Teaching Multimodal Literacy Through Reading and Writing Graphic Novels

Abstract

Scholarship suggests that writing teachers and instructors looking to integrate multimodal composition into their secondary or post-secondary classrooms should consider graphic novels as a mentor text for multimodal literacy. To help those pedagogues unfamiliar with graphic novels, we offer three titles-The Photographer, Operation Ajax, and Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow-students have responded positively to. Herein we offer a summary for each text, a discussion of their uses to teach multimodal literacy, a range of multimodal assignments to pair with each text, and a variety of assessment methods.

Exploring the Aesthetic Values and Components of Digital Graphic Novels: A Systematic Review

“…Most researchers agree on the importance of DGN in engaging kids in reading (Brenner, 2011;Kucirkova & Flewitt, 2020;Ortega, 2020;Cook & Kirchoff, 2017). The summarising text and images in DGN help children access complex stories.…”

Using social justice graphic novels in the ELL classroom

“…As students gravitated toward the new graphic novels for their own independent reading, teachers began using them in their mainstream ELA classes (Jaffe & Hurwich, 2018). There are now many reference materials for ELA educators interested in adopting graphic novels (Bakis, 2012; Cook & Kirchoff, 2017; Jaffe & Hurwich, 2018; Monnin, 2010). However, despite this recognition of the value of graphic novels for native English speakers in the ELA classroom, little has been written on the topic for educators of nonnative English speakers in the English language learner (ELL) classroom.…”

Teaching Jihad: Developing Religious Literacy through Graphic Novels

“…As multimodal texts, graphic novels are of high interest to students because they engage sensitive and difficult topics through visual art and the written word (Carano and Clabough 2016;Decker and Castro 2012). This dynamism captures reader attention and can engender an emotive response and critical thinking (Cook and Kirchoff 2017). Graphic novels are an excellent avenue to improve literacy, especially for struggling readers (Jobe and Dayton-Sakari 1999;Tomasevich 2013), and as a tool for teachers to reinforce students' prior knowledge and understanding of themselves in relations to religious Others (Liou and Cutler 2020).…”