college syllabus: Comics culture
Why comics are more important than ever
click here for article
for an article on
how to discuss comic art
click here
Let's Get Graphic: 100 Favorite Comics And Graphic Novels
click here
So, you'd like to get into highbrow comics...click here for article link
"behind the shield" a great article about Vishavjit Singh, "an engineer, writer, educator, activist, costumer player and the artist behind sikhtoons.com." He uses comics to "dispel myths about sikhs and to encourage a new generation of comic book artists to share their stories." |
But this book has Pictures! The case for Graphic NOvels in the AP classroom by Lisa S. cohen
But This Book Has Pictures! The Case for Graphic Novels in an AP Classroom
by Lisa S. Cohen
Spanish River Community High School
Boca Raton, Florida
Make Complex Concepts Approachable
Integrating graphic novels into my curriculum has been one of the best choices I have made as a teacher of both high- and lower-level students. These novels can make a difficult subject interesting and relatable. I have seen many students with no previously expressed interest in language and literature excel in the analysis of a graphic novel. The graphic novel is also an excellent way to teach complex concepts to higher-level students and to introduce them to an important postmodern genre. The visual world has had increasing impact on our students' lives, and this is a way to connect to untapped portions of their minds.
I have taught the graphic novel primarily with Art Spiegelman's MAUS: A Survivor's Tale(volumes 1 and 2) through a Holocaust research unit for advanced tenth-grade students. The unit incorporates the study of the graphic novel and research on the historical events surrounding the Holocaust, including an emphasis on documentation and source investigation skills. I also use the (now out-of-print) companion CD-ROM that Art Spiegelman helped to author, called The Complete MAUS. The CD-ROM contains many of Spiegelman's primary sources for his nonfictional, historical graphic "novel," including narrative by both Spiegelman and his father, Vladek, who is at the core of the story. It additionally offers many other valuable teaching resources, such as Spiegelman's original drafts and periodical articles about MAUSand graphic novels.
While MAUS is appropriate for high school students, teachers of middle school students may consider teaching Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, which relates the events of the Islamic Revolution in Iran through the eyes of the author as a young girl. In its sequel, Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, the author returns to Iran as a young adult. Additionally, American Born Chinese, the first graphic novel to be nominated for a National Book Award, integrates Chinese folk legend and the story of the life of a young Chinese boy growing up in America. Like MAUS, these graphic novels show that an added advantage of examining visual texts with students is the exposure to new historical and cultural ideas valuable to a well-rounded education.
There are many ways use graphic novels in your classroom. Here are some that I've found most useful.
Teach Visual Rhetoric
Any graphic novel unit might begin with an introduction of visual rhetoric terms and the vocabulary that has developed for graphic novels specifically. From the MAUS CD-ROM, I use Spiegelman's succinct definitions for key comics terms: panel, balloon, border, gutter, bleed, and chapter opener. For example, the term bleed, which refers to text and illustrations that run to the edge of a page, prompts an excellent discussion on the pun in Spiegelman's subtitle for the first volume of MAUS, My Father Bleeds History. With the added visual vocabulary, students combine looking for the bleed in the book, which happens at a crucial moment at the end ofMAUS I, with the more common usages of bleed. Because the graphic novel also challenges traditional ideas of narrative, we can also examine history through the multiple meanings of this critical term.
The most effective way of guiding students toward insights on the visuals in graphic novels is to allow them to brainstorm out loud about the details on one page in the book. Students who have difficulty transitioning to visual rhetoric frequently have trouble finding all the details necessary for understanding a visual text. They begin to find "hidden" connections between the text and visuals and discover the ways in which the visuals interact with each other. I often present this in a more general discussion of visual terms such as spatial order, color or shading, typography and text design, perspective, contrast, and style. Often, a mere cataloging of details encourages students to analyze more deeply.
Students also benefit from other, more general vocabulary for visual analysis. Graphic novels allow for the continuation of investigating imagery in text, but with the graphic form, I also press students to examine the way the author conveys a sense of time and motion. For example, Joe Sacco, who depicts journalistic stories using graphics, often uses the direction of his characters' movement to convey more abstract ideas of progress or rebellion.
