Graphic Novels

[Update: check out my Graphic Novels page for book lists.]

Below is a post I made today in response to a serious query on English Companion Ning about the validity of teaching graphic novels as "text."  I got so excited about the topic that I ordered three graphic novels while working on the comment.  My love of the graphic began with picture books - my own childhood books, many of which were saved by my mother and now live in my granddaughter Bea's bookcase.

I believe that my fascination with this genre is also connected to my reading history.  I learned to read in Nebraska and Wisconsin cemeteries, on long walks with my college professor dad.  From him I also learned early to love fantasy (Arthurian) and SF.  From my mother's collection of Horizon magazines I learned the power of myth and image.  Graphic novels, like the best iPad apps, are among today's best tactile and literary venues for showing students different paths to reading and learning.

Learning what?   

• "The need to conduct research and to produce and consume media is embedded into every aspect of today’s curriculum."  (Common Core Standards, Key Design Considerations).
• "Integrate and evaluate information presented in diverse media and formats, including visually, quantitatively, and orally." (Common Core Standards, Anchor Standards)
• every single ELA analytical term and method can be visually demonstrated using selected graphic novels - the best of them cover most of the tested content

Comparing texts in different formats is not a new idea - I was doing that with 16mm film long ago - what a pain.  It is now much easier to integrate film media, thanks to YouTube, but graphic media has been more of a challenge to teachers.  The graphic novel, it seems to me, fits the bill for today's teachers, at all grade levels.

Matching graphic text to student in terms of appropriateness is important.  So read the books before giving them to students.

My post is in response to this query (the following discussion is going to be good as well - take note of the post by Karen LaBonte pointing teachers to Scoop.It, which in turn points us at this Book Shelf interview: Graphic storytelling and the new literacies and many more terrific resources for teaching with graphic novels.  Check it out.

You might also want to explore the concept of the picto-essay.  Syncopated: An Anthology of Nonfiction Picto-Essays is a starter collection. These short graphic pieces eyeball an experience (e.g. memoir), place, or time, crossing back and forth from history to "you are there" as only the visual world can.  I would use them along with the web to enrich visual literacy and visual history lessons. Students with drawing-disability can generally create a wonderful product with a digital camera.

[My response to Raef Earl Williams, who writes: "With the pressures of teaching all standards and standardized testing, can you rationalize teaching this type of text year in and year out? "] There is also new pressure to teach creative thinking and textual interpretation, and to have students work in purposeful discussion groups.  I think that the best graphic novels are a legitimate text source for developing higher order skills - including comprehension.  I also agree with you that the power of images is a literacy that should be taught.  One approach might be to compare graphic to text versions of literature.  I did this with Fahrenheit 451. The Gunslinger, The Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Twilight, The Odyssey, and Beowulf (several graphic and comic versions of this are available) are other possibilities  [and, I have since discovered, most of Shakespeare and Mark Twain, many great moments in US history... the concept of compare/contrast is HUGE using this format].

It is certainly possible to study any element of literature through its visual presentation in graphic novels - much as you might study a visual image (painting, photograph, etc.).  [in fact, some concepts might be best introduced or reinforced with graphic novels: irony, mood, point of view, contrast, parallelism - to name a few]

Here are some titles I would love to teach: American Vampire, Vol. 1 (because Stephen King was involved - but there are also a vol.2 and 3 is on the way), Persepolis, Trickster (Native American storytellers and graphic artists), American Born Chinese, Stitches - a Memoir, Shaun Tan (The Arrival, Lost and Found), and (of course - you would have to offer this) Maus.

American Library Association maintains lists of the best YA graphic novels published each year.  The number of titles alone is one reason to attend to them in the classroom.

Since I am having fun imagining this:

• Hark a Vagrant and Wondermark are online sources of excellent, intelligent "shorts" - check out the Hark archives to show kids that graphic is not "dumb." Find a 1-panel short called "The Hole" at this unlikely source: ELL online resource Grammarman (also noted in my post Storytelling Spirit). Grammarman Comic also offers short graphic lessons: comics with errors, worksheets, answer sheets.  And another in the .pdf download from, of all places, spirit - the journal of Southwest Airlines, October 2011.
• There are many comic apps - so your students should have no trouble finding DC and other titles for their smart phones. I use Comics, the reader for ComiXology.com.
• I would probably begin with a study of wordless picture books: The Mysteries of Harris Burdick (there is a collection of short stories - one for each picture - due out this fall), Woolvs in the Sitee, Varmints, and Chalk are four of my favorites, but ask a children's librarian. 
• Inanimate Alice is a terrific graphic puzzle story - a good problem-solving challenge for a visual reader. There will surely be more of these fully digital visual stories in the months to come.
• It would be interesting to have students do some deep thinking about the mood, tone, and content of graphic novels - so little humor, so much violence and darkness (just a study of color across several titles would be fun).

