s important to think about who we are as Canadians because it’s important to reflect on we are. We must think about our past, and how that differs to who we want to become. It’s important for Truth and Reconciliation to be able to acknowledge our past mistakes as Canadians. This way, we can work towards reconciliation. Without acknowledging our past, we cannot work on ourselves for the future. Canadians have a long way to go in who we are, and if we reflect on who we are and try to use that as a tool to improve for the future, we can truly thrive as a nation.”
I’m happy with the work I did on this assignment because my first draft was not my best work but I was given some feedback and I am happy with how I applied these revisions and changed my work for the better.
After that, we learned about Canadian women to practise our inquiry skills. First, we had to ask lots of “Need to know” questions. A need to know question is a question that you ask to get an answer that helps you learn more about the subject.
Here were my need to knows about Canadian women:
After we came up with our need to knows, we researched the answers to the questions and used the knowledge we learned from that in an in-class discussion about women and how they struggle as a minority. In this in-class conversation, I’m very happy with how I participated and engaged with the other students. I hope in future classroom conversations I can apply that same energy.
Next, we created our personal inquiry driving questions. This question was a main question that we came up with to help drive our research on our topic to encourage deeper learning. We then created some need to knows to narrow down our research to ultimately answer our driving questions. We put all this on a Craft document, including notes from the actual research and writing in our sources.
Once we finished that, we had to write up an elevator pitch talking about our research and what we learned. My elevator pitch I decided to have my elevator pitch also in the Craft document. We presented these elevator pitches to small groups in class. We presented to two different groups and each group tried to engage in conversation about the things we had learned and connect between topics. The two different groups we were put in were groups with similar topics to us, and groups with completely different topics. I talked a little more about this in my reflection journal.
We also created a reflection journal in a Craft document. This was a document to reflect on our research and inquiry, our discussions, and our human library. Here is a link to my Craft document with evidence of all of my learning.
Speaking of our human library, that was the last big thing we did in this project! A human library is an event where many “books” talk about their life experiences. For example, a “book” may be an immigrant coming in to talk about their experiences to people who haven’t had those experiences. This allows us to learn more about what it’s like to have different experiences when we haven’t had those experiences ourselves. It helps us be more empathetic and understanding towards other’s experiences and feelings.
For our human library, each of us students were expected to invite one “book.” The book that I invited was my mom. My mom immigrated from Ecuador when she was a child, and grew up facing racial discrimination in Toronto, Ontario. Through the human library, she educated a small group of people on her story. Here are some photos from the human library:
Our human library was the ultimate wrap-up to this project! I’m quite happy with my work from this project. I believe that I tried my best in all my work, and I have a deep understanding of Canadian identity by the end.
That’s all, thanks for reading!
Susan