Teaching ideas of sequence also allows students to examine time and motion; additionally, it is a way to introduce aspects of the rhetorical triangle as it encourages analysis of how the author manipulates the reader's experience. Will Eisner, a graphic novelist and author of several texts on the language of graphic storytelling, points out that the author utilizes the audience's "reading rhythm" in the way he or she connects panels together and creates illusions of fast or slow movement. A way to get students to study this technique is to give them two excerpts from a graphic piece, one with the words removed (so that students look only at the visuals) and the other containing only the text (students can then compare differences in the way they read it). Alan Moore, the author of V for Vendetta and Watchmen (graphic novels that borrow heavily from the superhero comic book genre), writes the text of his novels and works with an illustrator. In his writing, however, he doesn't use only dialogue and narration, he also gives explicit instructions to the illustrator regarding the size, spacing, and perspective of each panel. Having students write using such instructions in a process essay can draw their focus to the many elements involved in a visual work. To test the quality of the descriptions, students can trade and try to create the visual described in the directions and see if they can match the author's original conception.
Scott McCloud, in his Understanding Comics, offers further discussion of these techniques, and using the first two chapters of McCloud's book at the start of any visual unit helps students develop a language for visual analysis. This is also an excellent guide for planning lessons that focus on visual rhetoric. McCloud gives an introduction to the essential terms for exploring novels, but as the book itself is graphic, it literally shows how these terms function.
Incorporating visual rhetoric into your curriculum will also require students to practice higher learning critical thinking and analytical skills emphasized in an AP curriculum. The reading of both visuals and text together usually necessitates inference skills and a synthesis of a number of clues presented both on the page and as a pattern throughout the book. For instance, Spiegelman incorporates the image of a swastika in many of the images in MAUS for various thematic reasons. Students who start tracing the appearance of the swastika often can develop ideas on the abstract motif present behind it.
Incorporate Literary Elements into the Teaching of Graphic Novels
Even though graphic novels are excellent resources for teaching visual rhetoric, they remain, at heart, stories with the characteristics of other literature. I emphasize several core literary elements when working on the MAUS unit. We discuss development of theme through motifs and symbols, anthropomorphism and other figurative representation, juxtaposition (and the results of juxtaposition: paradox and irony), methods of characterization, impact of syntax, and tone.
Here are some focal points for literary analysis through graphic novels:
1. Development of theme through motifs and symbols. Graphic novels are excellent vehicles for introducing students to the function of concrete symbols. Giving students a symbol to trace through reading and then culminating with a project on the symbol's link to an abstract idea (motif) and the author's argument in portraying this idea (theme) provides students with a way to approach literature cohesively. Some symbols I have given students to focus on through the reading of MAUS are: prisons/imprisonment, eyes, cats and mice, masks, smoke streams (mostly from Art's cigarette), numbers and dates, trains, circles/moons/cycles, and the grid. The last symbol, the grid, refers to Spiegelman's use of the design grid and variations from it to create meaning by putting elements on angles, creating asymmetry or symmetry, paralleling structure in a series of panels, and so forth.
2. The graphic use of anthropomorphism. Many graphic novels use anthropomorphized animals, inanimate objects, or concepts. In Spiegelman's novel, he draws all of his Jewish characters as mice, all of the German characters as cats, the Americans as dogs, and the British as fish. A good way to introduce a graphic novel is to examine both the historical influences that are behind graphic symbolism and the way unrealistic depictions can convey an author's ideas.
When introducing MAUS, I show students a series of original German, Polish, and Austrian propaganda that depicts Jews as rats, mice, or other vermin (many examples of this are on theMAUS CD-ROM). I sometimes include a discussion of analyzing American visual propaganda during World War II that portrays Japanese as apes and vermin. (An excellent source for both American and Japanese propaganda is John W. Dower's War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War.) The discussion of animal symbolism also links to a common pattern in literature of authors using animal imagery for humans, such as in The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Lord of the Flies, and The Metamorphosis.
3. Aspects of style. Graphic novels allow for a new approach to diction, imagery, syntax, structure, and language. For example, many graphic authors frequently emphasize words by making them boldface, italic, or underlined, practices applied sparingly in traditional texts. Graphic novels also substitute figurative imagery with the images themselves, but the interplay of what is written and what is drawn makes for an important point of analysis. Often graphic novelists exploit the dual expressions of text and visuals to create puns, irony, and paradox. Syntax also becomes an examination of both sentence structure and panel and object structure. For example, in MAUS, when Art's father, Vladek, relates a story of shooting a soldier during World War II, he uses pronouns to conceal his responsibility for the killing, but Spiegelman relates the importance of the death through a panel structure that emphasizes the stark difference between life and death.
