Teaching with Comics

It’s early Saturday morning and I’m finally finding a minute to reflect on the annual ACTEM Conference where I presented this week.  One of my sessions was Promoting Literacy with Comic Life and, I must admit, I was feeling uneasy about it.  It was a one-hour session and I’m finding it harder and harder to do a good session in that short time period.  I’m also fighting a cold and had two other sessions to prepare so I was afraid I was giving it short shrift.  In a one-hour session, with as many people as I had in the room (I’m guessing around 50 or 60) I couldn’t really give them a hands-on experience so I opted to talk more about the “why” than the “how.”

I distributed my Promoting Literacy with Cartoons, Comics, and Graphic Novels notebook which now resides on the ACTEM server as a web notebook as well as a downloadable NoteShare notebook. We talked a lot about teaching with comics in general before we turned to a discussion of Comic Life.  The crowd was very receptive to the idea of using images and text, both as a medium for conveying content and another way for students to demonstrate their learning.  Once again, I found two subgroups among the participants who really get it: librarians and foreign language teachers.  I think librarians, for the most part, understand that comics and graphics novels are legitimate reading material and they belong in their collections.  Foreign Language teachers (and ESL teachers) have always used images for teaching vocabulary and they know how powerful dialog combined with pictures can be.

When it came time to talk about Comic Life, I wanted to do something different so we attempted to make a comic of Act I, Scene ii of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  It’s the scene where Quince has gathered all his players to begin working on the play they will perform for the duke.  I had my colleague Phil help me, and we got some volunteers to wear various hats and took a bunch of pictures of them in various poses.  We downloaded the pictures to iPhoto and then opened Comic Life and began making a comic of the scene, translating the Elizabethan language into modern English.  It would have been better if I had a longer period of time to do it but I think they got the idea.

The best part of the session was when I asked the participants for ideas they had for using Comic Life. We always learn from the collective wisdom of the group.

Probably by now you’ve heard that Google has come out with its own browser, Chrome. I’m a little bummed that there isn’t a Mac version yet but I can wait. What really intrigues me is that Google had artist Scott McCloud write a web comic to introduce it. How interesting that Google chose to use a sequential art piece to teach the public about their new browser! Apparently someone there understands how powerful comics are as teaching tools.

Or… maybe it’s just geeks reaching out to other geeks. I’d rather think that it’s geeks looking for the most effective way to get their concepts across to a broad audience.

I’m gathering materials for a session I’m doing next week at the Studywiz Spark Users Conference and I’ve run into a bit of a problem. It’s a one-hour (not nearly enough time) workshop to show participants how they can use Studywiz to support literacy across the curriculum. The “supporting literacy” part is not the problem; Studywiz certainly is built to support reading, writing, listening, speaking, inquiry, and all the technology skills that fall under that huge umbrella we call “literacy.” It’s the content that’s causing me problems.

I decided to create a unit in Studywiz on the elections. Although elections happen every year (and local elections sometimes more than once a year) people really pay attention during a Presidential election year. It’s one of those “teachable moments,” or rather, a real-life event that is rich with teachable moments. I thought I would use this content to do a little proselytizing about gathering a lot of reading material for a topic rather than relying on just one reading for everyone (usually a text book). My experience has been that most 8th grade Social Studies classes have kids whose reading abilities span a wide range and we test these kids so much that it’s not hard for a teacher in any content area to get a pretty good picture of how diverse her or his class is. And online learning environments like Studywiz make it easy for teachers to gather all kinds of readings and other materials on a topic and either allow kids to choose which sources they use to learn the content, or match kids up with readings that are in their comfort zone.

So, I set off on my quest to find reading material with Lexile measurements ranging from around 400 to 1400 that would help kids learn more about the elections, particularly the race for President. I headed to MARVEL first because I can search the databases by Lexile and I did find some articles but the pieces written for lower reading level were obviously written for young children and I knew 8th graders would not find them very engaging and probably would be embarrassed to be caught reading them.

