The fall quarter at University of Cincinnati’s Center for Access and Transition was well underway last year when, as part of my training as a new Writing Center tutor, I walked into Susan Bernstein’s introductory composition class. I’d been told to observe how tutors and instructors alike worked with these developmental writers. Susan greeted me and then handed me a copy of a clever political statement in comic form, a simply rendered comic of an apple and an orange struggling for power.

“Emily’s final project,” she grinned. “Isn’t it awesome?” I was caught off guard. I didn’t know how to read it. Should I comment on the artwork, the content, or the student’s innovation? Up until then I had watched instructors and tutors strive to elicit more conventional genres of writing. Based on my background teaching ESL students in Switzerland and my own experiences as a product of US higher educational systems, I was nonplussed. Could this work be considered acceptable for a developmental writing class? Apparently so— Susan seemed delighted. She must have seen my double take, because she handed me, by way of explanation, a copy of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis 1: The Story of a Childhood, a graphic novel about growing up in Iran in the midst of the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War.

Emily’s paper, Susan explained, was a revision of one she had written earlier in the quarter. “For that assignment, I asked students to divide their essay into three parts: find an example of figurative language from Frederick Douglass’ Narrative; analyze the effectiveness of this example; examine whether or not the example remains effective for 21 st century readers. I encouraged them to relate effective language to the changing political and social contexts of 19 th and 20 th century readers.”

“In addition, students could add a creative writing project for extra credit points that would count toward class participation and sustained effort and practice in the writing process. The creative writing aspect of the assignment invited students to reframe the topic of their essay in a non-expository, imaginative genre, such as poetry or comics.”

At first Emily decided against creating a comic, Susan continued. However, Emily revised this essay for her portfolio in late November, in the aftermath of the 2004 presidential elections. Emily, like many of her classmates, had voted for the first time in that election. As Ohio residents, these students were particularly aware of the importance of their votes in a swing state. In order to better visualize how to frame her revision, Emily decided to draw a comic to express her ideas. This comic became “Apples and Oranges.”

Mary Deming of Georgia State University suggests in “ Reading and Writing: Making the Connection for Basic Writers”, “Both reading and writing have a place in the basic writing classroom for one process informs and complements the other.” Reading graphic novels in a basic writing course adds an additional complementary process. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then literacy is people “getting the picture.”

Developing writers, regardless of their exposure to academic English, often “get the picture.” They just haven’t had the practice of putting the picture into words –either on the paper or in a classroom discussion. Students are battling a system designed around a single literacy. Yet proficiency in one language supports proficiency in a second language (Krashen). As students move among multiple literacies, they learn the ways in which they are already literate, creating metacognitive awareness and motivating learning. Understanding the interrelationship among literacies is crucial at the developmental level as students gain experience with the expectations of academic cultures.

Working together as tutor (Terry) and teacher (Susan) in the winter and spring quarters, we discovered that we both had backgrounds in Fine Arts that allowed us to approach graphic novels from different perspectives. I was drawn to the aesthetics of the graphics on my first reading of Persepolis 1, reading the words as part of the whole picture. I had to train myself to go beyond the words on the page. Susan’s training in critical theory allowed her to see the multiple literacies implied in the text. However she found that she needed to slow down at times to absorb the impact of the story. Our different ways of reading ultimately helped us to understand the learning differences that our students experienced.

As we recount this experience now, world events—none more powerful than Hurricane Katrina or the memory of September 11, 2001—remind us again of both the power of images and our need to expect the unexpected. We educators can use both the word and the world to our advantage in stimulating discussion and facilitating opportunities for engaging students’ multiple literacies. Graphic novels in combination with other literary texts are one way to sustain dialogue and to create learning opportunities.

The links below in the works cited and works consulted sections lead to some great graphic novel source sites. With that in mind, we would like to end with a list of our reasons for continuing to teach graphic novels—and hope to have more stories to tell as the days go on

Graphic novels:

• Deal with the difficult events/themes common to academic environments.
  • They facilitate the introduction of abstract topics (power struggle, political change). These abstract topics help to maximize ‘intellectual time’ in the basic writing classroom.
  • They illustrate how narrative can be built and how characters can be presented.
    
• More readily prompt discussions.
  • Critical thinking takes place in the classroom and on paper.
  • Students are not reliant on one interpretation of the story— they can read images and/or text.
  • Discussions can engage potentially more students.
    • There is more sense of the class group as a community because no one is at a disadvantage in the process –some have ‘read’ the pictures, some the text.
• Help teach students to, in Freire’s words, ‘read’ the world, and reading allows students to verbalize their ideas.
  
• Lastly, graphic novels can be used as a writing tool in prewriting.
  • Students can use the comic book/storyboard approach themselves.
    • They’ll know that no one can possibly describe everything. They have to (and can) leave some interpretation to the audience

Discussion Questions:

• What choices do you make when you choose a text for a basic writing course? Why and how do you choose a particular text? What texts have worked particularly well?
• Have you used graphic novels before? If so, how have your students and colleagues responded? If not, what questions and concerns do you have?
• Have you used a combination of written and visual texts? What have your experiences been? What have been the impacts?
• What multiple literacies have you noticed among your students? How do such multiple literacies facilitate their growth as college writers?

Resources

 Teaching Basic Writing