4. Classic or pop? I often use this question as another way to explore the literary implications of a graphic work. Students develop criteria for a classic work of literature and then compare these to the most defining aspects of the graphic novel. For example, many students understand the criterion that a classic work should express universal themes. An appropriate way to lead this discussion in MAUS is to examine whether Vladek, the protagonist in much of Spiegelman's story, meets the characteristics of a hero. Comparisons with The Odyssey, Death of a Salesman,Paradise Lost, the Bible, and the Ramayana offer excellent discussions on defining a literary hero. The use of other sources, both scholarly and critical, will also help this examination. Charles McGrath's New York Times article "Not Funnies" offers a discussion of those traits that graphic novels share with other classic literature, and Peter Schjeldahl's "Words and Pictures" article for The New Yorker critically examines the durability of the graphic novel as a genre, showing that, while the form may have passed its artistic peak, its popularity will likely endure. Encouraging students toward a discourse on this subject will get them closer to understanding the reasons why certain works enter into the canon.
Apply Various Critical Approaches
A way to create meaning for students learning about literature is to introduce them to the various critical approaches for analyzing text. Teachers of world literature often like to expose students to the archetypical approach, introducing students to ideas originally put forth by Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, and for more advanced students, studying the criticism of Northrop Frye. Since graphic novels often incorporate many archetypical symbols and ideas, applying such an approach helps students connect this fairly new form to older pieces of literature.
Students also benefit from an understanding of some of the techniques of the deconstructive approach. Many graphic novelists use deconstructive techniques in changing the meaning of traditional symbols and words. Art Spiegelman has cited deconstructive influences such as the criticism of Jacques Derrida. A study of MAUS II: A Survivor's Tale -- And Here My Troubles Began, particularly the chapter "Time Flies," from a deconstructive perspective allows students to examine several levels of the text. Students may not need to know the somewhat complex terminology of deconstructive criticism; activities focusing on how the writer of a nonfictional graphic novel may take on different personas as the character representing him in his book can help students examine the subtle differences between authors and characters.
In MAUS, Art Spiegelman shows himself, his wife, and other real people in his life as characters. At the end of MAUS I, Spiegelman allows the character of Art to call his father a "murderer," an act that the author would not actually do. He also reexamines the meanings of crucial symbols, such as ashes, in his carefully crafted relationship between the ashes of his cigarette and the ashes of death camp victims. He uses a similar technique in his later work, In the Shadow of No Towers, a book about the World Trade Center attacks, by comparing his burning cigarette to the flames of the terrorist attack.
Even if students are not ready to learn the formal terms of criticism, introducing them to the processes of literary criticism will promote the development of independent points of view. Another way teachers can approach many graphic novels is from a cultural and historical methodology. Because so many graphic novels are mostly nonfictional memoirs or histories, a unit built with the investigation of primary sources and cultural information can show students the many pieces involved in creating nonfiction.
In the MAUS unit I use in my classroom, students combine the additional critical and historical sources we read into a research project. We develop a thesis statement examining MAUS's status as a potential classic based on the way it has defined its genre, the new ways graphic novels are able to communicate, the specific subject matter of the Jewish people during World War II, and the more general genres of memoir and narrative. Students then compile information from documentary films, photos, historical documents, and articles to synthesize the discussion that has evolved concerning MAUS, as well as graphic novels, literature, history, and communication in general. In later years and college, students can apply these skills not only in the traditional tasks of research and literary analysis, but also to the emerging focus in many English classes on the examination of visual text and communication.
Resources for Graphic Novels
Lisa S. Cohen has taught English since 2002 at Spanish River Community High School in Boca Raton, Florida. She teaches AP English Language and Composition and advanced tenth-grade English. Her students encounter a wide range of instructional approaches as she integrates classical philosophy, film, radio, comics, and multimedia to prepare students to enter the changing contemporary discourse. Cohen graduated from Yale University in 2002.
by Lisa S. Cohen
Spanish River Community High School
Boca Raton, Florida
Make Complex Concepts Approachable
Integrating graphic novels into my curriculum has been one of the best choices I have made as a teacher of both high- and lower-level students. These novels can make a difficult subject interesting and relatable. I have seen many students with no previously expressed interest in language and literature excel in the analysis of a graphic novel. The graphic novel is also an excellent way to teach complex concepts to higher-level students and to introduce them to an important postmodern genre. The visual world has had increasing impact on our students' lives, and this is a way to connect to untapped portions of their minds.
