The Graphic Novel Classroom: POWerful Teaching and Learning with Images

By Maureen Bakis and James Bucky Carter

Every teacher knows that keeping adolescents interested in learning can be challengingThe Graphic Novel Classroom overcomes that challenge. In these pages, you will learn how to create your own graphic novel in order to inspire students and make them love reading. Create your own superhero to teach reading, writing, critical thinking, and problem solving!

Secondary language arts teacher Maureen Bakis discovered this powerful pedagogy in her own search to engage her students. Amazingly successful results encouraged Bakis to provide this learning tool to other middle and high school teachers so that they might also use this foolproof method to inspire their students. Readers will learn how to incorporate graphic novels into their classrooms in order to:

Teach twenty-first-century skills such as interpretation of content and form
Improve students’ writing and visual comprehension
Captivate both struggling and proficient students in reading
Promote authentic literacy learning
Develop students’ ability to create in multiple formats

This all-encompassing resource includes teaching and learning models, text-specific detailed lesson units, and examples of student work. An effective, contemporary way to improve learning and inspire students to love reading, The Graphic Novel Classroom is the perfect superpower for every teacher of adolescent students!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Release date: Aug 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781629140889

Book preview

Cover Page of Graphic Novel ClassroomHalf Title of Graphic Novel Classroom

For Jack, Shea, Regan, and Riley

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see.

—Anaïs Nin

Title Page of Graphic Novel Classroom

Copyright © 2012 by Corwin Press

First Skyhorse Publishing edition 2014

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN: 978-1-62873-734-9

eISBN: 978-1-62914-088-9

Printed in China

Contents

List of Classroom Teaching Tools on the Companion Website

Foreword

James Bucky Carter

Preface

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Introduction: Welcome to the Graphic Novel Classroom

PART I. LOOKING AT LITERACY IN THE

GRAPHIC NOVEL CLASSROOM

Chapter 1. Looking at the Comics Medium:

Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics

Chapter 2. Interpreting Images:

Shaun Tan’s The Arrival

Rachel Masilimani’s Two Kinds of People

Gene Leun Yang’s American Born Chinese

Chapter 3. Looking at the Big Picture:

Will Eisner’s A Contract With God and A Life Force

PART II. LOOKING AT MEMOIR IN THE

GRAPHIC NOVEL CLASSROOM

Chapter 4. Pictures, Perception, and the Past:

Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis

Chapter 5. Leaving a Legacy Through Images:

Art Spiegelman’s Maus

Elie Wiesel’s Night

Scott Russell Sanders’s Under the Influence

PART III. LOOKING AT SUPERHEROES IN THE GRAPHIC NOVEL CLASSROOM

Chapter 6. A Glimpse of the Superhero Genre:

Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns

Chapter 7. Making the Invisible Visible:

Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta

Afterword: The Value of Teaching Graphic Novels

Resources

References and Further Reading

Index

List of Classroom Teaching Tools on the Companion Website

Foreword

In 2007, in the introductory chapter to Building Literacy Connections With Graphic Novels: Page by Page, Panel by Panel, I wrote that Although it is hoped that teachers might be convinced by this collection of essays and similar works to try comics or graphic novels in the classroom, more needs to be written to be sufficiently compelling for the most conservative educators (p. 13). While I do not claim credit for the many comics and literacy articles and books that have been published since then, it is nice to see so many teacher-educators, humanities scholars, librarians, graduate students, and practicing teachers adding to the body of research regarding comics and literacy: a corpus, by the way, that stretches at least as far back as the 1940s. Comics and education are linked and have been for decades—centuries even, if we take into account the connections between contemporary graphica and related forms of sequential art. As I tell my students, Anyone who has sight is a visual learner. Humans are wired to learn visually, and the image-text interface will always be a means of learning, recording, sharing, and knowing. While I know there are still educators reluctant to integrate comics into the curriculum, to embrace fully the utility and history of the image, I take heart in the growing number of educators who see that doing so is no more a fad than blue jeans or movies, both of which were coming into the American consciousness around the same time as comic strips.

