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.

Christopher Knapp, Weblog Entry #1

While I had considered the use of graphic novels within my own English language arts classes, what stood out to me most is how effective the use of graphic novels and/or other forms of visual text could be to ESL learners within the classroom.

In my prior experience with graphic novels, and in courses focused specifically on graphic novels that I took part in during my undergraduate degree, it also seemed as if graphic novels and the ability to ‘properly’ read a graphic novel required a degree of knowledge and expertise that was more advanced that what your average reader might possess; however, in reading this article, it came to my realization that while the degree of textual literacy and its difficulty might change depending on the graphic novel, the visual literacy and the skills necessary to interpret the images are such that it can be approached by almost any reader at any level (with the exception of small children). In this sense, what the article did most for me was change my perception of how one might read a graphic novel, and that it is possible to simply ‘read’ the story by simply viewing the images alone.

In relation to this idea of reading a graphic novel visually, rather than textually, I also found the use of graphic novels as a scaffolding tool to launch the students into a visually driven project/storyboard to be quite interesting, as it allowed students to effectively tell a story (through a series of pictures), without having to fully rely upon a strong textual narrative. In this sense, even for native English-speaking students, this kind of project has students thinking “outside of the box” in terms of what they are used to a story being, and in turn has them considering how they might tell a story through a visual mosaic; in a way, this allows students to tell a story through their own ‘eyes’, rather than their words.

Though Frey and Fisher happened to use graphic novels as their form of visual literacy in which to engage the students with, I think that this article raises the idea that any form of visual literacy, not just graphic novels, can be used as a means to engage students with English language learning and to increase their abilities not only in their language development, but also the skills needed to create and produce effective and meaningful narratives. With this in mind, I was left with the curious notion of what other forms of visual literacy might be effectively used in the classroom. Considering the ever-advancing growth of the Internet and Internet culture in the past two decades, might Internet comics, memes, or other visual materials be a more effective tool in which to engage our students? Though I have no definitive answer to this question, it is certainly one that I will continue to pursue in my own teaching practice.

Jacqueline Simpson, Weblog Entry #1

In the reading from July fourth, Messaris (1998) implies that interpreting visual cues and how we make meaning from them is essential in order to critically examine the world around us and, more specifically, the types of images we are presented with by media and popular culture. The act of viewing is not passive, yet visual literacy necessitates an awareness of how, exactly, we interact with visual space. Where “explicit relational indicators” are not present, Messaris implies that students (or all viewers) will not be able to critically assess the images and their responses to them. Alternatively, Frey and Fisher (2004) posit that students are able to make meaning from images that they are presented with, often critically interpreting them without explicit awareness or specific prompts to lead their thinking in response to an image. Without the explicit relational indicators that Messaris has identified, Frey and Fisher observe that students are able to create their own meaning and—as shown by students’ responses to images as writing prompts—they were presenting a critical analysis informed almost entirely by their own experiences and the knowledge they were already bringing into the classroom. In this sense, images support text as much as text supports image.
The positive outcome that Frey and Fisher identified from their study is that popular media allowed students to find a way into classroom literacy by inspiring interest and sparking imagination. Aside from developing writing techniques (largely creative writing techniques—the article does not suggest how or if popular media such as graphic novels and the internet could foster the development of formal writing, although it does suggest that comic books such as an adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis can draw students into challenging works of literature), Frey and Fisher noted that students were also becoming “more knowledgeable consumers of ideas and information” (p. 24). By creating the links between words, image, and meaning for themselves, students were interacting with both text and image in a way that was “authentic,” as it brought their own ideas and experiences into examination through the construction of their narratives. While tradition forms of literacy were taught, they were not done so through remedial exercises. As a result, students were engaged in the writing process, and perhaps were more creative in their experimentations with both narrative and language.
The barriers identified by Frey and Fisher—that the content of graphic novels often barred them from the classroom, that there are issues of access—are likely familiar to anyone who has tried to bring forms of media that are not privileged forms or canonical (in the case of written text) into the classroom, and this problem would remain familiar despite research to suggest that students become more engaged when they are interacting with “real world” (rather than “school”) texts. The problem is as much administrative as it is logistical, although simple picture prompts could easily be brought into any classroom. A problem in accessing more texts or resources that engage multiple literacies is that findings such as “students were more engaged” are not quantitative, and traditional methods of teaching writing and reading prevail based on a notion that it produces the desired results (despite quantitative research to the contrary). I think that there is a shift towards recognizing the role visual literacy (as well as other forms of literacy) can play in a traditional classroom setting, and in most cases (by my observation) activities like the ones described in the article are used more frequently than remedial drilling of content. Still, the barriers remain.