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CLS30205
CONTEXTUAL STUDIES
"STOP THINKING LIKE A CONSUMER, START THINKING LIKE A DESIGNER."
- MR. CHARLES
ASSIGNMENT 1
FINDING A RESEARCH PROBLEM
At the start of the first week of a new semester, we had already talked briefly about the assignments that we would have to do in the coming weeks. We were given an outline of the module, which serves sort of as a timetable for what we will do in every CTX class. My friends Daryl, Jim, Carla and I formed a group together to complete this assignment. Our first assignment concerns on finding/framing a research problem. Basically, we were given a fable called "The Rabbits Who Caused All The Trouble", author James Thurber, and to understand more on the story, we had to do the following steps: -
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Come up with as many observations as you can from the text, story or any source that you are given to study.
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Locate underlying problems in the story (look for loopholes, contradictions or anything that doesn't make sense in the story)
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Ask yourselves critical questions such as 'Why does the plot play out this way. Couldn't there have been a better alternative?' or 'Why did the characters do this?'
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Make a bunch of theories or hypothesis, so that you can shed some light into the story you are studying to gain a better understanding on the context of the story.
Basically, what I have just said in the above pretty much sums up entirely on what assignment 1 is really about. Moving on, we explained the breakdown of the fable with the help of visual aids. In short, this is what the fable tells us:
Breakdown
Breakdown
Breakdown
Breakdown
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The most popular theory discussed within the entire class is that this fable depicts a real life event that happened in the 1940s - World War II (The Holocaust). I won't go too much into the details about this, but all I can tell you is that the Wolves represent the Nazis and the Rabbits are the Jews.
Anyway, we came up with lots of observations and problems, but we selected only a few ones that we think are best to present in our slides. From there, we asked each other critical questions and came up with a couple of theories/hypotheses. Do have a look at our review:
Moving on, during our meetings together to work on CTX, we wanted to better understand the fable by using analogies. So, we thought of relating the scenes in the fable to a high school scenario that contains a lot of drama. However, because we referred to almost every line in the fable to our analogy, we decided to come up with a whole new story instead (still relating to the context of the fable).
The wolves in our story are Bullies, the rabbits are Victims/Weak kids, whereas the other animals are Teachers/Students. We broke down the story into a comparative kind of way in our slides because the full version of our story is way too long. Have a look at our comparative analysis: -
Victims Who Caused All The Trouble
Comparative Analysis
Comparative Analysis
Victims Who Caused All The Trouble
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We also related the fable to another story that's called "Animal Farm" written by George Orwell. As the word implies, the story uses animals just like Thurber's fable to relate to a real life event. In short, the story depicts of a couple of animals (pigs) that claims to be superior over the other animals (farm animals) to represent communism in Russia. The story actually caught my interest as towards the end of the plot, the pigs had blended in together with man, and when the farm animals looked at how the pigs can live together with man, they can no longer distinguish the difference between the two (implicitly implying that men are pigs).
"The pigs start to resemble humans, as they walk upright, carry whips, and wear clothes. The Seven Commandments are abridged to a single phrase: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.""
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"As the animals outside gaze at the scene and look from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again, they can no longer distinguish between the two."
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- Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm)
In our final slide, we had to frame the biggest/main problem among all the problems we could find. For our group, we decided to question on why would the rabbits live near the wolves in the first place? As we all know, rabbits are prey to their predator, the wolves. We are not sure as to how could the rabbits continue living near to the wolves, adding to the fact that they had also encountered wolves before.
To conclude, our lecturers Mr. Charles and Mr. Choy commented on how well-written our slides are and further complimented on our work. The 4 of us felt so relieved and glad that they liked our presentation, which we expected that we would do just okay. They had mentioned how they liked that we put our analogies to good use by making them into a comparative style, and also how we implemented lots of designs in our slides. I hope that we can keep this up to the final project!
VIDEO PRESENTATION & SLIDES
Below is a YouTube link to a video of our presentation for this assignment. I uploaded it straight to YouTube because of how Wix has limited free users on maximum video hours. Please pay no attention to the watermark :)
Click the button below to see our presentation:
The button below contains the slides that we had made for this presentation. Do click to have a look:
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