…in which I argue that comics in the classroom can uniquely take advantage of students’ homegrown multiliterate resilience to vault into deeper learning.
We’re coming back to school. We can’t afford to come back the same. Here: MK Reed and Jonathan Hill’s “Wild Weather” (First Second)
Post-Distance Learning Readers: what’s been gained, not just what’s lost
Kids and youth often read generationally in advance of teachers. It gives us teachers plenty of reasons to look down on students’ literacy practices. We fret that our youth are somehow less literate than we were (rather than differently literate), even though we have centuries of generational evidence that the progress of literacy access and technologies keeps broadening and deepening. Our kids stare at their phones or disappear into video game narratives, and we cast aspersions because they aren’t the diligent readers of teen magazines or horror novels that we were.
“Kids these days just don’t read like we used to. When I was young, we REALLY had to read tough stuff.” This is the Wizard issue I read about seven times when I was a kid.
Taking the view that youth read adaptively to the evolving technologies of texts that our cultures create (and exalt and market), I felt vindication and glee this last year, as teachers who felt themselves well-educated stumbled over the basics of operating a web-based platform or composing a visually legible Google Slides presentation. Meanwhile, our students figured out in a snap when to scroll fast or slow for relevant info, how to navigate even poorly designed headers and menus, and which composition strategies for image+text+audio+video pieces would spin our heads around with awe. All while multi-tasking with one ear on their droning teacher’s Zoom voice and another window exploring vast gamer worlds or TikTok Trump trolling or knocking out witticisms on text threads with GIFs and emojis.
(These are facts of my own teaching and my students, to be clear. And my colleagues too.)
While we educators do have real work to do in rebounding and resilience after the crisis and pain of this brutal year-plus, I hope we resist those narrow notions of “learning loss” just because our students haven’t followed our tightly school-scripted trajectories in their development. With literacies in particular, I fear teachers will suffer the failures of imagination that make us incapable of seeing the assets students grew from their year surviving our half-baked efforts at teaching online. Kids are visually literate in adaptive ways that we have barely fathomed.
How do we navigate bad (or tricky) web design? Our youth might just know way better than we do.
How can we bootstrap those gifts to bring them into the imaginative worlds or the detailed knowledges that only come with sustained attention to a Shakespeare play or a clearly annotated schematic or a layered primary source or a challenging word problem?
Surely not by time-traveling them to the literacy practices of a century ago, neglecting all the smarts they’ve gained, and pretending the only way to higher mental operations and critical thought is basal readers and boring recitation.
After a year learning to fly online, our students may have some trouble being strapped to our horse-drawn carriages of old instructional habits.
Prospects for Comics as Multimodal Texts
Let’s be honest, though: comics and graphic novels aren’t X-Box or TikTok. Even though I’ve seen greater proportions of my students hooked into reading comics than prose texts, it’s only by degrees, not a standalone guarantee for more engagement. Comics aren’t a literacy panacea. What they are, what they can offer, though, are the gifts of texts, like depth of detail and focus, pacing, rewarding re-reading, space for densely compacted sentences or languid poetic ones, narratives that grow empathy, concepts spelled out over chapters and building one upon another.
From Reed and Hill’s “Wild Weather” (First Second.) We COULD try to tease out the proportion of information contained by words, by images, or by markers of sequence or causation compared to a textbook page, maybe coming up with 25/50/25 vs 50/20/30. But splicing it up misses the point: the whole is greater than the sum of parts. That’s multimodality.
But they also offer the gifts of multimodality. Here’s some literacy theory jargon: a quarter-century ago, some educational linguists and theorists framed some currents of thought within literacy studies and other fields into “a pedagogy of multiliteracies,” a pretty seminal paper. To speak on a popular tip, there’s a little latter-day Marshall McLuhan in there, a little Paulo Freire, a little Courtney Cazden (sort of like Deborah Tannen in the classroom), if those names mean anything. If they don’t mean anything, don’t worry: your own experiences of reading and writing in the 21st century are enough.
Multiliteracies, as the visuals and summary from a cool Weebly site below show, embraces the fact that we read in really wide-ranging contexts of communication and expression, all of which involve our bodies or visuals or places or cultural practices. Even when we reach peak nerd-reading, nine chapters into a novel or four papers into a research synthesis, we rely on textual and para-textual or extra-textual cues for when to stop and start, we rifle through our mental drawers of stock images, we call forth our exposures to this laboratory experiment or that debutante ball in order to make the words on a page into worlds in our minds.
Huh? This is a screenshot of a web page with a table, an infographic, and hyperlinked text. From http://futuristicmultiliteracies.weebly.com/main-components-of-multiliteracies-pedagogy.html retrieved on Aug 21, 2021. This Weebly page exhibits many of the dimensions of multiliteracies that it’s explounding.
