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Why Teach with Comics?

By: Jennifer Haines
Originally published on Diamond Bookshelf

As school boards across North America are becoming more open to varied strategies to improve student literacy, there has been an increase in the use of graphic novels in the classroom. However, there is still a strong stigma attached to the idea of using comics as a teaching tool. Anyone who has tried to convince a non-comic reader of the benefits of comics has heard the same things: the reading level is too low, the subject matter is frivolous, comics are too violent. While these complaints may ring true for some books on the market, it dismisses the wide variety of books out there that are challenging to read, thoughtful and insightful, and age-appropriate. It also dismisses the fact that comics can be an incredibly rewarding teaching tool for a variety of learners.

To a reluctant reader or an English Language Learner, a prose text can be incredibly daunting; it is a wall of words, overwhelming to start, impossible to finish. The key to getting these learners to read is to engage their imagination and interest. Comics are a perfect vehicle. They divide up the text into manageable chunks, which are supported by images. These images help readers increase their vocabulary through the connection between words and images. Comics are especially useful for English Language Learners from Korea, China, and Japan, for whom comics are an inherent part of their culture. By offering a style of reading with which these students are familiar, they will be more willing to make the effort to read. The bottom line is getting them to read. Thus, it is better to offer a graphic adaptation of a prose novel covered in class to those reluctant readers, to allow all students to participate in discussions and unit work, rather than have some students fall behind and be unable to participate at all.

One criticism levelled at comics is that the reading level is too low. As it turns out, this is not true. “According to read-aloud specialist Jim Trelease (2001), to become proficient readers, people need to master a set of about 5,000 ‘rare words’ that appear infrequently in conversation. In the average adult novel, these words appear 52 times per 1,000 words of text. In comic books, they appear 53 times per 1,000 (Hayes & Athens, 1988). Consequently, comic books don’t reduce the vocabulary demand on young readers, but they do provide picture support, quick and appealing story lines, and less text.”1 As it turns out, comics are just as challenging as prose novels in terms of reading level and ability. But, since they are broken into chunks of reading, they are much more accessible to reluctant readers and English Language Learners.

Even beyond the support given to reluctant readers and English Language Learners, the benefits of graphic novels and comics in the classroom are vast. They can:

The key is choosing the right comic books. Seek out your local comic store for advice and read 1 Newkirk, Thomas. “Media and Literacy: What’s Good?”. Educational Leadership, September 2006. some books before deciding what will work best in your classroom. Perhaps you are looking for a selection of graphic novels to get your elementary students into reading; there are a lot of engaging books out there with positive messages, such as Jellaby by Kean Soo or Mouse Guard by David Petersen. Perhaps you are looking for something that you can use in your high school English or history class; there are a lot of great books with historical and social context that could lead to rich discussion, such as Maus by Art Spiegelman, or It’s a Bird by Steven T. Seagle and Teddy Kristiansen.

Schools have become increasingly more aware of the need to address the varying learning styles of students. In 1983, Howard Gardner put forth his theory of Multiple Intelligences, according to which, students learn in different ways. He identified eight different learning styles, of which, traditionally, schools have emphasized the Verbal/Linguistic and Logical/Mathematical styles. As a result, students who learn in alternate ways have tended to be identified as less intelligent, as intellect has historically been attached to linguistic and mathematical skills.

Although Gardner’s work has been met with some controversy, most teachers will tell you that they are able to observe these varying styles first hand in their classrooms. They will also tell you that they see a more consistent result from their students when they incorporate assignments and activities which tap into multiple intelligences, as this differentiated learning allows more students to achieve success. One way to address multiple intelligences in an assignment or activity is to build in options, which will allow different learners to more successfully demonstrate their learning. Another way is to create an assignment or activity which utilizes multiple learning styles. This insures that students who learn in different ways can increase their opportunities for success in the classroom. An assignment or activity in which students create their own comic or graphic novel can explore all of Gardner’s “Multiple Intelligences”:

The benefits of using comics in the classroom are certainly great, both in increasing literacy and in addressing the educational needs of differentiated learners. As schools struggle to maintain enrolment and ensure that students are not left behind in the learning process, teachers must adapt their classroom to the developing needs of their students. This means utilizing different teaching methods and tools. The application of Gardner’s theory of Multiple Intelligences and the use of comics and graphic novels can provide students with greater opportunities for success, both in the classroom and beyond.

