Ode to an Orange

 

If you feel inspired by Mr. Orange Peel's dramatic success, check out Christina Scucina's Sicilian Whole Orange Cake Recipe!

After reading "Ode to an Orange," I decided that the thing that stood out to me most from the text was the emphasis on the peel itself. So I was thrilled when I discovered a recipe that used the whole orange, peel and all! I felt like the same sort of holistic use of the orange really captured the same essence of the text. However, I decided to take it a step further and turn the footage I took of the cake-making process into a movie trailer featuring the peel itself. I'm very unfamiliar with movie trailers, so it was fun to use iMovie and try to match video clips with the recommended formatting as best I could. 

This project helped improve my understanding of text by permitting me to extract something from the essay and then analyze it in such a way that I was able to transform what I extracted into my own piece. This is something that would be so easy to replicate in the classroom! Having students take a text and extract a key element from it and then transform it into something new in a meaningful way teaches the students to identify the salient features of a work and then to analyze them in a productive way. While not asking them to articulate that analysis in a text that matches the format of the original (essay), it invites them to still perform that deeper-level thinking and then to represent their conclusions through another medium. 

I also learned about processes because of the multiple processes I went through. The process of making the cake itself, the process of taking footage and then editing that footage, the process of turning that into a different medium entirely. It was intriguing to realized that something I previously viewed as one process was actually made up of several smaller processes. 

I also learned about literacies because I was forced to take my reading literacy and turn it into video literacy, and then I had to learn the new literacy of movie trailer in order to achieve this completed product. Literacy is so much more than just reading, and in an English classroom I think it is particularly important to focus on the other aspects of literacy. If we can read and write that's good, but showing true comprehension comes from transforming the things we read into something meaningful for us. It's the difference between analysis and application, and that's where true literacy lies. Becoming literate in a new medium is also a fun way to expand upon understanding. It provides an opportunity for students to think about things in a new way, to learn in the process, and to see their project in a different light.

My one regret is that I didn't take any pictures or videos of the orange while it was whole. That would have added to the beginning of this piece in a way that I didn't foresee when I began.