Graphic Novel Lit Review

I read an article about a group of researchers who helped at risk high school students read and write graphic novels. The article: "Adolescents and 'Autobiographies': Reading and Writing Coming-of-Age Graphic Novels" by Hughes, King, Perkins, and Fuke. There was a lot I took away from it that may help me when I implement my afterschool program. Here are some cliff notes:

-The authors argue that kids are exposed to multimodal literacies everyday: "the dominant site of texts is now the screen, and that the screen is the site of the visual, such as the image". Graphic novels can simultaneously tap into, and help expand students' "multimodal literacy".

-Besides reading graphic novels, creating having students create their own graphic novels about integral moments in their lives was important because " 'When students are given opportunities to share their identity texts with peers, family, teachers, and the general public through media, they are likely to make gains in self-confidence, self-esteem, and a sense of community belonging through positive feedback.' (CUmmins, Brown, and Sayers, 2007)" My interpretation of this is that the process of writing graphic novels actually can reshape students' identities and self-images. What a novel idea!

-An interesting challenge with the reading of graphic novels is that since there's a lot of pictures to view and interpret, the pace of reading is quite varied, so stay away from read alouds. I think we should be ok with partner reading though.

-An interesting challenge with making graphic novels is that students often aren't confident or satisfied with their artistic abilities. This is why it'll be important to enlist some students with artistic skills and pair them up strategically with non-artistically gifted students. Also, you can teach students how to represent human characters abstractly or as animals/objects that are easier to draw. One girl did an awesome job with raindrops!

-Not surprisingly, the students were highly motivated to work on graphic novels because there was an element of playfulness. i hope for the same.

-One interesting nuance to how graphic novels develop students' ability to infer: "The nature of graphic novel format also forced students to make inferences across the gutters (i.e. the space between the panels) as they moved from one image to the next." Never considered this...