1 Newkirk, Thomas. “Media and Literacy: What’s Good?”. Educational Leadership, September 2006.

Reading with Pictures: Comics That Make Kids Smarter

The thought of using a comic in the classroom fifteen years ago was almost unheard of. Batman and Superman? Used to teach kids about history? Pshaw, I say! Pshaw! In recent years, as readers have been exposed to works like John Lewis’s March trilogy, educators have taken a second look and realized, maybe there’s more to comics than just superheroes. And maybe, just maybe, they do fit into the classroom. One such person is Josh Elder, who in 2009 founded the nonprofit Reading With Pictures, out of which this book was born. Reading With Pictures was first published with a Kickstarter and later kept in print by Andrews McNeel Publishing.

In this book, Elder and his colleagues have united some of the best creative talents to produce over a dozen short stories that can be used in the classroom for a variety of subjects. Highlights include “The Power of Print” by Katie Cook and “The Black Brigade” by Chris Schweizer, as well as a foreword by Printz and Eisner Award winning author Gene Luen Yang (American Born Chinese) and a downloadable Teacher’s Guide that includes lesson plans for each story, how to use them, and best classroom practices.

This is one of those rare books that I would consider groundbreaking in its area. Not that there aren’t other books that talk about graphic novels in the classroom before this one, but this one is one of the first to use comics as a means of actually showing and telling the stories. As well as the fact that they recruited acclaimed artists and storytellers that are known for making comics that can be used in the classroom or have had other educational impact. Lastly, it is also the first (or one of the first as far as I can find) to be distributed by a major publishing house. As such, it an important stepping stone towards the future of using comics in education.

The book is well put together with a great deal of thought gone into who to recruit to write the stories. While some comics are better than others, I think it was absolutely brilliant to ask Chris Schweizer (Crogan’s Adventures) to create a story for the history section and it is certainly one of my favorites in the book. Josh Elder also has done a great job of dividing the comics into different sections—mathematics, history, literature, and so on—so that educators can get a feel for what types of stories might work for their lesson plans. There are also multiple stories in each section to give different ideas and angles. My one criticism here is that I wish there was a page separating each story, as they start to run together which can make it hard in some places to differentiate between two comics, especially to a neophyte reader.

As I mentioned above, this book was originally produced via Kickstarter and has subsequently been kept in print and published by Andrews McNell Publishing, allowing it to have a wider audience. However, another issue that bugs me a bit is that they included a page of advertising in the book for other AMP kids books. While the books aren’t bad, I would have preferred seeing it worked into the book somehow, such as a comic using those characters or just an explanation of how those books meet the criteria that the book has been discussing.

Reading with Pictures: Comics That Make Kids Smarter
by Editor: Josh Elder
ISBN: 9781449458782
Andrews McNeel Publishing, 2015

Barefoot Gen Vol. 1 Study Guide

2. Barefoot Gen has been described as a comic book for both children and adults – do you agree with this statement? What audience do you feel is most appropriate for this book?

3. One thing that makes Barefoot Gen unique is that it describes the day-to-day life of ordinary men, women and children living in wartime. The bulk of the book deals with suffering outside of the battlefield. Select and describe a scene that occurs before the bombing that you found affecting or moving.

4. Despite the serious nature of the story, Barefoot Gen uses slapstick violence and crude humor. Describe how this approach affects the story – what are its advantages and disadvantages?

5. Describe Nakazawa’s drawing style. Is it well suited for this narrative?

6. Throughout the book, there are instances in which characters who are initially portrayed as villains are later shown in a sympathetic light. Select and describe a passage where this occurs. What do you believe Nakazawa was trying to achieve?

