My 10th grade Humanities class spent a month learning about the Vietnam War before our winter break, and then we began designing our exhibition after break. I switched to Animas High School from Durango High School after winter break, which was after my class had finished researching the Vietnam War. After break, our class split up into three separate groups to display three different perspectives on the war that would end up being displayed in three different rooms. The role I ended up choosing was working on designing a room for our exhibition that accurately portrayed the Vietnamese perspective. Cat, a fellow student and I worked on our room, figuring out how to best portray the perspectives of North and South Vietnam. We used a mannequin to depict what a Viet Cong fighter wore and carried. We shared pictures with descriptions on the wall that gave light to the intense bombing, both explosive and chemical, that Vietnam experienced throughout the war, as well as the suppression the Vietnamese experienced prior to the war. I also edited clips of primary sources from Vietnam sharing their war-time stories out of a documentary we watched in class called, the Ken Burns Documentary, but due to technical difficulties we were only able to display audio clips. Unfortunately I was not able to be at school the week of our exhibition, which made it hard for Cat, but she got help and was able to set up an amazing room which portrayed the Vietnamese perspective accurately.
Throughout working on our project, I was introduced to a new style of learning, collaborating and presenting my research that is not present at Durango High School. At first I was definitely a little lost regarding what an exhibition is, what exactly we are doing and how we are preparing our work as a group to show off our research to the public. Little by little, it all began to make more sense to me. Once I picked a room to focus on and began collaborating with my group, I really developed a clear understanding of what an exhibition is and what we wanted ours to look like. Working on editing the Ken Burns documentary taught me a lot. Generally I don’t use technology a whole lot, I don’t play video games and I don’t do much with technology other than watching skateboard and ski videos on youtube. So having to learn how to troubleshoot all those technical difficulties was definitely a learning experience for me. Understanding what an exhibition is and the style of doing work at Animas High School definitely was my biggest and main growth over the course of this project.
This project increased my understanding of the Vietnam War in many ways. I had no idea how intensely we bombed Vietnam. The way we used chemical agents and how intensely we attacked the land and people is absolutely absurd and devastating in my opinion. After reading various articles, I gathered certain opinions of the war, then after talking to George, a man who actually fought in the war, my understanding of the war grew. I know I will take away fat amounts of this information because it relates to tissues that I am very passionate about, particularly peace among humans and mother earth. War is super intense and has gotten so much more intense through the creation of modern technology, and through modern technology man’s connection to mother earth has dwindled and our disregard for her has grown through our greed. This is why I feel the things I learned about the Vietnam war will stick with me.
Throughout working on our project, I was introduced to a new style of learning, collaborating and presenting my research that is not present at Durango High School. At first I was definitely a little lost regarding what an exhibition is, what exactly we are doing and how we are preparing our work as a group to show off our research to the public. Little by little, it all began to make more sense to me. Once I picked a room to focus on and began collaborating with my group, I really developed a clear understanding of what an exhibition is and what we wanted ours to look like. Working on editing the Ken Burns documentary taught me a lot. Generally I don’t use technology a whole lot, I don’t play video games and I don’t do much with technology other than watching skateboard and ski videos on youtube. So having to learn how to troubleshoot all those technical difficulties was definitely a learning experience for me. Understanding what an exhibition is and the style of doing work at Animas High School definitely was my biggest and main growth over the course of this project.
This project increased my understanding of the Vietnam War in many ways. I had no idea how intensely we bombed Vietnam. The way we used chemical agents and how intensely we attacked the land and people is absolutely absurd and devastating in my opinion. After reading various articles, I gathered certain opinions of the war, then after talking to George, a man who actually fought in the war, my understanding of the war grew. I know I will take away fat amounts of this information because it relates to tissues that I am very passionate about, particularly peace among humans and mother earth. War is super intense and has gotten so much more intense through the creation of modern technology, and through modern technology man’s connection to mother earth has dwindled and our disregard for her has grown through our greed. This is why I feel the things I learned about the Vietnam war will stick with me.