As a teacher, I am always looking for opportunities for my students to be exposed to the written word and challenged in their reading. I am also constantly looking for materials to develop literacy skills.
It has always been a challenge for me to creatively and intentionally approach interactions with informational texts in my classroom, and growing in challenging texts is a never-ending endeavor. I recognize that the hardest part for my students to read is content area text. Of course, my students read a lot of nonfiction books through Kelly Gallagher’s Articles of the Week and other free resources, and I put most of our reading on inquiry-based reading. In addition to recommended resources like these, I draw on a range of visual or multimodal texts and approaches. There are many possibilities for the comics medium, including creating opportunities for engagement and close reading around informational text themes.
Close Reading of Content Comics
One of the ways I help students practice scrutinizing nonfiction is through the use of informational comics. The Science Comics and History Comics series, published by Macmillan Publishers, use a combination of text and images to talk about content area connections. Critics of the use of multimedia methods in the classroom may notice that some graphic novels have fewer words than many prose works.
However, these images have their own possibilities for meaning-and I’ve been helping my students analyze words based on their practice with images. When exploring images, students typically utilize a range of elements, including the placement of characters, the depiction of gestures and facial expressions, and the presence or absence of a clear background.
Paying close attention to the composition of a multimodal page can also focus attention on the decisions that authors make in their prose work. For example, in a lesson structure using science comics, I show a two-page spread on the screen as an opening to the class (hint for teaching visual text: showing a copy is very useful). I can then ask students open-ended questions about what they notice, what words stand out to them, and how the images relate to/add to the content. This is an exercise that builds discussion around the text, but it also involves specific images and elements of the page, as well as the words.
My students have the opportunity to enjoy and appreciate what comics have to offer, which is a link between literacy and additional reading and work.
Combining Charts, Graphs and Characters
In a recent reflection on this class, some of my students did a semester summary on TikTok. One of them said, “This was Dr. D’s class. Of course he drew every character in every book we read.” The worlds of nonfiction and fiction are not so divided that creative and narrative elements never appear in informational texts. In fact, informational comics often combine characterization and research. While drawing and art aren’t always comfortable ways for my students to approach their analysis, I modeled multiple ways of interacting with content.
After we practiced some graphic organizers for the reading material (and we did read a lot in class, even if the reading centered only around excerpts), my students had the option of approaching the themes of inquiry with image-based responses from the slides, as well as their own illustrations to respond to the findings.
From my research work in the arts, I have noticed that an idea or aspect of what I am analyzing sometimes comes into sharper focus when I step back creatively. Experience is complex, and so is research; as I teach students how to process and organize information, I realize that it is an invisible process. Index cards and slides are a physical way to think about findings, and responding to those findings in an artistic way can make the process memorable and engaging.
Of course, I also have students who prefer to just write, and that’s fine. At the same time, I welcome and applaud multimodal ways of approaching ideas.
Conceptualizing Nonfiction Ideas as Comics
Finally, I use comics not only as reading material, but as a mentor text for creating fiction and nonfiction. This could be a multimodal cultural memoir, which is the approach I used in class when I began studying world literature. It might also be a visual summary of a query-based text recreated into comic book form. In order to accomplish this, students must do the following.
1. read an informational text carefully enough to memorize its content.
2. process the information to the extent that they can recite, adapt and translate it into another form.
3. participate in the planning and creation process in order to present the content in words and images.
4. you will need to refine and revise the content in order to ensure that it is clear.
In comics, engagement with a range of ideas usually leads to a script, which then leads to a planned breakdown of the page. The art is then created through additions and substitutions by the artist. Following this comics-based approach to text creation, where students re-read for natural purposes during the creative process, means that exploratory activities can engage more with the written word and representational thinking as students decide which images they will use and how they will design and arrange them. It’s a complex process.
In addition to these ideas, I love using infographics as a reading and writing practice, and I love merging images with graphic organizers. As literacy educators, we have the opportunity to connect with all of the communication tools at our disposal, which allows our work to reflect how ideas are shared in the times in which we live. There is so much to explore as we help students hone their literacy skills.