Graphic Novels Column: Medium Matters: Comics in the Classroom~ Notes from the Field

Liza Halley is the Library Teacher at Plympton Elementary School in Waltham, MA

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In this article I want to start off discussing some language I use when talking about the medium of comics. People often ask me: What’s the difference between a graphic novel and a comic? What do you mean by comics in the classroom? What classroom are you talking about? Which teachers are you referring to? Here’s a simple boilerplate to explain:

Now I want to draw your attention to two book resources for teachers who want to teach with comics. The first, With Great Power Comes Great Pedagogy edited by Susan E. Kirtley, Antero Garcia, and Peter E. Carlson. (2020) asks readers to take a deeply theoretical look at how comics have been taught and how they could be used in classrooms. Broken into three parts— Foundations of Comics Pedagogy, Comics Pedagogy in Practice, and Future Directions in Comics Pedagogy— this book offers essays, comics, and interviews. If you haven’t been immersed in academic rhetoric for a long time, some of the chapters in the book might feel inaccessible, but I encourage teachers who do want to use comics in the classroom to dive into the parts of the book that resonate. I particularly love the interviews with comic book greats like Brian Michael Bendis, David Walker, and Lynda Barry. Ebony Flowers Kahir created a comic on how she teaches drawing and the uses of copying in developing as an artist. For those who are interested in using comics as a tool to teach science, I highly recommend James Kelley’s chapter “The Uncanny Power of Comic Books: Achieving Interdisciplinary Learning through Superhero Comic Books”. The book touches on the status of women in the comic creator world as well as accessibility for marginalized identities, and how these issues and activists affect how we read and teach comics.

The second book, Tim Smyth’s Teaching with Comics and Graphic Novels: Fun and Engaging Strategies to Improve Close Reading and Critical Thinking in Every Classroom is a much more down-to-earth, how-to guide to using comics in the classroom. I devoured this book! Tim Smyth has a long and impressive CV: he teaches 10th and 11th grade United States and modern History Wissahickon High School in Ambler, Pennsylvania, and he has been part of a global Comics in Education program developed online through the US State Department. He shares his many resources on his website TeachingWithComics.com. The chapters move from “How to Teach Comics,” to “Some Quick and Easy Lessons for Any Classroom” to “Tough Topics,” “Civil Rights,” “Refugees and Immigration” to “Social Emotional Learning and Graphic Memoirs.” Smyth offers a wide range of concrete lessons you can use to incorporate comics in your library classroom or that you can encourage the teachers in your school to use in their classrooms. A few examples include:

• Sequencing and Personal Interpretation. The idea behind this lesson is that there isn’t always one way to interpret a story, but we have to use evidence to support why we think one way or another about a story (and by extension a work or art, music, image, etc.) Smyth uses a wordless one-page comic that depicts a boy frolicking in leaves that he has been raking for this lesson. Smyth laminates the comic, cuts up each panel, and applies velcro to the back. He asks students to analyze the images and place them in the order they think best tells the story. From there, students compare their versions to the original. Extensions to this lesson include writing dialogue, writing out the story, reordering the images to tell a different story. (Ch. 7, pg 43-46).
• Fairy Tales in Comics. The steps to this lesson are as follows: Read Different Versions of Fairy Tales including comic versions. Ask questions about the similarities and differences. Create your own version of a fairy tale in comic form, and you can require that it must be a moral tale, or have a minimum number of panels, or include fantastical elements (Ch. 14, pg 95-99).
• Social Emotional Learning. Smyth writes, “Sometimes having a diverse collection of books in the classroom and the library can be enough to literally save children’s lives as they feel seen and accepted… There are many titles that can open up vital conversation in ways that might not otherwise be possible”(140). He offers many suggestions both in his book and on his website regarding books that can be used to discuss social and emotional topics (Ch. 18, pg 140-148).

​I could go on and on about this book. It’s a wonderful handbook for any librarian who wants to create library lessons with their students but is hesitant to do so or wants more ideas. One of my biggest takeaways was the importance of asking questions; with each of Smyth’s sample lessons, he poses a slew of questions to his students. In the back of the book he lists the questions out for teachers. It made me realize that one of the most important ways we can use comics in our classrooms is as a medium for asking questions, for getting curious and for allowing students to wonder and explore in ways that much of the structured lessons offered to them stifle. It empowers students to make their own meaning.

Have you been teaching with comics this Fall? What lessons have worked really well for you? One new thing I incorporated into my Owly lesson is to print out one of Andy Runton’s one-page comics about Owly and Friends. I have my younger students share a laminated page of the comic and work together to tell the story. Then we talk as a larger group about what’s happening in the comic. I have students use markers to circle their favorite parts and talk to each other about why they chose that particular panel. And finally, I have students write their own story about the Owly and friends.

​Please share your own lessons that are successful with me. I’d love to gather a list for other teachers. I am also interested in what more you want to learn about teaching with comics. In the next issue of the forum I plan to talk about choosing graphic biographies. Let me know if you have other topics you’d like me to cover.