7. Barefoot Gen’s main focus is the Nakaoka family; the story unfolds through their words, thoughts and actions. At times, a separate narrative voice is present, in the form of captions. This unknown narrator conveys information beyond the family’s experience, such as facts about the war. How well do these two storytelling approaches work together?

8. The pages of this book are filled with scenes of violence – from childish brawls to cruel beatings. Even within the Nakaoka family, violence is commonplace. How did the prevalence of violence affect you as a reader? How did it affect your sympathy for Gen and his family?

9. Though this story has a large cast of characters and many subplots, Gen plays the central role. Describe Gen and the pivotal role he plays throughout the novel.

Reading With Pictures : Comics That Make Kids Smarter

Comics have gone from «scourge of the classroom» to legitimate teaching tools, and the Common Core State Standards for scholastic achievement now explicitly recommend their use in the classroom.

Reading With Pictures: Comics That Make Kids Smarter unites the finest creative talents in the comics industry with the nation’s leading experts in visual literacy to create a game-changing tool for the classroom and beyond. This full-color volume features more than a dozen short stories (both fiction and nonfiction) that address topics in Social Studies, Math, Language Arts, and Science, while offering an immersive textual and visual experience that kids will enjoy. Highlights include George Washington: Action President by Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey, Doctor Sputnik: Man of Science by Roger Langridge, The Power of Print by Katie Cook, and many more.

Includes a foreword by Printz and Eisner Award-winning author Gene Luen Yang (American Born Chinese, Boxers and Saints).

A downloadable Teachers’ Guide includes standards-correlated lesson plans customized to each story, research-based justifications for using comics in the classroom, a guide to establishing best classroom practices, and a comprehensive listing of educational resources.

LibraryThing Review

LibraryThing Review

A cool first volume of the Reading With Pictures project. It’s got some of everything. Some funny stuff, some serious stuff, some educational stuff. Hopefully it can get into the hands of educators and help get the comics format into more classrooms. Читать весь отзыв

Comics in American Culture

Course Description:

An historical survey of American comic art and artists from the 1950’s to the 1990’s. The course is primarily concerned with how comics has developed and matured as a distinctively American art form, reflecting and commenting on post-W.W. II American society in a variety of narrative forms: comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels. But not simply reflecting American culture, comics themselves have often been at the center of debates about the influence of media in shaping the national character. Equally important to the course are issues of content versus social regulation (which structured the discourse of the Congressional debates concerning juvenile delinquency during the 1950’s) and issues involving the Comics Code Authority, which still governs the content of mainstream comics today. Countercultural comics of the 1960’s and 1970’s as well as alternative comics of the 1980’s and 1990’s round out our investigation of comics in American culture by helping us to understand comics as a system of cultural representations.

Course Objectives:

Students will be able to discuss the major developments in the history of

American comics since the 1950’s.

Students will understand comics as a system that has been structured by

three main ideological/cultural content divisions or publishing groupings:

mainstream, underground, and alternative.

Students will be able to read (i.e. decode semiotically) and analyze

critically the major narrative forms of comic art: comic strips, comic books

and graphic novels.

Watterson, The Tenth Anniversary Calvin and Hobbes.

Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics

DC Comics: Superman in the Sixties.

Marvel: Fantastic Firsts.

Robert Crumb, The Complete Crumb Comics, Vol. 7

Frank Miller, The Dark Knight Returns.

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen.

Art Spiegelman, Maus.

Daniel Clowes, Ghost World.

Plus essays on narrative semiotics by Umberto Eco, R. C. Harvey, Martin

Barker and others on ERROL.

