Graphic Narratives as Teaching Tools

Unit Overview/ Introduction

What once were seen as funny or heroic comics targeted towards children and the male teen, the illustrated story has evolved into graphic narratives that push the boundaries of genre, sequential storytelling, and art. Graphic narratives, or novels, (GN) today have few trending features aside from them being stories told with images. Some GN have no words, some are scary, some chronicle the history of war, some take multiple readings to figure out what’s happened. What they do have in common is that they rely on pictures to tell most, if not all, of the story and therefore actively engage readers more because processing images is something our brains do really well.

Elementary school was a long time ago for many of us, so it may be hard to remember this, but let’s see how we do: imagine sitting on the rug and the teacher is reading to the class. The excitement and sadness and joy and silliness are all conveyed in the read aloud. As soon as the page is done, with eyebrows raised, the teacher turns the book around to show the pages. What are you dying to see? What are you willing to get on your knees to make out? What will you complain about not being able to get a good view of?

As we get older, our books have less and less pictures in them. In fact, if you were in middle school and your book had pictures in it, someone might say you were reading a baby book. The irony is that humans love images- at all ages! Images create excitement in a way mere words do not. Images, like math, are also a universal language- ask anyone who has bought an item from that popular yellow and blue Swedish store. So why are all the pictures gone from our books by 5th grade?

Reading: With and Without Pictures

On the timeline of learning to read, pictures are often far left because before we ever get a handle on any letter sounds, we are shown images to tell a story. Some picture books take the sequential story approach and kids are allowed to say “and then” on each page as they read. Adult ears hear this and are amazed at the storytelling prowess of toddlers! As the timeline continues, pictures are used to help beginning readers determine the events of the story by hinting at what the words might say with visual clues: “The cat sat on the mat” is paired with a cat… sitting on a mat. From there, the timeline splits a bit and some programs teach word families or use patterned/ predictive texts, while others prescribe using whole language to get kids to stop relying on pictures to figure out what the words say. The Science of Reading, whose mission it is to bring research based instructional practices that really and truly work into the mainstream pedagogy, teaches a course on how to get kids reading without pictures or picture clues. Why? Because kids can’t read and reading is fundamental.

Unlike processing visual stimuli and developing language, the brain is not wired for reading. Reading is a set of very specific skills scaffolded on top of each other taking many years to master. Connections in the brain have to be made in order to read. And those connections do not all form in the same ways in all brains. Some people really struggle to learn to read. Some people have disabilities that make reading so difficult that without intervention, it can be impossible. Some people want to read and can read, but their attention span stops them in their tracks.

The brain, as stated, is hardwired for processing visual input.¹ Some scientists theorize that it goes back to our early homo sapiens days when being on the lookout for food or danger was imperative to survival. The human eye can notice movement at less than 10 ms.² We see 10 million colors.³ People can recognize an image in 53 ms.⁴ Now as long as we don’t compare ourselves to eagles or dragonflies, who can differentiate a flicker from a constant 200 times better than we can⁵, we are doing pretty good in the seeing visual stimuli area. What’s more is that our brains actually help our eyes by seeing things that aren’t even there by completing an image or scene with what is missing, think: seeing into a yard when walking past a fence. Furthermore when it comes to processing images versus reading, we are a wee bit faster, thus another point in favor of graphic heavy reading material.

No wonder then that the popularity of manga, the Japanese long comic form, is growing and projected to continue growing by 18.7% in the US marketplace.⁶ This makes it a billion dollar industry. While digital reading growth far outpaces print reading, retailers and schools account for a major portion⁷ of getting manga into kids’ hands. And the demand will not stop any time soon.

Some believe that manga is a very different style of comic than American audiences are used to. McCloud states that, “The Japanese offer a vision of comics very different from our own.”⁸ But what makes manga different, isn’t that it’s from a foreign culture, but that it tells the story in a different way.

…narrative manga as a storytelling medium that depicts a story unfolding over multiple panels, generally without external narrative text and relying on transdiegetic content instead. What I mean by transdiegetic content is visual representations of phenomena that are themselves nonvisual— the most common being sound, usually represented by the aforementioned speech balloon.… Transdiegetic (“crossing the story world”) content depicts intradiegetic elements like sound and movement but does so in extradiegetic form, such as through speech balloons and motion lines. These devices represent sound and movement perceptible to story characters but do so in ways that are perceptible only to the reader…⁹

Additionally, award winning gaming journalist Gita Jackson explains that although manga has been around for centuries in Japan stemming from multiple influences (Table 1), in the USA “The mainstreaming has happened slowly but surely, but I think especially within the black community and the hip hop community” because it appeals to young people who “don't want to hear that the good guys are good and the bad guys are bad. They want to hear that it's kind of hard to be an adult, but that everyone has to deal with these difficult emotions. That kind of heightened reality, just in general appeals to young people.”¹⁰

Table 1: Manga Becomes a Thing Timeline

adapted from Exner’s BRIEF CHRONOLOGY in Comics and the Origins of Manga: A Revisionist History¹¹

Since manga is mostly images and sound, no or little narration, the transition to anime was flawless. In a sense manga is the script + storyboard and anime is the animation of that. Still, the popularity of anime and manga has opened up the world of graphic novels to many young readers and in a time where almost all media consumed has a visual component, the time has come to embrace picture books across all reading levels, grades, and ages!

All of this is to say that the idea that reading images to tell a story may not be something we should leave behind as quickly as we do, culturally speaking. Especially for struggling readers, readers whose first language is not that of the text, or readers with disabilities, reading images via the GN may be a wonderful foot in the door for both learning the skill of reading and coming to love it. That is not to say that graphic novels are necessarily easy or easier than prose novels as Rodríguez-Astacio and Low explain, “comics are complex multimodal texts in their own right. Within its gaps, the medium affords readers opportunities to dwell in liminal spaces, to interpret deep issues and themes, and to coauthor meaning about what it is to be(long) in an ever-transitioning world.”¹² It is to say that students can process the images they see to tell a story regardless if they can read the text and for some students that is the difference between being a part of the discussion and not, being engaged in the story or putting their head down, and feeling like they understand and feeling left out. Graphic novels can help students understand very complex ideas and concepts in a way that is more appealing than the standard textbook or novel.¹³ In this curriculum unit, teachers and students can use the graphic novel YNI Meta of Manga DIY to create supplemental GN to books they are reading or completely original works, both of which will help engage and connect students to text by visiting these Slides:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vShbAvRaOjVRUY6OIud9pUizo-HxHeyM4m-l82isxT1N3REyx3lqs_pViFg5YXBG0hQ46_D1lqfuN40/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=60000

I have been an urban educator for over 20 years. Kids in the city face numerous challenges outside of the classroom, from hunger to violence to poverty to lack of mental health services, and when they step into a school, it behooves educators to use all the tools in their arsenal to help those students achieve their fullest potential. Might it be that graphic narratives could aid in that goal? Could it be that GN is the logical next step in our curriculum development? For students that don’t struggle, can’t GN stimulating the visual cortex as well as the temporal-occipital cortex while reading be a bonus?