On the "create" end of learning, you might want to have groups collaborate on a graphic story - apps like Comic Life and online tools like Make Beliefs Comix can support the non-artistic.  With middle schoolers, we did work on large pages as well as digital ones.   Have fun!

The Uses of Fairy Tales

I want fairy tales to be relevant. Like myths, these are stories that dig deeply into what is really important to children. They are dark and uneasy - but so are the stories and novels that our students are reading on their own "for pleasure." So many of these contemporary series and novels, and even movies, have their roots in the "old stories" that I have decided to bring my 7th graders on a journey back through the classic tales. It would take a year to read them all, so I am going to use the Reading Circles framework to let student groups guide themselves through as many fairy picture books as I can gather from our district and town libraries.

I will be doing a read-aloud of The Prince of the Pond and Jack and the Seven Deadly Giants to model the questioning and discussion methods the students will be following. The goal is for them to begin to develop their own skills as discussion group members (a group where everyone is a leader). My anticipation is that a month-long dose of this process will have a huge pay-off in terms of larger collaborations later in the year. And because the tales are short and almost always well-written and beautifully illustrated, I will gain a tool for measuring oral reading fluency, and for teaching literary terms and basic visual literacy (how to look at and compose an image).

But what intrinsic value do the fairy tales, and related lore such as fables and myths, have today? First and most obvious is their value as ur tales, tales upon which much of Western literature is scaffolded. From my point of view as a teacher of literary texts, recognizing the oldest character archetypes, settings, and story patterns in current works enriches the reading experience. It also provides a set of mental puzzles to be solved - a reader's search that simulates deeper reading. Making connections is itself a higher order thinking skill that our ping-back students sorely need to develop.

Discussion is one way to explore these connections. We will all be comparing and contrasting the telling and illustration of a core set of tales: Cinderella, Rapunzel, Jack & the Beanstalk, The Three Little Pigs, and Sleeping Beauty/Briar Rose. Reading groups will explore contemporary retellings and fracturings of these and other tales.

Online collaboration via wiki and/or shared Notebooks will allow individual students and reading groups to build a larger discussion of connections, opinions and interpretations. This will also give us a publication format for some of the more formal short writing assignments.

An equally important value is the intrinsic meanings found in the stories themselves. What can you do when a situation seems beyond your control? What makes good good and evil evil? These are core contemporary questions for today's middle schooler. By providing multiple forums for the discussion around these question, students will begin to gain confidence in their own ability to act and answer.

What are some of those forums? Writing and structured discussion (agreed upon questions), of course. But also more creative and alternative ways to build understanding. I will be asking students to retell one tale in Molly Bang's "cut shapes" format (Picture This). I have done my model as a ComicLife movie (the cover is above), but paper and glue, claymation, or colored pencil will do just as well. Reducing character and setting to basic forms is a path to meaning. I have shared my movie with many adults and it engenders great conversations about my choices of voice, shape, color and story.

Another forum will be dramatic. The "hot seat" activity is a wonderful way to make characters come to life in the classroom. Dramatic retelling is a true collaborative activity. Our students will be able to do this "live" and digitally through movies or slide shows.

Old tales will be followed by new translations of fairy. I would love to teach the myth retellings (Percy Jackson, etc.), but too many of our students have discovered these on their own. So I am going further back in literature time and sideways: Haroun and the Sea of Stories uses story to ask What is the value of story?; Briar Rose and Crazy Jack bring tales into troubling adult events; The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents plays with the Piper and questions of loyalty, courage, and what it means to be aware of the world. These will be read in choice groups, supplemented with Caldecott readings and libraries of other novels.

Beyond fairy tales is a difficult novel, which we will all read mid-year. Each student will read the novel differently - some for basic identification of how good & evil evolve in the book, some to making connections to tale and lore, some to identification with the protagonist and follow his growth. My goal is for each to have confidence in one way of reading deeply. The essence of individual understandings will make for Reading Circle discussions, as well as for individual written responses.

We will end the year by reading novels that bring fairy tales home - novels about being "orphaned and alone." Each novel choice will be paired with one or more picture book for pre-reading. Varmits, for example, is wonderful to pair with Un Lun Dun, I Am a Rat!, and I Am the Cheese; Woolves in the Sitee pairs with Slake's Limbo and Finding Stinko; The Brave Little Tailor with Bud, Not Buddy and Maniac Magee; The Snow Queen with The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Molly Moon's Incredible Book of Hypnotism; The Pied Piper with Spring-Heeled Jack; Twelve in One Blow with A Single Shard; Beauty and the Beast with The Secret Garden. We will all read the verse story of Home of the Brave and remember how Jack got the seeds to adventure.

Some of these are untraditional choices for literary reading circles, but all allow students to read at a choice of level and genre. It will be year's work to see if focusing upon ur stories, characters, themes and settings will empower students to read with more joy and depth.