When I talk to teachers about multiliteracies, we often jump to talking about how we try to integrate multimedia into our teaching, like comparing the film version of a book to the novel, or teaching a unit about propaganda and watching commercials with critical lenses. These are relevant applications, but I always try to slow down our rush to our teacherly lesson ideation impulses and simply observe the degrees to which our youth are already giftedly multiliterate. In fact, as a generational cohort, our youth are gifted in ways that we Gen-Xers or Millenials or (bless us) Boomers may not be… may never be… may even be constitutionally incapable of noticing, observing, or measuring.
Teachers who know where I’m going with this will feel a hesitation, one I feel myself. “Yes, I understand that real reading involves texts in context, which we tap into all the time. We have our students judge books by their covers, and we learn to pause for charts and graphs, and we pay attention to cinematic and commercial genres. But are you telling us to abandon our deep humanities traditions and practices? Don’t students learn that other stuff naturally? I don’t need to spend time in class teaching my kids how to surf the web or read a comic book. I need to expand their academic vocabularies and expose them to literary richness and refine their critical thinking with rigorous disciplinary knowledge.”
I agree with that line of thought in many ways. And distinguishing what students might pick up on their own and what students can reach with our pedagogical help does get us thinking in the right direction. Namely, a direction that isn’t “either/or” about “good” texts versus “bad” texts, or “academic” reading versus “casual” or “interest” reading. We can think more qualitatively about what kinds of texts we engage, when and how we engage them, and for what kinds of purposes.
Because I value situated-ness, I would never presume to say that it’s universally better for all students to learn from a comic (say, MK Reed and Jonathan Hill’s Wild Weather from First Second’s “Science Comics” series) than from a textbook or scientific journal article (say, Nature Climate). Let’s make that clear.
Ideally, we’d want our future climate leaders to be conversant in both, right? Texts that popularize knowledge with clarity and accuracy, and texts that bear the scrutiny of expert review and carefully weigh the evidence under disciplinary standards.
Philippe Squarzoni’s “Climate Changed” (Abrams, 2014)
Philippe Squarzoni’s “Climate Changed” (Abrams, 2014)
But concretely and contextually, I turn to my lived knowledge of where students are in this moment in history and in my local context, what they/we have gained and still need.
Not Just “Gateways” to Reading. Actual Reading. Robust Reading. Needed Reading.
When educators who don’t know comics well talk about comics, they’ll often try to speak optimistically and open-mindedly about comics not realizing how they’re damning with faint praise.
“Oh yeah,” they’ll intone, ”comics are a great gateway into reading.”
My shoulders will stiffen as I weigh whether to sway or inveigh or parlay. No, my experience wants to say, not just a great “gateway.” Or if it’s not worth the energy of a fight, I’ll say, oh yes! And when I was a kid, all the high-flown vocabulary and literary allusions and complex syntax… that was Stan Lee as much as Shakespeare!
But if I’m with a group of students, we’ll spend hours unpacking the density of the text, the layers of the art, and the logarithmic growth in meaning when those are contemplated with sequentiality, framing, narrative or discursive structures, all those image-text relationships McCloud outlined…
To approach this another way, sometimes I’ll point out to my colleagues those kids in the library reading manga or Dog Man or V for Vendetta, and I’ll point out their immersion in the page, the degree of focus, the interactive chatter with a friend reading next to them, the self-paced study, the wrangling with language and immersing in inferences, the forward-seated attention, the delightfully knitted brows. And I’ll say, on the spectrum between “study” and “video games” or “reading” and “Netflix,” even if you want to judge comics reading as “not really reading,” can you really argue that it’s as passive as those other forms? (If I’m feeling really feisty, I’ll demolish their curmudgeonly condescension about video games and Netflix too.)
Truly, for all the vast interest in superhero movies and TV shows, to look at how much box office those media make compared to how little the comic books sell, it’s hard not to shrug at the reality that a tiny minority of superhero fans actually feel compelled to read the comics avidly. And the ones who do? Anecdotally, the comics aren’t just a gateway. They’re a frequent lane on the nerd highway they switch into all the time, often just as frequently as paperback novels or NYTimes editorials, DIY manuals or policy explainers.
The great divide is not between some non-existent “semi-literate” mass of comics fans and the “sophisticated” readers who are cultured and college-ready. Rather, it’s between the readers (whatever medium) and those who’ve found it just as easy in modern life to bypass most reading altogether.
(And if you can accept that premise, it’s not far to see that such a divide is pretty much a false one, telling more about the judge than the judged.)
The Reading We Need Right Now
Between writing that last paragraph and this one, I started back in the classroom for the school year. All of us, students and teachers alike, are shell-shocked and proceeding with great uncertainty.
With ongoing fears about the pandemic, in our community where families contend with housing insecurity and healthcare access disparities and all kinds of other challenges, it can feel like the most distant climb up Maslow’s hierarchy to get to kids’ literacies.
But being in the classroom with these youth, I feel all the more acutely why comics matter as literacies to them.
That’s what I’ll explore in the next installment of [Comics:Classrooms]. Stay tuned.
And if you find this piece useful or thought-provoking, why don’t you let more folks know about Comics Syllabus?