Then I heard (probably on NPR) about plans to release comic book biographies of John McCain and Barack Obama. They won’t be out until October but I hope they are engaging and thought-provoking and serious about this very serious topic. I hope they are well-written and intellectually rigorous and they appeal to everyone, not just our struggling readers.

So now I’m on a quest to find other sequential art products we can use to teach about the election process. There must be more out there. Maybe someone among the millions of readers of this blog will know of some and can make some suggestions.

I attended the MLTI Summer Institute in Castine last week and my 3-hour session on Promoting Literacy with Cartoons, Comics and Graphic Novels went well. The participants were a very diverse group of teachers but I think everyone left with some ideas for introducing comics and graphic novels into their curricula. Mark, one of the participants, live blogged the session using Cover It Live and you can see the results on his Cooked on Education blog.

I distributed a NoteShare notebook that is now available on the ACTEM NoteShare server. If you have NoteShare, you can view and download it there. (Contact me if you need directions.) If you don’t have NoteShare you can view it in your browser. It’s in the Barbara Greenstone Collection and it’s named teach_comics. The password is actem.

I think the most powerful part of the session was Andrew’s Monster Party comic. It’s a 6-page “silent comic” that tells a simple story. Here’s the first page:

I wanted to display it on the wall in the room as well as in the NoteShare notebook so I uploaded each page to the Block Posters site and blew it up to 4 sheets (portrait) by 4. I printed it and then mounted each page on a 30″ x 40″ foam board so I had six big panels which I lined up on the tray of this huge white board that stretched along one wall of the room. That got everyone’s attention.

We spent a long time talking about all the possibilities for using wordless comics. We brainstormed a word list to use as a word well and then everyone took some time to write the story. We then talked about the 6 traits of writing in the context of the stories they wrote. You could also use a comic like this to teach vocabulary to ESL students or in a foreign language class.

The teachers loved it so I suggested to Andrew that he create more of these silent comics. We’ll see if he takes my advice…

One of my first attempts to use comic art in my teaching was with political cartoons. I’ve always liked newspapers and I used to do big newspaper units when I taught in a 6th grade self-contained classroom and when I taught middle school Language Arts. Of course we spent time with the daily comic strips but the political cartoons on the op-ed page were a great way to form ties with Social Studies classes.

I did that before the advent of the internet. Now huge collections of political cartoons are just a mouse click away. The most complete collection is at Daryl Cagle’s Professional Cartoonists Index. This collection is extensive with RSS feeds for individual artists and some collections. I’m going to try adding an RSS activity to my current events folder on Studywiz and see useful that might be. The Cagle Index also has at Teachers’ Guide site with some lesson ideas. The daily lesson plans are linked to the Class Brain site.

If you need to read up on political cartoons, the article A Brief History of Political Cartoons Part I can be very helpful. It covers the history of political cartoons from Leonardo da Vinci’s caricatures through late 19th century American politics.

A good way to introduce kids to political cartoons is with It’s No Laughing Matter: Analyzing Political Cartoons, an interactive lesson from the Library of Congress. It uses a collection of cartoons about school desegregation to teach about how political cartoons attempt to persuade us. It’s a good way to teach kids the vocabulary they need to talk about political cartoons (symbolism, irony, exaggeration, etc.) Be sure to check out the resources page of this lesson for more ideas and resources both from the Library of Congress collections and others.

Of course, getting kids to create their own political cartoons is a way to let the artists in the class really shine. I think I would try having kids work in pairs or small groups so kids can have rich discussions about the event or concept they will depict and they can collaborate on the drawing. This would also provide an opportunity to bring in the art teacher for an integrated lesson.

Here’s one of Andrew’s early attempts at a political cartoon. He drew this for an MLTI newsletter a few years ago.