I have taught the graphic novel primarily with Art Spiegelman's MAUS: A Survivor's Tale(volumes 1 and 2) through a Holocaust research unit for advanced tenth-grade students. The unit incorporates the study of the graphic novel and research on the historical events surrounding the Holocaust, including an emphasis on documentation and source investigation skills. I also use the (now out-of-print) companion CD-ROM that Art Spiegelman helped to author, called The Complete MAUS. The CD-ROM contains many of Spiegelman's primary sources for his nonfictional, historical graphic "novel," including narrative by both Spiegelman and his father, Vladek, who is at the core of the story. It additionally offers many other valuable teaching resources, such as Spiegelman's original drafts and periodical articles about MAUSand graphic novels.
While MAUS is appropriate for high school students, teachers of middle school students may consider teaching Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, which relates the events of the Islamic Revolution in Iran through the eyes of the author as a young girl. In its sequel, Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, the author returns to Iran as a young adult. Additionally, American Born Chinese, the first graphic novel to be nominated for a National Book Award, integrates Chinese folk legend and the story of the life of a young Chinese boy growing up in America. Like MAUS, these graphic novels show that an added advantage of examining visual texts with students is the exposure to new historical and cultural ideas valuable to a well-rounded education.
There are many ways use graphic novels in your classroom. Here are some that I've found most useful.
Teach Visual Rhetoric
Any graphic novel unit might begin with an introduction of visual rhetoric terms and the vocabulary that has developed for graphic novels specifically. From the MAUS CD-ROM, I use Spiegelman's succinct definitions for key comics terms: panel, balloon, border, gutter, bleed, and chapter opener. For example, the term bleed, which refers to text and illustrations that run to the edge of a page, prompts an excellent discussion on the pun in Spiegelman's subtitle for the first volume of MAUS, My Father Bleeds History. With the added visual vocabulary, students combine looking for the bleed in the book, which happens at a crucial moment at the end ofMAUS I, with the more common usages of bleed. Because the graphic novel also challenges traditional ideas of narrative, we can also examine history through the multiple meanings of this critical term.
The most effective way of guiding students toward insights on the visuals in graphic novels is to allow them to brainstorm out loud about the details on one page in the book. Students who have difficulty transitioning to visual rhetoric frequently have trouble finding all the details necessary for understanding a visual text. They begin to find "hidden" connections between the text and visuals and discover the ways in which the visuals interact with each other. I often present this in a more general discussion of visual terms such as spatial order, color or shading, typography and text design, perspective, contrast, and style. Often, a mere cataloging of details encourages students to analyze more deeply.
Students also benefit from other, more general vocabulary for visual analysis. Graphic novels allow for the continuation of investigating imagery in text, but with the graphic form, I also press students to examine the way the author conveys a sense of time and motion. For example, Joe Sacco, who depicts journalistic stories using graphics, often uses the direction of his characters' movement to convey more abstract ideas of progress or rebellion.
Teaching ideas of sequence also allows students to examine time and motion; additionally, it is a way to introduce aspects of the rhetorical triangle as it encourages analysis of how the author manipulates the reader's experience. Will Eisner, a graphic novelist and author of several texts on the language of graphic storytelling, points out that the author utilizes the audience's "reading rhythm" in the way he or she connects panels together and creates illusions of fast or slow movement. A way to get students to study this technique is to give them two excerpts from a graphic piece, one with the words removed (so that students look only at the visuals) and the other containing only the text (students can then compare differences in the way they read it). Alan Moore, the author of V for Vendetta and Watchmen (graphic novels that borrow heavily from the superhero comic book genre), writes the text of his novels and works with an illustrator. In his writing, however, he doesn't use only dialogue and narration, he also gives explicit instructions to the illustrator regarding the size, spacing, and perspective of each panel. Having students write using such instructions in a process essay can draw their focus to the many elements involved in a visual work. To test the quality of the descriptions, students can trade and try to create the visual described in the directions and see if they can match the author's original conception.
