I have been working so hard to fit in my internship, that I think I have forgotten there are options aside from the techniques that my mentor teacher uses. I was once again reminded of alternative teaching methods when I came across the article Transforming English with Graphic Novels: Moving toward Our "Optimus Prime"', by James Bucky Carter, while working on an assigment for an education class. This article backs up a theory my husband posited to me years ago-- that of using the graphic novel to get students interested in reading.
When he first suggested this idea, I feared that the graphic novel would be similar to the young adult fiction phenomena. When I was in high school, I fell in love with Christopher Pike books. I loved his storytelling and became absorbed by his characters, but the books were far below my reading level and I finished them in mere hours, so my literacy skills weren't challenged at all by this reading. In a similar way, many high school students today fall in love with the characters in Twilight and Harry Potter novels and read nothing but these stories. While reading something is better than reading nothing, when Lit Lab teachers allow students to read only what they like, which often happens to be books that do not challenge the student, it is difficult for the student to grow as a reader.
That said, I was surprised when I visited KIPP Delta a few weeks ago and saw students reading a graphic novel in a tenth grade English class, and I was even more surprised by the complexity of the material and the depth of the themes the students were studying. This concept was in the back of my mind when I began to work on an assignment summarizing an article about my discipline and I found Carter's article.
Not only does the article give examples of how Carter, an avid comic book fan for most of his life, used Captain America and Spiderman to help teach his students-- high school and students studying to be teachers-- to study complex themes, but he spells out several ways to use the graphic novel to teach complex books that students find less appealing. He even shows the reader how to teach difficult, controversial subjects to a younger group of students and explains how graphic novels can be used in this process.
Needless to say, I am looking at the process of teaching literature a little differently now. I ordered several graphic novels off of an internet bookstore and have begun looking for an appropriate graphic novel to contrast with "The Color Purple" in my thematic unit. I am again looking at more controversial, interesting topics to grab students' attention. Carter's article has helped me to remember why I wanted to teach in the first place. The field of literature is ever-changing, and as a teacher I need to respect that, and my curriculum needs to be ever-changing as well in order to impact students in a positive way and help them to feel as passionate as I do about what we are reading.
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