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Comics in the Classroom: Why Comics?
August 04, 2014 by Michelle Manno
Throughout the month of August, Teach.com and Reading With Pictures  are
bringing you
Comics in the Classroom, a blog series about using comics in education, including why
graphic novels are complex texts as defined by the Common Core Standards, how to use
graphic texts to teach in the content areas, how and where to find the best graphic texts, and
more. We hope you’ll join us and bring the power of comics to your classroom!
The following guest post is written by Tracy Edmunds, M.A., Curriculum Manger at Reading With
Pictures
“It always strikes me as supremely odd that high culture venerates the written word on the one hand, and the
fine visual arts on the other. Yet somehow putting the two together is dismissed as juvenilia. Why is that?
Why can’t these forms of art go together like music and dance?” — Jonathan Hennessey, Author of The
U.S. Constitution: A Graphic Adaptation and The Gettysburg Address: A Graphic Adaptation
When I was in school, kids would slip comics inside their textbooks to read on the side. Comics were
considered recreational reading at best, but usually adults saw them as mind-numbing tripe. You
certainly would never have seen one used in instruction. Times have changed, and as comics and
graphic novels become more accepted as a legitimate form of art and literature, they are making
their way into classrooms. Many parents and teachers, however, still remember the stigma that
comics had when they were young and are asking, "Why should kids read comics?"
Emerging research shows that comics and graphic novels are motivating, support struggling
readers, enrich the skills of accomplished readers and are highly effective at teaching sometimes
dull or dry material in subject areas such as science and social studies.
Josh Elder, founder and president of Reading With Pictures, sums up the strengths of comics as
educational tools with his “Three E’s of Comics.”
Engagement: Comics impart meaning through the reader’s active engagement with written
language and juxtaposed sequential images. Readers must actively make meaning from the
interplay of text and images, as well as by filling in the gaps between panels.
Efficiency: The comic format conveys large amounts of information in a short time. This is
especially effective for teaching content in the subject areas (math, science, social studies, etc.).
Effectiveness: Processing text and images together leads to better recall and transfer of
learning. Neurological experiments have shown that we process text and images in different
areas of the brain: known as the Dual-Coding Theory of Cognition. These experiments also
indicate that pairing an image with text leads to increased memory retention for both. With
comics, students not only learn the material faster, they learn it better.
Emergent, Beginning and Struggling Readers
Young children are just beginning to learn that concrete objects can be represented in different
ways. For example, a dog is a furry animal that wags its tail and barks. It can be represented by a
photograph of a dog, a stylized or "cartoon" illustration of a dog, or letters forming the word "dog."
Most children begin to make this transition from concrete to abstract through picture books, with a
single illustration on each page. Sequential art (wordless comics) can take learning to the next level,
asking kids to follow a sequence of illustrations that form a story.
Books like Owly  , by Andy Runton, provide an opportunity
for young children to look at the pictures in order and
follow the story. They love to verbalize the story, which
reinforces the concept that ink on a page can be translated
into ideas and words. In addition, the characters
communicate using symbols, providing another
opportunity for children to make the connection between
abstract images and language.
Before children are ready to read text, sequential art can give them practice in making meaning
from material printed on a page, tracking left to right and top to bottom, interpreting symbols, and
following the sequence of events in a story. Sequential art provides plenty of opportunity for
connecting a story to children's own experiences, predicting what will happen, inferring what
happens between panels and summarizing, just as you would do with a text story. The advantage of
sequential art is that children don't need to be able to decode text to learn and practice
comprehension skills.
Once a child begins to decode text, the comic format enables them to read much more complex
stories than is possible with traditional text and illustration.
Imagine what this page from Spiralbound  , by Aaron Renier, would look like as text:
It would take many pages of text to convey all the information in the last panel alone! With comics
and graphic novels, beginning readers can enjoy more emotion, action and detail than in a typical
"See Jane Run" story. When kids read enjoyable, complex and compelling stories, they are motivated
to read more, so graphic novels can be great steppingstones to longer text works. This is also an
advantage when encouraging struggling or reluctant readers or English learners. They can enjoy
great stories and practice high-level reading comprehension skills, even at a lower text reading
level.
But perhaps the most important reason that kids should read comics and graphic novels is
because they want to. Many young readers, when confronted with solid pages of text, become
intimidated and overwhelmed and just give up. Give the same reluctant reader a literary graphic
novel like Bone  by Jeff Smith or a historical work like Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales  and they
dive in eagerly, devouring every page. With many struggling readers, motivation is the key, and
comics are motivating.
Accomplished Readers
Because graphic novels require readers to actively decode and comprehend both text and images
and the interplay between them, students must use higher-level thinking skills such as inference
and synthesis. The narrative structures that authors can create using both text and image are often
different from and sometimes more complex than text alone, and while reading graphic texts,
students must analyze and synthesize structures both within a page and often as a pattern
throughout the book. The graphic medium also provides for novel uses of metaphor, symbolism,
puns, irony and point of view.
Take for example this page from Shannon and Dean Hale's Rapunzel’s Revenge  . The creators
have used a unique parallel visual structure, in combination with differing color palettes, to show
the main character’s memories and relate the past to the present.
In this single panel from The Secret Science Alliance and the Copycat Crook  , Eleanor Davis
challenges the reader to keep up with the characters as they try to figure out the timing of their
next move. Neither of these complicated narrative structures would be possible with text alone.
Graphic texts are complex, effective teaching tools because they require readers not only to
passively receive information, but to interact with both text and images to construct meaning, and
that is the key to the magic. Words and pictures work together!
Click here  to download a summary of studies supporting the use of comics in education from
Reading With Pictures.
Join the conversation! How have you used comics and/or graphic novels in your classroom?
Follow us on Tumblr  and Twitter  and share your story with the hashtag #teachcomics.
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