The Awakening: The Graphic Novel’s Pathway to 21st-Century Literacy

The rise of the graphic novel and other visual and social media in the last decade is astounding in terms of numbers and in terms of our students' encounters with the visual in our world. In recent survey data, graphic novels grossed over $1 billion in sales in North America alone, and in 2016, March Book Three was the first graphic novel to receive a National Book Award. “Increasingly, scholars and teachers realize that in a media-dominated society, one traditional literacy–reading and writing of print–is no longer sufficient.” (“Expanding Literacies through Graphic Novels”( National Council of Teachers of English)  In each grade level at Field, we expose our students, across disciplines, to this particular genre which is exponentially growing in the marketplace. “This genre possesses all the literary conventions we traditionally teach in prose and poetry at each grade level, but then adds on the element of visual complexity to further engage students in analyzing such things as layout, frame size and placement, the details of visual representations such as color, font, how graphics evolve from page to page. Best of all, this genre most nimbly has made space to take on issues of social justice, inequity, and cultural stereotyping in ways that are relevant and captivating for our students. One educator emphasizes “..the fact that they are multimodal (meaning multiple modes of expression are used) facilitates and supports students’ ability to visualize and understand complicated ideas, which is also a 21st-century literacy skill. (Gonzalez,Graphic Novels in the Classroom)

This year at every grade level 6-12, the English Department has designed a unit focused on a particular graphic novel or included a graphic novel as an option in a Choice unit. Additionally, The Graphic Novel course, taught by Tim Lane, was offered as a new senior English elective, in which students study the history of the graphic novel and create their own by the end of the year. Our objective as an English Department when building a unit on a graphic novel is to target visual literacy and critical thinking skills; students analyze the interface of words and sequential pictures, which replicates their own immersion in visual media on a daily basis. “Increasingly, scholars and teachers realize that in a media-dominated society, one traditional literacy–reading and writing of print–is no longer sufficient.”(Gonzalez, “Graphic Novels in The Classroom”) Or, as Lane asserts, “to learn to read graphic novels is to learn a new language…the graphic novel engages readers not only in the story, but a critical examination of this unique storytelling language.” 

In the case of When Some Stars are Scattered, English 7 students encounter “an intimate, important, and unforgettable look at the day-to-day life of a refugee, as told to New York Times Bestselling author/artist Victoria Jamieson by Omar Mohamed, the Somali man who lived the story” (GoodReads)  In Persepolis, a grade 10 text, students are allowed to visually encounter the concept of the veil that is steeped in themes of power, misogyny, violence, and revolution in Iran. They read and watch a young teen move towards her own rites of passage and young adulthood amidst the rise of the Iranian Revolution. In so many ways, her questions are the same questions our teenagers are asking right now. In choice reading groups in English 9, students deconstructed two frames from the prologue of March Book One detailing the childhood and young adult years of John Lewis' rise to power as a Civil Rights leader. Through a See, Think, Wonder writing protocol (Project Zero, Harvard University), students uncovered higher-order questions outstanding in these two frames in ways they might not have been able to without the dramatic visual prompting.