Scott McCloud, in his Understanding Comics, offers further discussion of these techniques, and using the first two chapters of McCloud's book at the start of any visual unit helps students develop a language for visual analysis. This is also an excellent guide for planning lessons that focus on visual rhetoric. McCloud gives an introduction to the essential terms for exploring novels, but as the book itself is graphic, it literally shows how these terms function.
Incorporating visual rhetoric into your curriculum will also require students to practice higher learning critical thinking and analytical skills emphasized in an AP curriculum. The reading of both visuals and text together usually necessitates inference skills and a synthesis of a number of clues presented both on the page and as a pattern throughout the book. For instance, Spiegelman incorporates the image of a swastika in many of the images in MAUS for various thematic reasons. Students who start tracing the appearance of the swastika often can develop ideas on the abstract motif present behind it.
Incorporate Literary Elements into the Teaching of Graphic Novels
Even though graphic novels are excellent resources for teaching visual rhetoric, they remain, at heart, stories with the characteristics of other literature. I emphasize several core literary elements when working on the MAUS unit. We discuss development of theme through motifs and symbols, anthropomorphism and other figurative representation, juxtaposition (and the results of juxtaposition: paradox and irony), methods of characterization, impact of syntax, and tone.
Here are some focal points for literary analysis through graphic novels:
1. Development of theme through motifs and symbols. Graphic novels are excellent vehicles for introducing students to the function of concrete symbols. Giving students a symbol to trace through reading and then culminating with a project on the symbol's link to an abstract idea (motif) and the author's argument in portraying this idea (theme) provides students with a way to approach literature cohesively. Some symbols I have given students to focus on through the reading of MAUS are: prisons/imprisonment, eyes, cats and mice, masks, smoke streams (mostly from Art's cigarette), numbers and dates, trains, circles/moons/cycles, and the grid. The last symbol, the grid, refers to Spiegelman's use of the design grid and variations from it to create meaning by putting elements on angles, creating asymmetry or symmetry, paralleling structure in a series of panels, and so forth.
2. The graphic use of anthropomorphism. Many graphic novels use anthropomorphized animals, inanimate objects, or concepts. In Spiegelman's novel, he draws all of his Jewish characters as mice, all of the German characters as cats, the Americans as dogs, and the British as fish. A good way to introduce a graphic novel is to examine both the historical influences that are behind graphic symbolism and the way unrealistic depictions can convey an author's ideas.
When introducing MAUS, I show students a series of original German, Polish, and Austrian propaganda that depicts Jews as rats, mice, or other vermin (many examples of this are on theMAUS CD-ROM). I sometimes include a discussion of analyzing American visual propaganda during World War II that portrays Japanese as apes and vermin. (An excellent source for both American and Japanese propaganda is John W. Dower's War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War.) The discussion of animal symbolism also links to a common pattern in literature of authors using animal imagery for humans, such as in The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Lord of the Flies, and The Metamorphosis.
3. Aspects of style. Graphic novels allow for a new approach to diction, imagery, syntax, structure, and language. For example, many graphic authors frequently emphasize words by making them boldface, italic, or underlined, practices applied sparingly in traditional texts. Graphic novels also substitute figurative imagery with the images themselves, but the interplay of what is written and what is drawn makes for an important point of analysis. Often graphic novelists exploit the dual expressions of text and visuals to create puns, irony, and paradox. Syntax also becomes an examination of both sentence structure and panel and object structure. For example, in MAUS, when Art's father, Vladek, relates a story of shooting a soldier during World War II, he uses pronouns to conceal his responsibility for the killing, but Spiegelman relates the importance of the death through a panel structure that emphasizes the stark difference between life and death.
4. Classic or pop? I often use this question as another way to explore the literary implications of a graphic work. Students develop criteria for a classic work of literature and then compare these to the most defining aspects of the graphic novel. For example, many students understand the criterion that a classic work should express universal themes. An appropriate way to lead this discussion in MAUS is to examine whether Vladek, the protagonist in much of Spiegelman's story, meets the characteristics of a hero. Comparisons with The Odyssey, Death of a Salesman,Paradise Lost, the Bible, and the Ramayana offer excellent discussions on defining a literary hero. The use of other sources, both scholarly and critical, will also help this examination. Charles McGrath's New York Times article "Not Funnies" offers a discussion of those traits that graphic novels share with other classic literature, and Peter Schjeldahl's "Words and Pictures" article for The New Yorker critically examines the durability of the graphic novel as a genre, showing that, while the form may have passed its artistic peak, its popularity will likely endure. Encouraging students toward a discourse on this subject will get them closer to understanding the reasons why certain works enter into the canon.
