Beyond the Panels

In Eighth Grade English, students are reading Maus, Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about his father’s experience surviving the Holocaust. Alongside historical context, students learned how graphic novels build meaning through visual elements like color, style, perspective, and page design. As a hands-on project, students traced a page from the novel, authored original dialogue, and presented their creative interpretations to their peers.

As Maus deals with complex history and heavy themes, students often need additional context to process it. Last summer, English department faculty used a Curriculum Innovation Grant to create a dedicated unit binder. It supplements the graphic novel with readings, journal prompts, and projects to give students a broader, more complete picture of the Holocaust. Students read excerpts from additional texts, including The Diary of Anne Frank, Song of a Blackbird by Maris van Lieshout, and Number the Stars by Lois Lowry, to diversify their experience with Holocaust accounts. Learning Services Teacher Ben Rotenberg also joined classes to share a presentation that gave students historical, cultural, and religious context for the impact of the Holocaust. 

To scaffold their reading of the book, students explored how graphic novels use visual storytelling to convey meaning. By varying panel sizes, perspectives, and page layouts, artists build emotion and move the story forward. Students also learned the importance of reading between the lines in graphic novels, inferring plot details and character emotions from both what is shown on the page and what is intentionally left out. To demonstrate their understanding of the characters and themes, students traced a page from the novel and created their own dialogue that was either directly related to the action within the text or imagined what a conversation between the characters would be like in 2026. Students presented their creations to the class and explained their dialogue choices. “They presented them as either an interpretative reading of that page or as what they saw in the characters’ relationship,” says English Teacher Dan Roy. During the unit, students will also have the opportunity to show their understanding in more conventional ways with vocabulary quizzes and a culminating essay.