Why the world needs more Canada

The school year is once again in full swing and in my PLP classes we’re just now wrapping up our first full project of the year¹ where we tried to answer the question:

Why does the world need more Canada?

This was a megaproject of sorts, combining humanities and maker to research, script, and edit a podcast episode as our answer to the DQ. That means there’s a lot to cover, so without further ado, let’s get started.

After a quick launch where we did a simple analysis of what it means to be Canadian, and went over the benchmarks, where we found that we would make a podcast episode answering the question “Why does the world need more Canada”, in other words, an overview of something that makes Canada great.

For the first week, we mainly focused on two things: Canada’s identity and global role, as well as analysis of Canadian literature. In our research on Canada, we looked at a variety of topics like globalization, treaties and alliances, and Canada’s peacekeeping methods. One way we researched this was by watching the CBC show The National, a half-hour-long nightly news program, which we watched every night. This was a particularly interesting source as it was very recent with the top stories about both Canadian and international issues. These made for good potential topics for both topic ideas for our final product and for the upcoming “Thinking Thursday” discussions.

There were a total of four scheduled thinking Thursday dates, of which I got the third. For our thinking Thursdays, we would present a topic of our choice, most likely based on a story on The National, and lead a discussion for 20 minutes. To prepare for our discussions, we would have to make a document with questions, media, and other information ² to help lead the discussion. Although I wish I had started work on my discussion earlier, I had trouble finding a topic, as nothing really stood out to me. In my indecision ³, the deadline quickly approached, and only once it was looming above me did I find a topic. After searching through all the previous episodes, I settled on the topic of Michael Kovrig’s 1019 days of imprisonment in China. In the two days remaining, I researched as much about the topic as I could and put together an overview, questions, and some images into my presentation. Sadly, despite the effort I had put into it, I still found it somewhat difficult to maintain the conversation and fell just short of the 20 minutes.⁴

Despite the illusion this blog post creates, my thinking Thursday was actually well into the project, and I had already started working on an essay⁵ on my future podcast topic. I had ideas for a topic from the very beginning, and it didn’t take long for me to boil everything down to the topic of publicly funded media. I’ve been a CBC fan for a while, and I also think the NFB’s productions are incredible, so I decided to mainly focus on those two. As with the other essays I’ve written, the first step was a topic sentence. With a bit of insight into what makes Canadian publicly funded media important, I came up with this:

As a result of the value Canada places on promoting Canadian culture and identity, we have many publicly funded media organizations that foster new Canadian talent, which has helped our homegrown media industries become internationally relevant.⁶

Although it is a bit of a mouthful, and barely a single sentence, it conveys what I want to convey, so that’s what I stuck with. I took my thesis and created a few paragraphs, each with a topic sentence ⁷ and outline. It was around this point that I also started my research rabbit hole, which would lead to at least 35 tabs open by my final draft.

With a solid outline, I started the long haul of writing my final composition, and although I did stare at the page writing absolutely nothing for multiple hours, I slowly but surely chipped away at it. When writing, I would use my outline to reference the general structure and key points. Then I would take the points I thought made sense and find out why( or why not ) that’s a thing. For example, if I thought Canadians trust the CBC, I would try to find out whether they do, why they do, and how much. From there, I could write a bit about what I found and move on to the next points. Although my writing and research methods are slow, I feel that it helps understand my topic more fully, rather than just the parts I specifically mention. This was great with a topic like publicly funded media, as it led to some pretty interesting conversations, especially about the CBC since it’s so heavily based on spreading Canadian identity; many people have experiences with it. I found this topic overall to be honestly pretty cool to research, as I knew about some of the benefits and systems but had never considered the full scope of things. ⁸

After a week of research, writing, and polishing, I finally completed my final essay. In true PLP fashion, I haven’t received any feedback on it yet. However, I like to think it’s not half bad, but that’s ultimately up to you.

The essay was only the base of the script for our podcast. As this was a joint project, we had been utilizing our maker time to learn about story structure and how to make a decent podcast. Using our essay as a base, we developed a script for a 5-minute podcast. I definitely found it difficult to say everything I wanted to in the 5 minutes and even had to cut parts out of my already shortened script to make time for everything. Still, I tried my best to make the script concise but still informative. My main hope is that people who listen to it or even you reading this post will go and check out the CBC and NFB’s libraries of content, as there are some truly incredible things in them. Additionally, seeing the results of Canada’s publicly funded media is a much better argument for why the world needs more Canada than any essay or podcast I could make.

Moving back from that tangent, I had a script, but I still had to actually make the podcast. I had quite a hard time with recording, as I don’t really have a great mic, so I tried to do a makeshift sound booth, which just made things muffled, but I did my best to rectify that in editing. I also had a cold the entire time we were recording, so I held off on my final recording until I was mostly better, which meant I had to re-edit my whole podcast the day before.

On the topic of editing, it was also rather tricky. I had used GarageBand before but never for a podcast, so I didn’t really know how to edit voice.⁹ Regardless, I guess that’s why it’s the first project; there’s definitely room to improve. If you really want to hear my podcast, here’s the link. The album art and intro music were the result of a vote and were created by Alex C and Matteo A, respectively.

And that’s pretty much it for this project. We moved on to a sprint where we learned about Canada’s government for a week, and now I’m writing this post. It was the first project of the year, and it has had its ups and downs. It has been mainly about the competency of questioning, relating to asking questions and research, as well as sharing my ideas. I already talked of my research methods, and I also think the questions I was able to ask not only myself but also friends and family were a nice outcome of my topic. The only struggle is sharing my ideas, specifically in the life presentation, as unlike in an essay or even a prerecorded podcast, you can’t really pick your words and edit your meaning as much. Still, first project down, and I’m pretty happy with my result. I’m Finn, so long for now.