Apply Various Critical Approaches
A way to create meaning for students learning about literature is to introduce them to the various critical approaches for analyzing text. Teachers of world literature often like to expose students to the archetypical approach, introducing students to ideas originally put forth by Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, and for more advanced students, studying the criticism of Northrop Frye. Since graphic novels often incorporate many archetypical symbols and ideas, applying such an approach helps students connect this fairly new form to older pieces of literature.
Students also benefit from an understanding of some of the techniques of the deconstructive approach. Many graphic novelists use deconstructive techniques in changing the meaning of traditional symbols and words. Art Spiegelman has cited deconstructive influences such as the criticism of Jacques Derrida. A study of MAUS II: A Survivor's Tale -- And Here My Troubles Began, particularly the chapter "Time Flies," from a deconstructive perspective allows students to examine several levels of the text. Students may not need to know the somewhat complex terminology of deconstructive criticism; activities focusing on how the writer of a nonfictional graphic novel may take on different personas as the character representing him in his book can help students examine the subtle differences between authors and characters.
In MAUS, Art Spiegelman shows himself, his wife, and other real people in his life as characters. At the end of MAUS I, Spiegelman allows the character of Art to call his father a "murderer," an act that the author would not actually do. He also reexamines the meanings of crucial symbols, such as ashes, in his carefully crafted relationship between the ashes of his cigarette and the ashes of death camp victims. He uses a similar technique in his later work, In the Shadow of No Towers, a book about the World Trade Center attacks, by comparing his burning cigarette to the flames of the terrorist attack.
Even if students are not ready to learn the formal terms of criticism, introducing them to the processes of literary criticism will promote the development of independent points of view. Another way teachers can approach many graphic novels is from a cultural and historical methodology. Because so many graphic novels are mostly nonfictional memoirs or histories, a unit built with the investigation of primary sources and cultural information can show students the many pieces involved in creating nonfiction.
In the MAUS unit I use in my classroom, students combine the additional critical and historical sources we read into a research project. We develop a thesis statement examining MAUS's status as a potential classic based on the way it has defined its genre, the new ways graphic novels are able to communicate, the specific subject matter of the Jewish people during World War II, and the more general genres of memoir and narrative. Students then compile information from documentary films, photos, historical documents, and articles to synthesize the discussion that has evolved concerning MAUS, as well as graphic novels, literature, history, and communication in general. In later years and college, students can apply these skills not only in the traditional tasks of research and literary analysis, but also to the emerging focus in many English classes on the examination of visual text and communication.
Resources for Graphic Novels
Lisa S. Cohen has taught English since 2002 at Spanish River Community High School in Boca Raton, Florida. She teaches AP English Language and Composition and advanced tenth-grade English. Her students encounter a wide range of instructional approaches as she integrates classical philosophy, film, radio, comics, and multimedia to prepare students to enter the changing contemporary discourse. Cohen graduated from Yale University in 2002.
Using Graphic Novels and Comics in the Classroom _JANUARY 11, 2012
Here are some specific strategies to ponder as you select a graphic novel or comic to read, or as you consider how students might create their own. Thinking about them will help you focus your purpose in your instruction. All of them are useful, as long as the purpose is clear to the teacher and the learner.1) A Tool to Differentiate InstructionGraphic novels and comics can be a great way to differentiate instruction for learners in terms of reading and also in terms of assessment. Perhaps you want to offer your students a graphic novel to support their reading of a chapter in a rigorous text. If this text is a classic, there are many graphic novel adaptations of classics out there. Maybe you're doing a project-based learning (PBL) project where you want to provide voice and choice for the student assessment. Students might be choosing between a letter, comic or podcast to answer a driving question, such as: how can we debunk myths and stereotypes about world religions?
2) Build Critical Reading SkillsReading standards around Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) can be built through the complex analysis and evaluation of graphic novels and comics. Have students look at how the authors and illustrators use colors, textures, words, text boxes, frames and camera angles; then make connections between these elements and evaluated their effectiveness.