With so many folks now mining the intersections of graphica and literacy, though, the question of ethos, or expertise and authority, must be addressed. Where does authority reside in contemporary English language arts (ELA) regarding the integration of comics and graphic novels? Within the data sets of the quantitative researcher? Within the case studies of the qualitatively minded professor? Within the well-written essay of a person deemed by fans of the form as an intelligent expert? The librarian? The teacher? The comics art creator?

To me, the question is highly connected to the more general inquiry of where authority resides now in education as a whole. One of my favorite articles of the past few years addressing this question is Frederick M. Hess’s The New Stupid (2008). Hess suggests that while the current emphasis on quantitative data in education and education studies is appropriate, such data may also be misused or overused. Authority, Hess seems to say, doesn’t reside just in the numbers. Qualitative researchers and those employing mixed-methods would be quick to agree. Having been trained as a humanities scholar before becoming an English educator, I tend to see data-driven research as just another rhetorical tradition and approach to understanding, with inherent flaws just like any other. However, I often feel that nowadays the English in ELA is being ignored in favor of senses of ethos that devalue humanities and practitioner-based ways of knowing and communicating. For example, I see shifts in the types of articles some journals are publishing, shifts away from the rich humanities traditions that still have an important place for practicing professionals; in comics-and-literacy related work, specifically, sometimes I notice articles passing peer-review without referencing salient examples of preceding work that should be known and referenced; and I see a variety of campuses remarketing themselves as research-focused at the expense of being seen as teaching-centered. While I understand some of the reasons behind these shifts, I often feel like important nuances are being erased from the discourse of contemporary education and from what it means to be involved in a field like English education that should always bridge the humanities and the social sciences.

To be fair, sometimes I see comics creators making blanket statements about learning without any mention of educational theory or figures. I have seen scholars in other fields and comics advocates make claims about teaching and comics as if simply saying it makes it so. Because of these things, I am quick to share with my own students, who I do hope will come to see themselves as teacher-researchers, this maxim: all research is important, and all research is bullshit. That is to say, when it comes to education and one’s practice thereof, consider everything as if it has something valid to offer, but always consider that it might have some flawed and limited theses, and try to figure out what those flaws and limits might be. Nothing, not even write-ups of quantitative data, can give us the complete answer: no one source, no one method, no single expertise.

So, where does authority reside in ELA today? Where does it reside in the intersections of comics and education? The answer is that it must reside in multiple sources. The rusting melting pot of intellectual ideas and pedagogy must morph into a dinner table, where there are many dishes to choose from and room for everyone. That is why I am so pleased with the effort you are about to read. While many comics-and-literacy scholars do have experience using graphica in K–12 settings and have written about those experiences, many of us teach at the university level now. That’s not to say we don’t ever interact in K–12 schools, but I think we’d all be quick to say that our roles and responsibilities at our universities are not exactly the same as they were when we taught full-time in elementary, middle, or high schools. Maureen’s chapters are rooted in current actual practice with contemporary American adolescents. She knows what works and what hasn’t and knows how to use real-time teacher research—the hit-or-miss, messy, sometimes instinctual, often based-in-theory-and-scholarly-research-but-not-a-slave-to-it kind of information that teachers gather, sort, and analyze every day, on the go, while balancing a hundred other stimuli.

Maureen shares experiences and artifacts from what she calls the graphic novel classroom, a place where students liked to read and authentic literacy occurred. She shares nothing she hasn’t used or reflected upon, and as you begin to integrate or adjust the ideas in these chapters to your own classrooms, she will be doing the same. You and your students will put your own authentic marks on the texts, strategies, and ideas shared herein, and you will never be alone in creating your own secondary graphic novel classrooms as long as Maureen Bakis is teaching and retooling alongside her kids in Topsfield, Massachusetts.