Requirements:

Mid-term and Final Exam. Two papers, each a minimum of five double- spaced pages (approx. 1500 words). The first paper will analyze (decode) intensively a short text of sequential art. The second paper may focus on the career of an artist, a title (i.e. Spider-man), a limited series, agraphic novel, the editorial point of view of an entire company (self-published, independent, or companies such as Marvel or DC), or artistic and graphic techniques or processes in comic art. Papers should focus on what the comic in question tells us about American culture/society.

Grading: Papers and exams each count for 25% of your grade.

Grading scale: A=100-95, A- =94-90; B+ = 86-89, B= 85, B- = 80-84; C+ =

76-79, C=75, C- =70-74; D+ = 66-69, D=65, D- = 64-60; F = 59 or below.

Statement on objectionable or offensive materials

Some, indeed many, of the works we will read and discuss in this course use language, describe events or actions, or take positions which you may find personally offensive; some of the authors may present ideas that you may find dogmatic or ideological. As a form of communication, comics are often humorous and satirical. Even when they are being serious, comics tend towards parody, caricature, and exaggerated cartoon representations of our political, social, and sexual lives. If you do not wish to risk being offended, or if you are otherwise concerned, you may not wish to take this course.

Be especially careful of expecting authors or characters to know what you know, or to think, believe, or act as you do. I will be discussing the historical and cultural contexts for works and characters in each part of this course, but that will only be useful if you are willing to avoid inappropriately imposing standards and values on works. In the case of underground and some alternative comics, for instance, you will also need to remember that the social norms of particular countercultural or subcultural groups in earlier times may not be those of mainstream groups today or of different groups at the time when these comics were produced. Authors and characters may think, believe, act, or speak in ways — especially in the area of sexuality — that are quite different from you.

In any case, if you are concerned about your personal reaction to the course materials, some of which contain sexually explicit images and/ or slang and profanity, or the possible evolution of class lectures, please confer with me during the first week of class. I do not promote the use of offensive language or call needless attention to offensive works or passages (even those that deliberately set out to offend “mainstream” American values as part of their aesthetic intention), but I expect to conduct an open and candid discussion of the graphic materials and ideas we are studying. Our goal is intellectual and critical understanding — not condemnation — of a unique American art form.

Lecture Topics and Assigned Readings (for a twenty-one hour television course)

Introduction to the Course

One Hour (Tape #1)

Unit One. How to Read a Comic/Comics as an Art Form

Watterson, The Tenth Anniversary Calvin and Hobbes.

Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics

Robert C. Harvey, “The Aesthetics of the Comic Strip” (on ERROL; see below

Chatman, Introduction to Story and Discourse

Five Hours (Tapes #2-6)

During this part of the course, students familiarize themselves with the critical vocabulary of sequential art by reading selections from criticism and theory. They learn the basics of how comics use signs both verbal and visual to communicate narrative meanings (comics are primarily a narrative art form). They examine semiotic analysis of narrative and learn the formalist distinction between story and plot (discourse). From Scott McCloud and Will Eisner they will learn the various ways in which comics represent time and temporal processes by spatializing them. By reading selections from R. C. Harvey’s The Art of the Funnies and Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, they will learn how to decode a visual narrative, discovering its denotative and connotative codes; from Eco’s readings of Superman they will learn how to situate a visual narrative in the context of social relations and processes. Students begin to analyze short narrative forms such as comic strips, and to examin

e political cartoons for social content and political references to American culture as well as literary figuration (metaphor/symbol). The techniques of humor and joke structures are also examined. Students will read one collection of comic strips, such as a Calvin and Hobbes collection. Also discussed are the differences between comic strips and comic books in terms of audience (adults versus children and adolescents). After W.W.II, American audiences saw strips as addressing the entire family whereas comic books were viewed as an inartistic, even dangerous product directed at children. The history of this aesthetics of reception is told in the next section.

Unit Two. The Mainstream Comic Book

Readings:

Martin Barker, “Lucy`s Story” (on ERROL)

Nyberg, Association of Comics Magazine Publishers Comics Code (on ERROL)

Electronic readings on the Comics Code:

Superman in the Sixties

Umberto Eco, “The Myth of Superman” (on ERROL)

Marvel: Fantastic Firsts.

