How can I create a yearbook that is different from previous editions?

2007 In Theory, In Practice, In Reality
Westwind,
West Henderson High School
Hendersonville, NC

Every year is different. Every staff is different. Hopefully that means it’s
Never the same book twice

It’s a truth that seems truer every year I spend in the classroom. The students I am teaching today are different from the students I taught last year — even though many of them are the very same students.

In 2006 my students obsessed about the labels on their clothes. They lived next door to state and national forests, but they didn’t want to be called “tree-huggers.” A year later our student body turned outward to focus on one of their own, Sarah, and her fight to walk again. After Sarah was in a serious accident, flipping her truck on a rain-soaked back road a month before school started, many of my students spent hours refitting her home for a wheelchair and raising thousands of dollars to defray the cost of her physical therapy. They cheered Sarah on as she took her first steps in February and stood in celebration as she walked across the stage at graduation.

2008 See What Unfolds

My current students insist on green products, and they panic every time I accidentally drop an empty drink bottle into the trash can rather than the recycling bag. Some of them seem more serious than usual as they are experiencing the realities of the current recession, and many of them morphed into news junkies as they followed the drama of the recent presidential election. The historic inauguration of our first African-American president has turned last year’s cynics into this year’s “hopeful realists.”

If students change that quickly, our yearbooks need to reflect that reality. The cover, the theme, the coverage and the design need to reflect the change. A 2009 yearbook should not look like a 2008 yearbook any more than its coverage should be based on the same ladder. Our 2007 theme – In Theory, In Practice, In Reality – grew out of Sarah’s experience and our students’ need to make sense of it. The book has an introspective voice very different from our 2008 book. Before the 2007-08 school year, our students learned they would have a new principal, a former football coach with a reputation for being very tough. Their anxiety increased when a racial incident disrupted the opening month of school. The yearbook theme – See What Unfolds – has a narrative voice that chronologically traces the students’ realization that school life could return to normal.

2009 It's Only Natural

My environmentally friendly, politically savvy students developed their 2009 “It’s Only Natural” theme with coverage that focuses on how current stereotypes cannot define who they are. While many of the same students worked on all three of these yearbooks, it is difficult to tell. Letting audience and theme drive the decision-making process of creating a yearbook can guarantee you never do the same book twice.

Contributed by Brenda Gorsuch, Yearbook Adviser
West Henderson High School, Hendersonville, NC
Discoveries Vol. 13 Issue 3