Multiliteracies in ELA Classrooms

When I was on my practicum, I attended a pro-d day presentation on visual thinking strategies that showed me how effective still images can be in helping students learn what it means to provide an analysis. The presenter, a woman from an art gallery, showed us a very complicated and busy image. The room full of teachers were asked only three questions: “What’s going on in this picture?”, “What do you see that makes you say that?”, “What more can we find?”. After each comment, the presenter would repeat back comments neutrally while pointing to the area of the image being described, and linking the comment to other comments. I was skeptical at first, but in the end I was extremely surprised at how quickly everyone moved towards making analytical comments. Approaching the image with a sense of wonder ended up being a pretty unintimidating way to approach a text, and having the presenter, a knowledgeable art gallery employee, repeat back comments created a feeling of being understood and validated. I later tried this same strategy with my students and I found it to be equally as effective.

While I enjoyed the article by Frey and Fisher and while I was happy to see that they found success with using graphic novels with grade 9 students, I wondered if the students could have further benefitted from the visual thinking strategies I learned about. I love the use of creative projects in the classroom, but I think that using visual media lends itself well to helping students also build analytical skills and thus, academic writing and speaking skills. Then again, I also wonder if I am wrong and there’s plenty of analytical thinking happening that the article cannot sufficiently showcase because, oddly enough, there are no images in this article about graphic novels and anime.

My last thought when reading this article was about the quote “A barrier for school use [of graphic novels] is the predominance of violence and sexual images in many graphic novels” (20). What is it about imagery that makes it so much more unacceptable than sex described in a novel, or murders in a play? Many of Shakespeare’s plays have violence and sex, yet it is perfectly acceptable to read in school. Would a graphic novel of Hamlet be acceptable to read? If so, would it be because Shakespeare wrote it? If not, would it be because it’s worse to see the violence than to read it?