Content Objectives: The Power of a Narrative
When I read or hear aloud the stories of others, I usually cannot help but transport myself into the role of the storyteller. Even if their narrative is completely different from my life experience, I feel compelled to try to look at the world from someone else’s perspective. I think that many of us find ourselves trying on the lives of others while keeping parts of our personal lens still on and focused on what happens next to someone else. I suppose this isn’t authentically taking on someone else’s perspective, but I think it is within our nature to look at someone else’s journey like this because it how we relate to each other. I would like my students to immerse themselves in the stories of others as they explore telling their own stories and understand how the arts, both written and visual, enable people to reach each other. As they are reading, I want my students to consider what it feels like to be the person whose story they get to be woven into for a few short pages. My hope is that my students do not just see characters, but begin to see and understand the humans before them, and ultimately that is what humanizes all of us.
This unit intertwines reading portions of Thi Bui’s Illustrated Memoir The Best We Could Do with writing and art-making exercises that guide students to tell the stories of their own journeys through spoken word and visual art. Similar to Bui and her family, my students have moved away from the roots of the places and people they knew as home and journeyed to this country on wings that were in some cases on their maiden voyage and perhaps not quite ready to fly. Although this story begins in Vietnam, a country where only a few of my students are from, the thread I anticipate my students weaving for themselves as we read is that they can see parts of their personal stories in the story of the Bui family despite differences in geography and time. Like their stories, this is one of roots and wings.
As my students are reading they will identify two literary devices: the voice or perspective the author uses to tell the story and setting, with a focus on the past, present, and future tense verbs. Additionally, while reading, students will be guided through four writing and art-making exercises to help connect the text they are reading with events in their own lives. Each exercise will correspond to a different moment in the story that students can clearly relate to their own experiences: the family’s decision to leave Vietnam, the rough journey on the boat, and life in the United States. Following reading portions of the graphic novel students will complete a final writing and art-making exercise as they envision their future. Students will then edit their texts while applying their growing knowledge of past tense verbs and use of pronouns. Next students will select three passages to record onto a sound chip that they will imbed into a wire and fabric mobile. Each student’s mobile will have three balancing components, representing three time periods in their life through their spoken words and images that came from their sketchbook work.
Graphic Novels
Graphic novels have the power to reach a diverse audience, and for my adolescent English Leaners they often provide access to texts that are out of reach while deepening my students’ understanding of language. With complex plots and powerful juxtapositions of text and images I have come to rely on graphic novels to help me teach students who are at multiple reading levels at the same time. As a visual arts teacher I closely identify with the way both Bui tells her family’s story through strong images. Bui’s illustrations are full of delicate black pen lines and brushstrokes that allow for variations in value with hints of watercolor washes that blend text and image seamlessly.
Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics, discusses using words and images interchangeably when we were children and acquiring and mastering language, and he claims that it really didn’t matter if at the time you used words or images or even a combination to communicate with others.6 For my students, who are developing their use of the English language, using words and images interchangeably not only often helps them get their point across to others, but it is also how they make meaning of what they are learning. Bui unites text and image to tell her story, varying the relationship between text and image throughout her book. Sometimes images are as McCloud describes, “word specific” when a picture doesn’t bring anything significant to the reader’s comprehension of the text. Often my students rely heavily on what McCloud calls “picture specific” combinations to communicate when words add only a little background to the storytelling, a strategy that Bui employs through her narrative. McCloud also identifies what he calls “duo-specific” illustrations, in which words and text take a parallel approach to delivering a message.7
It is in her duo-specific illustrations where Bui’s work takes on more complex messaging. Through these frames her storytelling becomes more layered, not just by a balance of text and image, but in the way text is broken down and communicated. Bui utilizes a basic comic anatomy, with captions, speech bubbles or word balloons. Captions, where words appear in a box isolated from the rest of the panel, allow for narration and sometimes for clarification of characters’ thoughts where a word balloon or speech bubble gives each character’s voice an opportunity to be heard. This simple structure allows readers to absorb a great deal of information about each story as they read and one that I plan to break down for my students as we are reading aloud and in small groups by assigning different students to take on different portions of the text. For example, one student could assume the voice of the narrator as they read the captions, which are often incased in rectangles. Other students could take on the words of different characters that are clearly marked by text balloons that point to the person who is speaking. By dissecting this comic structure, there is an opportunity for our class read aloud activities to have a more engaging performance quality. Reading aloud for English Learners affords students time to not only practice pronunciation and fluency, it also invites them to listen to English being spoken by others and reflect upon what they are hearing.
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