offers a rationale, based on the need for current students to learn multiple lit eracies, for the use of graphic novels in the high school English class. She highlights several titles, suggests possible classroom strategies, and discusses some of the obstacles teachers may face in adding graphic novels to their curriculum.Time has arrived to broaden the canons of traditional education and the curriculum. . . . Using critical pedagogy to integrate the new forms of visual and electronic "texts" repre sents a curriculum requiring new competencies and a new definition of what constitutes learning as well as how and when it takes place.
Media literacy education, social issues, and graphic novels all have a role to play in educating students for civic education. The graphic novel is especially useful for secondary students because many titles touch on important social-political issues. Moreover, this medium offers excellent opportunities for media literacy education, students learning to ask questions and evaluate information that is communicated through print, image, and technology. A rhetorical analysis, engaging media literacy skills, is offered along with other lesson ideas and suggested graphic novels titles.
Involving today's adolescent in the joys of reading is a challenge in a hyper-mediated, fast paced world of informa tion. Just getting a teen to stop racing from activity to activ ity for a few minutes of quiet reading can be difficult. Adolescents are constantly occupied by the mall, movies, jobs, and their cell phones. One genre that is gaining academic respectability can help engage adolescents in reading: the graphic novel. The graphic novel, basically a "comic" in short book length, appeals to diverse readers who have come to expect visuals in the texts they encounter in their world. Graphic novels can offer well written and exciting stories, unusual information and ideas, new points of view, and stimu Librarians/media specialists have been especially enthusi astic about graphic novels. See, for example, articles by Stephen Weiner (2002), Michael Lavin (1998), and Lora Bruggeman (1997) in various library journals, advising on the emergence of graphic novels for library collections. Other scholars explore graphic novels as artifacts of popular cul ture. Ultimately, both the written text and graphics of good graphic novels are worthy of reading and study, and students are drawn to them. The graphic novel is short, has interesting pictures (some in color and some not), usually offers dialogue and action with little narration or description, and comes in paperback lating art work.
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