I recently read an article in Edutopia about comics and literacy, A New Literary Hero: Comics Make for Colorful Learning by Ed Finkel. It brings up some of the points I’ve been thinking about regarding the use of comics as a tool for literacy. The article also refers to the Comic Book Project, a program out of Columbia University’s Teachers College. I took a quick look at that site several months ago but I’m ready now to look at it more closely. The project’s stated goal is “to help children forge an alternative pathway to literacy by writing, designing, and publishing original comic books.” I’m sure I’ll be writing more about this is in a future post.

In the fall of 2006 the Maine Learning Technology Initiative distributed new iBooks to all 7th and 8th grade teachers and students, replacing the four-year-old devices of the first deployment. These new laptops had some new software. One new title was Comic Life. I had seen it and even played with it a little beforehand but I really started thinking about it when it became available to everyone.

If you haven’t seen it, go to the Plasq site and take a look. It’s a tool that allows you to create comics using images from your photo collection. I knew right away that kids were going to love this but I wanted to have some solid rationale for having kids create comics (other than it’s fun). It turned out that there are lots of good reasons for using Comic Life in school and I’ll talk more about this in future posts.

Because of the sequential nature of comic art it became clear that teachers and students could use comics when explaining processes. Teachers could use it to demonstrate step-by-step directions. Students could use it as an alternative to the written science lab report. I needed an example of this so I turned to my resident artist (my son) and asked him to create a comic in Comic Life that would demonstrate a process and I suggested it would be cool if he used his drawings rather than photos. He agreed and made this little comic about how to make a comic with your own drawings:

Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words.

I did not read comic books when I was a kid.

I learned to read before I started school (my older sister taught me) and I read everything I could my hands on but one thing I couldn’t get my hands on was comics. I guess my mother thought there was something immoral or unhealthy about comic books so we never had them in our house.

I’m a very text-oriented reader. I do read comic strips in newspapers but my eyes immediately go to the text. I’m sure I’m “reading” the images on some level but I truly believe that I get the story from the text. And because I’m good with text, I did really well in school and eventually became a teacher.

As an avid reader and a teacher of reading, I expected that my son would be a reader just like me. After all, I knew how to produce a reader; I read to him every day from the day he was born. Our house was full of books and he loved them. He could retell the stories and his preschool teachers constantly commented on his extensive vocabulary. I’m afraid it turned out to be not that easy. He didn’t start reading independently until the end of third grade and he has always struggled with text. School was a nightmare for him and now, in college, he still finds reading and writing to be very difficult.

It was my son who introduced me to comics. He couldn’t get enough of them when he was little and he knew from a very young age that he wanted to be a comic book artist. I clearly remember the first comic he drew. He was 5 or 6 years old at the time. He folded some paper into a little booklet and on the first page he drew a hand with one finger. He drew the hand again on the second page and gave it two fingers and continued the sequence on the next three pages until the hand had a full complement of fingers. He made a cover and asked me to write the title on it: Growing Fingers. That was the beginning of what I hope will become his career. He’s a student now at Savannah College of Art and Design where he is majoring in Sequential Art.

Needless to say, my little family has been surrounded by comic books and cartoon art for a few years now and, while I appreciate my son’s talent, I never really understood why he was so attracted to this art form. Then, a couple of years ago, he ordered a graphic novel from Amazon as a gift for his girlfriend. The book arrived at our house when he was away at college so I opened the package. It happened to be Free Comic Week and, in celebration, Amazon added a free copy of “Splashin’ Around” an Owly comic to the order. It’s a story told almost completely with images and without words. I was curious so I opened it and started reading. By the third page I was feeling really annoyed. I was struggling. Getting the story from the images was hard work! And then I realized that my son must feel that way when he reads text. If it’s hard work and you can’t do it easily and fluently, before long you give up and stop trying.

This is happening in many of our classrooms too. Kids who struggle with text for one reason or another give up and find excuses not to read. And since so much of our content is delivered through text, they miss out on a lot. Many of those kids might be more fluent in images than in text. They may be more adept at giving and receiving information with pictures than with words. How often do we give them opportunities to do this?

This is what lead me to consider teaching with comics and that’s why I created this blog – as a place to try out new ideas and hear some of yours.