Many students—and teachers (including me!)—love graphic novels.
Today’s post begins a series exploring how they can be used in the classroom.
‘Wonderful Societal Artifacts’
Tim Smyth is an award-winning educator and Eisner-nominated author of Teaching with Comics and Graphic Novels: Fun and Engaging Strategies to Improve Close Reading and Critical Thinking in Every Classroom, available from Routledge. He also shares many engaging education strategies on his website, www.teachingwithcomics.com and can be found on social media @historycomics.:
Being a reading specialist and social studies educator for over 20 years, I continue to be amazed at the power of comics and graphic novels to inspire and engage students of all ages and levels. Students are not the only ones who benefit from this medium, as I am also a lifelong comics reader and get to share my passion with them, which energizes me.
As an educator, I agree with Spider-Man that with great power, truly comes great responsibility. I have a responsibility to make sure that I go beyond using comics as just a hook and, instead, I focus on using this compelling medium to create analytical readers and writers.
Some ideas:
-
Don’t underestimate the power of creation. My students generate their own comics in the manner they feel most comfortable, using Canva, Pixton, PowerPoint, photographs, hand drawing, etc. For example, students could choose a person from history that inspires them and make that person into a superhero—complete with origin story, accessories, uniform, enemies, allies, and an annotated works-cited page.
Every subject area has heroes that have impacted the content area, and these figures can be made into heroes allowing the students to fully immerse themselves in the research. My students have done this for celebratory months, such as Black History, Women’s History, Arab History, LGBTQIA+, etc.
- Don’t forget that comic books come out every Wednesday, which means that they serve as wonderful societal artifacts, chronicling what’s happening in the world around us in real time. I begin many classes by putting a single comics panel on the smartboard and asking students to discuss its meaning as a do-now activity. These panels have allowed us to open vital conversations about race, gender, identity, and so much more in an engaging and nonconfrontational way. Today’s comics truly do represent all walks of life, and I hope that this representation will help make meaningful change.
- An easy comics lesson is one that I have done on the very first day of school. Before the students arrive, I set out assorted comics for groups of 3-4 students to read and analyze as historical artifacts. These comics span from the 1940s through today, allowing students to discuss the meaning of historical artifact and that history is all around us. I encourage them to look at advertisements, letters to the editor, technology, representation, gender roles, and so much more. They go home on the first day of school talking about class and they are excited to come back knowing that we will look at history in a completely new and exciting way.
-
As a reading specialist, I truly feel that we are all teachers of reading, regardless of what classes we teach. An important skill for students is annotating (did I just hear a groan?) and actively interacting with text. Comics are perfect in teaching this skill as students are forced to slow down and truly see what is happening—to make meaning in the melding of text and image. This is a 21st-century literacy skill as we routinely do this when consuming media in all of its forms.
My comics readers are experts at picking apart and annotating not just words but also political cartoons, videos, propaganda, and advertisements. While comics are never a replacement for prose, they are another important literacy resource which often inspires excitement and further research.
In my class, students have been drawn (pun intended) to wonderfully illustrated graphic novels about so many topics, including the March Trilogy about Congressman John Lewis’ life (we also create our own well-researched comics about modern civil rights issues), the Harlem Hellfighters, Japanese-American internment camps, the plight of a mother in Syria, genocide, politics, economics, music, and countless inspiring graphic biographies.
- As a content-area teacher, I just do not have the time to teach all of these topics with prose resources, but I can have students read the manga adaptation of Les Misérables in one 90-minute class. Students can also individually read comics in one sitting on multiple topics and then share with their partners and gain a wider understanding of an event or person while allowing for student choice.
‘Allegorical Digital Books’
Jun Shen is a social studies teacher and teacher on special assignment (ToSA) for educational technology at Laguna Beach High School in California:
My example might be more of an illustrated novel than a graphic novel, but in my 10th grade world-history class, I have my students create ones that get published in our local libraries.
I redesigned my pre-WWII totalitarianism unit last year through my district’s Unit Design professional development process. Inspired by George Orwell’s Animal Farm, I had my students create original allegorical tales that paralleled the actions of totalitarian regimes before WWII.
More specifically, students were given a list of key historical events, characters, groups, and institutions from Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Stalin’s U.S.S.R., and the Holocaust. Student groups had to choose one of those themes, research the history behind it, brainstorm creative ways to retell the story using symbolism and metaphors, and then craft an illustrated novel using the BookCreator app.
Many students made Animal Farm-like stories, with slightly different animal characters and settings. However, I was really impressed and entertained by some of the more creative allegories. For example, one book about the rise of Nazi Germany was set in a used car lot where an intelligent Tesla manipulated the head salesman to give it ultimate power over the dealership.
Another book about the rise of Stalin in the U.S.S.R. had its story take place within a power struggle between two girls on a high school varsity volleyball team. The students were also required to include a real history lesson in the back of the book to help the readers understand the historical parallels. Each group read their books to the class and taught the corresponding history lessons at the end of the unit.