Note: Unless otherwise indicated, you are to read the entire book during these lectures; readings are not keyed to specific lectures, but you should be able to find particular stories discussed in the lectures on your own. Five Hours (Tapes# 7-11)

During these lectures students learn to analyze narratives beyond the limited range of the strip. They learn to read the comic book as an aesthetic object produced for their entertainment, but also to examine the social codes under which the bulk of these narratives are now produced (i.e. the Comics Code Authority). Students here begin to pick up a history of comic books since the 1950’s, when the Senate Hearings on Juvenile Delinquency implicated crime and horror comics as a factor affecting social deviance. EC comics — a company that was destroyed as a result of the hearings — will be taken as a model of a certain aesthetics the short story form (horror) based on formulas and reader expectations which were largely ignored by the Hearings. Students will also read about the comics campaign in Great Britain (Barker`s A Haunt of Fears) which was based on our own and which resulted in legislation regulating comic books.

The primary emphasis however will be on the language and idiom of superheroes as a modern American myth. Students during these lectures will pick up more of the history of the comic book during the Silver Age (post-1950 Code supervised).The lectures survey the development of both the DC (Superman and Batman) and the Marvel (Spiderman) Universes as well as independents. We examine how new narrative structures are created as these universes expand and try to interlock various narrative worlds. We will discuss superheroes as a kind of modern folklore. Students will read a long narrative sequence in continuity or a limited series from one of these narrative universes and strive to understand the superhero genre as providing the most familiar and lasting type of comic book character. Students will be asked to consider the ways in which a story may be woven into the on-going continuity of a narrative universe. Students will learn that a story of this sort may take place over the course of several months, affecting many titles. It may be complexly intertextual. These story may attain complex temporal structures (Eco on “The Myth of Superman”). But they do not yet have novelistic structure.

Midterm Exam/First Paper Due: Sunday, March 9, Cavanaugh 229, 1:00-3:00 PM.

Unit Three. Underground and Alternative Comics

Readings:

Robert Crumb, Vol, 7, The Complete Crumb Comics.

Art Spiegelman, Maus.

Daniel Clowes, Ghost World.

Five Hours (Tapes# 12-16)

This unit focuses on comics published outside the code, for adults. We will discuss “underground” comics produced in the United States from 1965 to 1975, decoding them for their “countercultural” meanings that take on specifically political and ideological forms in the context of protest against mainstream American culture. The work of Robert Crumb is a focus of this section. Alternative (i.e. “subcultural,”) comics produced in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s will also be discussed. Here the work of Art Spiegelman – who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 – is also given a special scrutiny. Students learn how these comics helped to expand the artistic range of the comics medium by confronting the reality of events like the Holocaust. We also consider the subcultural function of such graphic magazines such as RAW and Weirdo in presenting new women artists and alternative visions of America.

Unit Four. The New Mainstream

Readings:

Frank Miller, The Dark Knight Returns.

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen.

Five Hours (Tapes# 17-21)

The concluding unit will explore new directions in comic art during the eighties and nineties, including the developments of separate lines of comics — DC’s Vertigo, for instance — which have captured the young adult audience with more mature content by deliberately publishing outside the code. The rise of independently published comics such as Todd McFarlane’s Spawn will be discussed. In these lectures, students are expected to bring to bear everything they have learned about the social semiotics of comic book heroes to their reading of a graphic novel. Extensive analysis of both Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen will be provided so that students can distinguish a narrative which really does employ novelistic structures for political and ideological purposes and one that does not. These two books ushered in the term “graphic novel”, and showed that comics can be just as complex as a mainstream modernist political novel. Does the superhero genre have a basis in authoritarian political thought (i.e. even fascism)? Students will see how new social and political content demands new forms of art that enact criticism of the status quo.

Final Exam/Final Paper Due: Sunday, April 27, Cavanaugh Hall 229, 1:00-3:00 PM.

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