OUAS 4 Educators

Graphic tales make novel teaching tools

http://www.theage.com.au/national/graphic-tales-make-novel-teaching-tools-20080920-4knb.html?page=-1

• Liza Power
• September 21, 2008

This was a relief for Ms Cromie, a senior English teacher at South Australia’s Pedare Christian College. Faced with a class of disengaged students who struggled to read traditional texts, she was desperate for material that would excite her charges. So she pitched the graphic novels as “dark, mysterious and underground”, told her students they were about to explore uncharted territory and had their attention from the get-go.

Graphic novels tend to invite attention wherever they travel in education circles — but the reception they receive is not always glowing. Ms Cromie had waged quite a battle both with her students’ parents (“My kid’s 15 and you’re showing him a picture book!”) and the school board before she was able to take her 10-week graphic novel pilot program into the classroom.

Dismissed by some educators as frivolous and “substandard literature”, graphic novels, like comics, have long battled for legitimacy as teaching tools. Many teachers argue that class time spent studying non-traditional texts is time taken away from more rigorous scholastic endeavours. Hobby reading, they argue, has no place in the classroom.

Pam Macintyre, lecturer in language and literacy at the University of Melbourne, hopes that a recent wave of sophisticated titles, including The Great Gatsby by Melbourne-based comic artist Nicki Greenberg and Shaun Tan’s award-winning The Arrival, will change this. She argues that young people live in a world saturated with visual images and are, as a result, sophisticated users and readers of them. Building a link between this everyday world and the classroom is vital. “Today’s students want to look, engage and understand material very quickly. If they’re daunted by a difficult to understand text, they simply get bored and move on.”

Dianne Laycock, teacher and librarian at Sydney’s Barker College and author of several research papers on graphic novels in the classroom, argues that teaching students to analyse visual information (television, advertising, the internet) is crucial. Graphic novels, she argues, assist this teaching in ways that other texts can’t.

Blair Mahoney, who teaches English at Melbourne High and this year introduced his year 11 students to Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer prize-winning Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, says many critics don’t appreciate the sophistication of graphic novels.

Incorporating words with visual images — which involve colour, perspectives and framing — often combined with dialogue in speech balloons, graphic novels represent a unique visual/literary form, Mr Mahoney says.

Dianne Laycock says that one of the greatest appeals of the graphic novel is their ability to cater to a wide array of learning styles and abilities. When she first introduced a year 8 class to an adaptation of Macbeth, boys who had struggled with the language and themes of the traditional text found that being able to see the relationships between the characters made a dramatic difference. Higher-ability students studied the graphic novel and original text together, evaluating the adaptation process.

Still, there were some students who didn’t enjoy the exercise. “They felt the pictures took away the chance for them to use their own imaginations. They couldn’t picture the characters themselves, because someone else had done it for them,” Ms Laycock says. Many parents were also confronted by the idea of a manga adaptation of Shakespeare, given the form’s reputation for explicit depictions of violence.

When Meghan Cromie asked her year 9 students to create their own graphic novels, their responses surprised her. “There were some amazing ideas that integrated history, politics and ideas of morality.”

She was delighted when they carried this enthusiasm over into their next reading project — the traditional text version of The Merchant of Venice. “I expected a massive drop in engagement but it didn’t happen. All of a sudden they felt like accomplished English students.”