One of the key components of the units created through Unit Design is the authentic assessments. This is taking project-based learning a step further by incorporating social entrepreneurship into the curriculum. We want to make sure that what the students learn is demonstrated by more than a test or paper, even more than a project that gets displayed. We wanted to make sure that the students take what they learn and help make the world better.
For this project, all the allegorical digital books were sent to one of our 8th grade English classes at our local middle school. The 8th graders were at the time reading The Diary of Anne Frank and were learning about the dangers of totalitarianism, which coincided perfectly with our 10th grade content.
First, the 8th graders read the 10th graders’ books. Then, select 10th graders went on a field trip to the middle school to hold an authors panel in the 8th grade English class. There, the students had a chance to ask the authors questions about the creative book-writing process. The authors also had a chance to teach the 8th graders about the politics and the real-life implications of their stories, so as to inspire civic participation and citizenship.
Finally, the best book of the class, an allegory about the rise of Mussolini, but set in a coral reef, was published digitally and physically. The Rise of the Mega was published in our school district’s digital library in the Sora app. It was also printed and hardcover copies were placed in each of our district’s school libraries plus our local city public library.
Students all felt empowered through this unit, not only to have done something creative but with the knowledge that they helped, even if in a small way, maintain our democratic norms and institutions.
‘Rich, Complex, and Engaging’
Kiera Beddes has been a high school ELA/history teacher, now digital learning specialist, in Utah for 13 years. She is currently a member of the Utah Teacher Fellows and is passionate about social science, literature, and technology in education:
I’ve been an English teacher for 10 years, even though I went to school initially to be a history teacher. In my classroom, I had a very broad view of what qualified as a text. Just like how anything could be a historical artifact, almost anything can be “read” as a text. Graphic novels and comics are 100 percent worthy of being instructional materials and offer a wide landscape for critical thinking.
I remember reading American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang in my adolescent literature class during my teacher-prep program, and it completely changed the way I looked at graphic novels in the classroom. I had no idea graphic novels could be so rich, complex, and engaging.
As I have dived more into the format, I’ve fallen in love with the vast array of graphic novels that can be used in the classroom. If you are still looking for reasons why you should consider using graphic novels, I could point to the enduring popularity and high quality, the chance for students to practice both visual and multimodal literacy, as well as the chance to use 21st-century skills of creativity and critical thinking as they decipher the text. Great graphic novels are a seamless blend of text and picture. You can’t make complete meaning of the story without both.
When I first started teaching, I encouraged my struggling readers to use graphic novels as a way to build up their confidence with reading, because they could usually read them faster than a regular book and feel a sense of accomplishment when they finished a whole book.
I used part of a graphic novel retelling of Frankenstein with the whole class for the same reason. Since the novel is a frame story (a story, within a story, within a story), using the graphic novel version for the creature’s version of events allowed us to cover a lot of chapters in a short amount of time, comprehend it well, and explore a new type of storytelling.
I taught a film and literature elective ELA class and I used Filmish: A Graphic Journey Through Film by Edward Ross as one of the reference materials for the course. It is the most fascinating discussion of film that I’ve ever read. It is also super interesting to use a graphic novel format to analyze film.
Considering film is a visual medium, it makes sense to use another visual medium to analyze it. This book allowed me to use a unique literary form to help students look at film in a different light. Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art is also a must read for this very reason. What better way to understand comics than with comics?
McCloud breaks down the nature of sequential art, its history, and how to craft your own story. I would recommend using short selections from each with students, as taken as a whole they are quite dense.
The last way I’ve used graphic novels or comics with students is as mentor texts for student work.
There is a lot of power in using art as storytelling, even for the kids who aren’t super artistic. For instance, students can explore tone really easily with the use of color. Comics are a great way to help students understand sequencing and to demonstrate their comprehension of plot structure.
Comics are really flexible considering the technology you have on hand: I’ve had students create comics on paper, in Google Slides, or with comic book templates in Canva or Adobe Express.
Teachers should use graphic novels and comics in the classroom because they engage students, develop different literacies, and foster critical thinking. These texts offer diverse perspectives and can simplify complex concepts, making them accessible and relatable. To easily incorporate graphic novels, teachers can use them to build struggling readers’ confidence and employ them as mentor texts for student projects. Using graphic novels or comics in the classroom is more than just the cool factor. They are a valuable source of rich text worthy of study and use in the classroom.
Thanks to Tim, Jun, and Kiera for contributing their thoughts!
Today’s post answered this question:
How do you use graphic novels or comics in your classroom?
Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at [email protected]. When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.
You can also contact me on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo.
Just a reminder; you can subscribe and receive updates from this blog via email. And if you missed any of the highlights from the first 12 years of this blog, you can see a categorized list here.