3) Assess Student LearningPBL calls for the creation of authentic products that are useful and credible to the group. You can have students create comics or graphic novels, or components of them, as a useful formative assessment tool to check for understanding of important content. If used as a summative assessment, the comic could be made to combat bullying, such as the suggestion Suzie Boss made in an earlier post. Make the graphic novel or comic a product that students create to meet a need. Don't just make it a regurgitation of knowledge. Instead, give it an authentic purpose.
4) Study the Genre ItselfScott McCloud, in his book Understanding Comics, asserts the legitimacy and complexity of comics and graphic novels as a genre. Pairing selections from his work with a graphic novel or comic can provide interesting discussion and inquiry into the elements of the genre itself. Genre study is an easy way to utilize literature circle groups and instructionementsIn addition to traditional literary elements like symbol, character and plot, graphic novels take these elements and modify them, where characters become heroes and villains, where symbols are actually drawn and created. Consider this clip from the movie "Unbreakable," where the "normal" arch villain and hero confront each other, not in a fantasy, but in real life.
There are many other purposes for graphic novels in the classroom, from looking at different cultures and backgrounds to utilizing technology in authentic ways. Just make sure you select the graphic novel or comic with a clear purpose in mind. Perhaps you have multiple purposes, as there are many instructionally sound purposes out there.
I will leave you with some favorite graphic novels and comics that I've used in my classroom! Trust me, I have read plenty more than this list!
Here are some specific strategies to ponder as you select a graphic novel or comic to read, or as you consider how students might create their own. Thinking about them will help you focus your purpose in your instruction. All of them are useful, as long as the purpose is clear to the teacher and the learner.1) A Tool to Differentiate InstructionGraphic novels and comics can be a great way to differentiate instruction for learners in terms of reading and also in terms of assessment. Perhaps you want to offer your students a graphic novel to support their reading of a chapter in a rigorous text. If this text is a classic, there are many graphic novel adaptations of classics out there. Maybe you're doing a project-based learning (PBL) project where you want to provide voice and choice for the student assessment. Students might be choosing between a letter, comic or podcast to answer a driving question, such as: how can we debunk myths and stereotypes about world religions?
2) Build Critical Reading SkillsReading standards around Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) can be built through the complex analysis and evaluation of graphic novels and comics. Have students look at how the authors and illustrators use colors, textures, words, text boxes, frames and camera angles; then make connections between these elements and evaluated their effectiveness.
3) Assess Student LearningPBL calls for the creation of authentic products that are useful and credible to the group. You can have students create comics or graphic novels, or components of them, as a useful formative assessment tool to check for understanding of important content. If used as a summative assessment, the comic could be made to combat bullying, such as the suggestion Suzie Boss made in an earlier post. Make the graphic novel or comic a product that students create to meet a need. Don't just make it a regurgitation of knowledge. Instead, give it an authentic purpose.
4) Study the Genre ItselfScott McCloud, in his book Understanding Comics, asserts the legitimacy and complexity of comics and graphic novels as a genre. Pairing selections from his work with a graphic novel or comic can provide interesting discussion and inquiry into the elements of the genre itself. Genre study is an easy way to utilize literature circle groups and instructionementsIn addition to traditional literary elements like symbol, character and plot, graphic novels take these elements and modify them, where characters become heroes and villains, where symbols are actually drawn and created. Consider this clip from the movie "Unbreakable," where the "normal" arch villain and hero confront each other, not in a fantasy, but in real life.
There are many other purposes for graphic novels in the classroom, from looking at different cultures and backgrounds to utilizing technology in authentic ways. Just make sure you select the graphic novel or comic with a clear purpose in mind. Perhaps you have multiple purposes, as there are many instructionally sound purposes out there.
I will leave you with some favorite graphic novels and comics that I've used in my classroom! Trust me, I have read plenty more than this list!
- Persepolis, a memoir of a girl growing up during the Islamic revolution in Iran, was recently made into a motion picture.
- Maus, a top favorite for many, explores themes of the Holocaust through a memoir characterized by mice and cats.
- American Born Chinese is the tale of three characters: Jin Wang, the only Chinese-American in the neighborhood; Chin-Kee, the ultimate Chinese stereotype; and the Monkey King, ancient fable character.
- X-Men Annual #4 - Uncanny X-Men Volume #3 In this issue, the X-men travel into Dante's Inferno.