Back in 2006, I was wrapping up my second year of teaching seniors down in Virginia when a student lent me “Watchmen”, a graphic novel recently turned into a movie, because he knew I was into books like “1984”. It was my first experience with a graphic novel and also one of my favorite experiences with books, in general. Since then, I’ve looked for ways to fit them into my classroom but struggle with how I can fit them into the prescribed curriculum. Up to this point, I’ve done little more than recommend them to students as part of their independent reading requirements for class. Looking at some of the following resources and a few experiments in my classes, I have some ideas.
One of these is a short article on the basics of teaching a graphic novel in a literature class. The others are blogs by educators. The first are entries on teaching graphic novels with links to other sources. The last one is something a masters student put together as part of his thesis on teaching graphic novels.
http://middlehighschool.suite101.com/article.cfm/how_to_teach_graphic_novels
http://thisteachinglife.blogspot.com/2004/08/graphic-novels-and-comics.html
http://strzyz.blogspot.com/2007/02/graphic-novels-in-classroom.html
http://graphicclassroom.blogspot.com
Beach brings up the software “Comic Life” when discussing students writing their own graphic novels. I tried this myself last fall upon completing the novel “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry”. I assigned my students a few different plot points to present graphically with pictures and text much like a graphic novel. The idea was that they would do this with a published book before doing it to their own stories. We didn’t get that far because the unit was taking too much time. The experiment went well in regards to the students using the program and hitting the main points of each assigned section. What I didn’t like was the students’ limited knowledge of the graphic novel genre. Had I time to do this again, I would at least show them one ahead of time rather than my own crude example of a “Comic Life” project. The students that had experience with graphic novels did a much better job overall. Look here for a few examples from one of my classes:
http://eckhoffla.pbwiki.com/browse/#view=ViewFolder¶m=A1
As far as getting a graphic novel into the classroom, I can fit a few different ones into the curriculum, but still need to get clearance from the powers that be. You know, the ones with the money and power.
Since we spend a great deal of time on “The Diary of Anne Frank” (play) an easy choice would be “Maus”. It fits in with the play perfectly, offers a new perspective on a topic we already study, and still deals with the overall theme of 8th grade literature; how people treat those different from themselves. I like the idea of throwing this in because it would allow us to go through a book as we usually do, but with the added element of images. We could do a lot of different things with analysis in regards to effective and ineffective uses of images to enhance text. Hopefully, analysis such as this would transfer over to part 2 of the graphic novel study; the creation of their own.
I would like to go ahead with my original plan of a narrative paper with a graphic novel component. A big problem I’ll have to work around is kids trying to write stories simply to accommodate the pictures they want to use. I’ve been told by many and know from experience that it’s better to get the story first, media second. I haven’t decided if I would then keep the graphic novel portion a secret until go time.
Many have told me that I shouldn’t do this assignment because of the access issue. Lots of students don’t have access to Internet, digital photography, scanners, etc. I’ve found that by doing creative commons searches on flickr.com is a great way to get around this. It also serves as a great way to get students to try and alter their search terms to find the thing they’re looking for.
The biggest reason I want to add graphic novels to my classroom is the interest level. A few of my students already read them on their own and I feel that the others would get more excited about reading if I added them in. My only worry is that I would turn some of my lesser performing students off from reading altogether since it’s them that read the graphic novels on their own. I don’t want to put a negative connotation on something they read willingly by making it a schoolbook.
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