With great pleasure, I announce Maureen Bakis’s place at the table, and I know I can speak for both of us when I say we welcome you to pull up a chair, dig in, and add your own flavor and dishes to the spread. Ultimately, after all, ethos in education or anywhere else doesn’t come solely from any one him, her, or them, nor from the producers alone; it comes also from the collective us, the critical consumers who interact with information from multiple sources, look over multiple dishes, if you will, then decide what’s best to chew on for a while and what’s best to pass.

James Bucky Carter, PhD

Assistant Professor of English Education

University of Texas at El Paso

Preface

Why won’t they read? This is the frustrating question I must have asked myself a million times in my first five years as an English teacher. This root problem naturally led to other concerns about literacy—how to teach students basic writing skills, how to get them to think critically, and how get them to problem solve. I spent much of those years trying to reinvent an approach to teaching literature that would cause students to make personal connections to traditional, classic texts in ways that would motivate them to express themselves with passion. I was somewhat successful, but it took an enormous amount of performance from me during class, and honestly, it just felt phony. I was talking too much and leading them too often to make connections that I saw (or thought they should see) in lieu of their own authentic responses.

At the same time I was wrestling with this dilemma, I found myself in a graduate class focused entirely on graphic novels. Never a comic book reader myself, I suddenly felt negative and reluctant to read. I was insulted that I was being asked to read something so seemingly irrelevant. What did Batman have to do with me, a forty-year-old single mother? What could I possibly learn from someone like Alan Moore or Scott McCloud? I was angry and skeptical, as I suddenly found myself in the seats of my own students! After I resigned myself to reading these picture books to achieve my grade, I found myself falling madly in love. I discovered that Scott McCloud is funny and intriguing and his Understanding Comics (1993) blew me away. I wept while reading Maus (Spiegelman, 1986) and read Persepolis (Satrapi, 2004) three times. V for Vendetta (Moore & Lloyd, 1988) resonated with me as I recalled aspects of my undergraduate education as a philosophy major: existentialism, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, and the role of the artist in society. Reading as a teacher, I began to take notes on teachable aspects of all of these incredibly inspiring graphic narratives and wracked my brain about ways I could possibly get these novels into the hands of my students. If I was a reluctant, skeptical reader and I converted, the chances were pretty good students might too. Luckily, just at this time, my high school was considering an English 12 curriculum overhaul, so I jumped at the opportunity to create a course that would focus on graphic novels.

This book is the result of my work to develop a graphic novel classroom, an inviting place at school where students like to read and authentic literacy learning occurs. It is the result of my personal reflections on numerous conversations with students, educators, book distributors, bloggers, librarians, and graphic novelists about teenagers, comics, language arts pedagogy, and twenty-first century learning. When I was searching for information about how to teach graphic novels to high school age students, I looked for resources that exhibited how real students responded to graphic novels and how these texts fostered enjoyment, achievement, and English language arts (ELA) skills. Would teenagers actually read these novels? What would they think if they were being asked to read them in school? I sought answers by investigating how teachers like me were using graphic novels in their classrooms and the degree of success they were experiencing.

A number of outstanding resources authored by educators and professionals informed my development as a graphic novel teacher, including Dr. James Carter’s Building Literacy Connections With Graphic Novels (2007), which paved the way for teachers like me to publicize their experiences teaching comics. His award-winning book is an edited collection of various educators’ ideas for pairing graphic novels with classic texts and contemporary young adult literature. Katie Monnin’s Teaching Graphic Novels: Practical Strategies for the Secondary ELA Classroom (2010) is another great resource loaded with extensive reading lists, classroom activity templates, and an outstanding cross-index of middle and high school graphic novels and themes. Dr. Michael Bitz’s When Commas Meet Kryptonite (2010) is yet another excellent book that includes instructional ideas for the classroom based on Dr. Bitz’s very successful Comic Book Project (Bitz, 2004). These scholars, and other talented professionals in the field, have created useful resources for teaching comics and graphic novels to a range of age groups and academic levels, but this book you are currently reading is the resource I was looking for—comprehensive, text-specific with models of teaching and student learning authored by a high school English teacher