Multiliteracies in ELA Classrooms

Shannon Smart – Blog entry #1

In “Using Graphic Novels, Anime, and the Internet in an Urban High School” by Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher, the authors explore various ways in which these non-traditional media can be used to complement written texts and to encourage learning in a high school classroom. The authors posit that students – and particularly those that have struggled with reading and writing – are often bored by skill-building worksheets. North American schools, as well as schools elsewhere in the world, tend to privilege one style of teaching and one method of transmitting information high above others. Books, full mostly of small, typed words, are the medium of choice. Of course, reading doesn’t resonate with every person. Some learners, as Gardner (1983) has pointed out, are much more visual in the way they acquire knowledge. Others are tactile learners, while others, still, learn best when they hear new information. Many people, says Gardner, have “multiple intelligences.” With this in mind, Frey and Fisher’s suggestion that bringing graphic novels and the other aforementioned media into the classroom sounds like a darn good way of engaging students that are otherwise relatively disconnected.

My experience as a student teacher and a long time tutor supports Frey and Fisher’s hypothesis. I have seen that many students who struggle with reading and writing don’t simply need practice, but they need to try a different approach entirely. While it may sometimes be the case that an individual hasn’t mastered the skill yet and just needs a bit more time or assistance, I have found more often a struggling reader or writer needs to be provided with an alternate route to the destination. After all, learning to communicate, to tell stories, to empathize, and to think critically about texts (in the broadest sense possible: written or otherwise) aren’t skills you can just plug away at until you’ve got the rules memorized. They’re skills that take a great deal of time to master, and students with different learning styles will likely need different support as they develop them.

Not only does the use of graphic representation in school cater to students with different learning styles, but, as Frey and Fisher note, bringing graphica into the classroom capitalizes on many teens’ already-present interest in the genre. Additionally, bringing these “alternative” texts into the academic sphere legitimizes students’ personal interests. In my practicum, I used a graphic version of Romeo and Juliet as a supporting text (along with an audio recording by a group of actors in Stratford, Ontario, and two film versions of the play) while teaching Shakespeare’s early modern English text. A few times throughout the unit, I would give students a photocopied version of the same act from the graphic version after reading that act in Shakespeare’s original. I removed the text from the graphic novel’s speech bubbles and had the students try to fill in the gist of the characters’ conversations (in modern English) from memory before turning to Shakespeare’s words to find the right lines. The reactions from students were primarily ones of great relief. This was a grade 9 class, and many students had not seen Shakespeare before. Bringing the graphic version into the mix – I think – allowed them a familiar, safe medium to understand the play through. They had fun translating the lines into a more modern context to fit in the speech bubbles, too.

I should probably wrap this up. I suppose what I’d like to suggest, building off of Frey and Fisher’s work, is that in addition to using original graphic novels in the classroom, that all teachers – whether they enjoy reading graphic novels yourself or not – consider using graphic interpretations of canonical texts with their students. There are an ever-increasing number available. Frey and Fisher mentioned one that graphically represents some of Kafka’s short stories, but there are also versions of most of Shakespeare’s plays available as well as texts by Homer, Sappho, Milton, Melville, Dickens, Austen, Conrad, Woolf, Orwell…the list goes on and on.