Multiliteracies in ELA Classrooms

Catherine Howes – Blog Entry #1

I think Graphic novels are highly under utilized in our classrooms at this time. I find they are a great way to get our students to enhance their critical thinking skills in a different way. Unlike novels, which often give descriptions of the settings, characters and their actions, graphic novels give you a version of the setting and encourage readers to decipher meaning from the artwork. Instead of listening to adverbs to describe how a character is doing something, you have to look at the picture to get that cue. It requires visual literacy to be able to pick up hints and understanding by looking at certain characters and how they are portrayed in a frame. It leads to questions such as:

1)   Does the character’s actions/posture/place in the panel contradict the meaning of what he or she is saying?
2)   How can you tell and what kinds of clues lead you to this analysis?

This becomes interesting when you get a classroom of students with different cultural backgrounds. Depending on where the novel is produced shares a large part of the cultural history of the writer, the time and place he or she is writing in and how you might perceive it. We interpret body language differently from country to country. While one student might interpret a character as being sincere because of their body language, another student may perceive it as a clear sign of deception based on his or her own cultural upbringing. This can foster discussions on whether or not there are certain types of body language that are cross-cultural. Through getting our students to look at the same panels, we allow them to show their critical thinking skills as well as allowing us to get a deeper insight into how they see the world.

By incorporating this type of text in our classroom we also help our ELL learners. Text on a page requires knowledge of a particular language; it requires a strong vocabulary and understanding of grammar. Pictures, however, give students the ability to gain understanding from pictures and then relate that to the words to infer meaning. By giving them a visual literacy to work with, we can help them make the connections between words and their meaning.