Using Comics in the classroom

Well, this is a very appropriate topic for me right now. I have several students in my classes who cannot pry themselves away from their manga books long enough to pay attention in class. On one hand, I'm very glad that they're reading; on the other hand, I wish that they were as interested in what we're reading in class as they are in their manga books. It's sort of driving me and my colleagues crazy.

Onto more productive thoughts. I have used comics before in my classroom. A couple years ago, I used excerpts from Art Spiegelman's Maus during a unit on the Holocaust. The kids responded pretty well, and the text offered some interesting ideas for discussion. Then, last year my accelerated 9th graders read Persepolis Part I as part of a unit titled "Seeing versus Being Seen," which included the novels A Beautiful Mind, The Bluest Eye, and Love Medicine, and focused thematically on issues of power, access, and voice. Persepolis in conjunction with the other novels, served as a fantastic jumping off point for some fairly in depth discussions. I also had the students create their own hand-written, hand-drawn comics about an issue in the lives of today's teenagers that revolved around the idea of voice and power. I don't think I explained it as clearly as I should have, because the results I got weren't exactly what I was hoping for, but it was the first time I'd tried it.

In the future, I like the idea of using comics as a way for kids to challenge texts by re-creating the stories and changing the things they had problems with. For example, a lot of the kids get a little frustrated with Romeo and Juliet and how impulsively they act, or how limited Juliet is in what she can do as a woman in the Renaissance. It would be really cool to discuss these things with kids and then allow them to re-write the story-challenging what they see as issues-using a comic book format. In addition to my students who are addicted to reading manga, I have a lot of artists who like to doodle and draw during class. This would be a great way to get them more engaged and allow them to share their talents with their classmates.

I think the real work on my part would be teaching them how the simple placement of characters and text can communicate something about the characters, their relationships with others, their relative status as compared to other characters, etc. That might take a little more preparation and modeling on my part, but it would definitely create a more thoughtful final product from the students.