Are you looking for a way to motivate reluctant readers, engage urban youth, develop the comprehension skills of second-language learners, or teach visual literacy to elementary level students? Have you considered comics? That's right, comics! More and more teachers are finding that once-maligned comics, and their big brothers graphic novels, can be effective tools for teaching a multitude of literacy skills to students with a variety of learning needs.
According to Stephen Cary, a second language learner specialist and author of Going Graphic: Comics at Work in the Multilingual Classroom, "Comics provide authentic language learning opportunities for all students….The dramatically reduced text of many comics make them manageable and language profitable for even beginning level readers."
Comics, Cary notes, with their emphasis on engaging content and an expanded use of visual material, are an especially effective medium in the context of brain-based teaching, which emphasizes hands-on, manipulative-based activities. "The brain has little time for nonsense. It's a meaning-maker, constantly searching for patterns, connecting bits of new information to old, fashioning wholes from parts and parts from wholes. It's also shamelessly self-centered. The brain makes sense of the world in terms of personal learner needs. Relevant curriculum attracts and engages it….For a number of reasons -- the humor, heroes, movement, pop culture themes, real-world language, novelty, and perhaps, above all, artwork -- comics consistently engage students."
When teachers use comics, Cary says, students attend to the activities and learning accelerates.
Clearly, comics are an effective tool for engaging students. Having gotten their attention, however, what do you do with it? What can students possibly learn from comics? A lot, according to Read Write Think, a partnership among the International Reading Association (IRA), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and the MarcoPolo Education Foundation, which offers 18 lessons that use comics to teach such skills and concepts as narrative structure, genre, popular culture, homophones, characterization, even math and poetry, to students in kindergarten through high school.
The New York City Comic Book Museum offers a complete English curriculum built around comics. Created by Dan Tandarich, a 5th grade teacher in Brooklyn, New York, "C.O.M.I.C.S. Challenging Objective Minds: An Instructional Comicbook Series" focuses on using comics to teach reading and writing to students in grades 5-10.
Additional lessons, on sequencing, storytelling, cultural comparison, cartooning, poetry, literature, and writing can be found at the National Association of Comics Art.
http://www.education-world.com/a_curr/profdev/profdev105.shtml
Het bovenstaande is slechts een deel van het complete artikel, dat ook nog uitgebreid ingaat op de educatieve voordelen van de 'graphic novel'. Geschreven door Linda Starr voor Education World.
