Skip to main content

The One-Pager: Going Beyond the Literary Analysis

This year I'm interested in students expressing themselves with not only a literary lens but with digital elements. Thanks to my wonderful colleague, Allison Mitchell, I was introduced to the wonderful world of one-pagers. A one-pager is a single page that blends and collages quotes, analysis, and images to form a cohesive expression .

The Requirements:
As detailed from Teach Writing, the best part about the requirements is that they're malleable to suit your needs. All four of my classes needed to include quotations, focus on a specific character and include multiple pictures and sketches of these ideas. But depending on the class, there were different elements that changed the focus. 9th graders were tasked to choose a metaphor from the text that thematically links to the one page. Think about what is the literal and figurative metaphor. Show it in visuals and describe it in text. My American Wilderness (upper level 11th/12th grade students) needed to demonstrate an understanding of an applied theory/criticism using some sketches, quotations, and words of your own; meanwhile my Ethics (11th/12th) need "to make real world connections."

 The flexibility to make the One-Pager is what makes it great not just for elementary and middle grades, but high school students too.

In this 9th grade piece inspired by A House on Mango Street, I want you to take a
moment and notice how color is essential to the piece. With each new view, you can
find more connections. This is layered and complex in ways that are often surprising.
Going Beyond Text
What I love about the one-pager is that students are forced to go beyond the text. It requires time to visual and organize ideas. In many ways, students found the process both more laborious and more rewarding.

Too often, teachers and colleagues assume if we're not writing literary analysis we're not analyzing the text. But a cohesive and powerful one-pager can demonstrate more thought in the process. Additionally, I find myself more engaged as the reader as I'm forced to reexamine details to form connections. The way I tell my students, "A good one-pager captures my attention, but a great one-pager allows me to discover something new on each view."

The Digital Element
In order to really go beyond the text, students were tasked with providing a QR Code that linked to an audio recording they created. I expected rambling thoughts or a poem, what I received exceeded even my highest expectations. Students used this as an opportunity to embody characters, compose musical pieces or, in one instance, write an entire song inspired from A Streetcar Named Desire.

In this piece, the student links to a composed musical piece (see below)

Listen to her song here
Some students went overboard with multiple QR codes; frankly, I was thrilled. Students tried to defy the constraints of the one-pager. And if our students aren't stretching our scope and understanding of the task, then was the task really rigorous in the first place?

On one level, it's too much. But as you spend time with it, it reveals
its layers, forcing the reader the reexamine each piece with
each scan of the 5 different QR codes.
The Technology That I Wish Was There
What I see for the one-pager is that the piece ultimately becomes a multimedia piece. Unfortunately, I don't think our technology is quite there. With the AR technology boom, many AR technologies are making the mundane come alive. Imagine holding your camera up to a one-pager as fire or water submerges the page—imagine the page coming alive. No matter where I look, it's clear that this technology is only just coming to fruition and can't quite do what I need it to do. Here's hoping that in a few years, more AR will be programmable with students.


 What I Would Do Different
In truth, not much. Many of my upper-level students started to create sub-themes and motifs throughout their one-pager. I may emphasize and encourage this for next time. I also want to honor the process and have students explain what they did. That said, how I do that is a big question mark. If they write it out, isn't that the antithesis of what I'm trying to create? I'm thinking a quick FlipGrid might be the answer, but maybe—just maybe—the one-pager can speak for itself.


Daniel Valentin teaches American Wilderness, Ethics, and English 9 at Horace Greeley High School. He is currently reading 1919: The Year that Changed American by Martin W. Sandler and listening to Thick and Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom. He wants his students to feel empowered through books. Follow him @DaValentinCCSD
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Best LGBTQ Books for Students of 2019

October is LGBTQ history month. This is the perfect opportunity to expose our students to LGBTQ texts. For me, this is essential. As a student, the closest I could find to LGBTQ characters were Tom from The Glass Menagerie , the random David Sedaris piece and Michael Thomas Ford's books (which as a teenager I was way too young to be reading about). Now, there's a number of LGBT characters and representation in literature, but if you're an educator, where do you start? What I'm hoping is that my students will see queer texts not as queer texts, but simply texts. Often times (and not to generalize, but here I go anyway) my straight male students will avoid anything with even a hint of gay subtext. The more I talk to my students, it's clear that there is still an internalized insecurity. What they read might say something about themselves. In truth, a book is a book, queer characters or not. The easiest way to break the ice with that stereotype is that I always tel...
Post a Comment
Read more

HyperDocs: Creating Ownership Through Exploration

HyperDocs are here, and the potential for student exploration and engagement seems bountiful. But hold up— Before we delve into the potential, what is a HyperDoc? The short answer is: It's a Google Doc with a variety of links that leads to a number of different tasks. Once students receive this doc, they're free to explore it in any order and any pace of their choosing. But to sum up a HyperDoc as a Google Doc with just a bunch of links would be the equivalent of saying Moby Dick  is a book about a whale. To be so reductive is to miss the point. To see a full HyperDoc Click Here Going Beyond the Workshop Model As an ELA teacher, I'm a workshop model kind of guy. Walk into my class at any given moment, and you know what you will see. The first ten minutes? Reading. The next five to ten minutes? Quick Write. Followed by mini-lessons, workshop time and sharing somewhere in-between. It's routine (and never boring). Often times, I map out my work weeks in advan...
2 comments
Read more

A Gallery Walk in American Wilderness

The first week of school was met with the usual jitters and excitement. My school had its debut of a gorgeous new renovated space with more glass, nooks, and crannies than I can properly do it justice. It's a flexible space, and the opportunities seem endless. This year, I started my American Wilderness with the Imagine Our Parks with Poems project. The project "...commissioned fifty poets to write poems about a park in each of the fifty states. This project is part of Imagine Your Parks, a grant initiative from the National Endowment for the Arts created in partnership with the National Park Service to support projects that use the arts to engage people with the memorable places and landscapes of the National Park System." My idea was students could canvas a large portion of the United States, seeing various states of wilderness and the state's identity. Using these poems as mentor texts, my hope was students would utilize their Writer's Notebook starting ...
Post a Comment
Read more