Anne 

The Conflict and Genocide Poster project was a collaboration of World History and Language Arts. In World History, we learned about different conflicts and genocides such as the Holocaust, Armenian, Cambodian, Rwandan, and Bosnian Genocide as well as conflicts “solved” and on-going. We hit some of the ten themes of this class during this project, like Civic Ideals. In this Civil Ideals means that you have a responsibility to the world and how individual actions can impact not just the community but the world. I think that many students including myself learned that there hasn’t been just one genocide. There have been many, which is quite disturbing with some of the genocides being relatively recent. Those disturbing actions made can have a lasting impact forever in the lives that could have been and have been. This project also relates to People, places, and environment which basically, is how people interact and how one action in this world is like a ripple in a pond. After we learned about these tragic events and conflict “solved” and on-going, the Language Arts part of the collaboration came in to play. We had a choice to either read a book about the Armenian, Holocaust, and Bosnian genocide and the Arab/Israeli Conflict. I ended up reading a book about the Armenian Genocide. This book was about the life of a young Armenian as retold by his grandson. The young Armenian, Vahn, come from a rich family that was targeted due to money and the power his dad had. Vahn ended up losing his mom, two brothers, one of his sisters, and from what I understood his dad too (sent off on a death march). As the book went along we saw Vahn struggle with the reality that he was alone, and that he was now facing it as he tried to escape for his life through the horrific and traumatic experiences along the way. After reading the book, it was time to make our posters. That either memorized or brought attention to a conflict or genocide we had studied about. Before we could start our posters we needed a statistic and slogan that related to the conflict or genocide we were making the poster about. For example, my poster was about the Armenian Genocide. In the poster as you can see I brought up that 1.5 million Armenians died but the United States doesn’t recognize the Genocide due to that fact that it could hurt U.S. Turkey relations because they don’t recognize the genocide. As well for our posters, we learned about symbols, imagery, and layout because linoleum block are a different kind of material and doesn’t show up in detail. Rather, these block show up is more of shapes that allow you to understand the picture with imagery. During this lesson, we started by thinking of our first reaction and making shapes from it that people could understand. Next we found an image we wanted to use if we didn’t have a shape that we were using to put onto the linoleum blocks. From that we traced the image onto tracing paper then transferred it to the blocks. Then the block were cut. To cut we used chisel tools that cut little grooves out. The shape that was not carved was what the image wouldbe. That meant next we inked the blocks and printed them three times at the minimum and five at the maximum. I think the biggest challenge I had was just concentrating. My partner and I have been good friends so a while (since we came to STEM) and though we could get work done it was a slow going. We would keep making jokes and get each other off task. Having different history periods helped so we at least had two hours to work on it a day at the minimum to three if we kept ourselves in check. It also helped when things had deadlines coming up and they needed to get done, so we kept ourselves in check

 

This work has benefitted me as a future student/citizen because I now know the events that sadly some try to forget about and with knowing about the conflict can offer suggestions and letters to my congressman. The implications of accomplishing this work is that we are going to auction off our poster and the money we raise goes to UNICEF in which they do work to promote the human life and make it livable. Specifically in Language Arts creativity means being able to think on the fly and effectively about the poster and display it with our new knowledge. For World History, creativity is thinking outside the box when it comes to the poster. It needs to get a point across in a way that unique. I demonstrated these qualities through thoughtful and unique process of getting the information and poster. I wanted something that addressed the Armenian Genocide but was a piece of art all my own.