Railroading the Best Laid Plans

Driving Question:

How do you go through a mountain without offending anyone?

Project Description:

The class will be divided into groups and given a section of Canada that features the Canadian Pacific Railway. We will start with a visit to a railway museum. Each group member will choose a topic to research such as physical factors, social factors (First Nations), political factors, immigration etc. They will collect images, newspaper reports, patents, stories related to their topic etc. As a group they will create a scaled drawing of their section of Canada including annotations of what each section is visually representing. Once completed, they will take photos of each section of the map and print as puzzle pieces and devise a game to build the puzzle. In addition, they will super-impose today’s Trans-Mountain pipeline proposal onto map and look to find similarities in terms of factors studied regarding the CPR. They will be sure to look at environmental impacts as well. Similar topic groups will get together from the different areas to run protocols.

Connections and Perspectives:

Our school values academic rigour and connecting our heritage to the student’s studies. We will look at the significance of South Asian peoples’ influences on the building of Canadian infrastructure and their contributions to Canada. Students will work as a group and learn how to work together to serve one another and come to a common good. This project will endeavour to help students realize that everything happens for a reason and that sometimes decisions serve most people equitably and other times they benefit one group and destroy another group’s livelihood or cultural identity.