Falling in Love With Teaching Graphic Novels

Including why I was wrong for overlooking this powerful genre as an English teacher

One of the most important choices that many English teachers make each year is which books to center in their classroom for whole-class reading.

No, not all teachers have a say in this—and yes, there are quite a few controversies at the moment about which books teachers are allowed to teach and which ones are being wrenched from their shelves.

Still, while acknowledging myriad exceptions, teachers do often have some say in what books the entire classroom experiences. And over the last half-decade, I now look back and recognize that one of my biggest mistakes was overlooking the value that a graphic novel could bring into our classroom.

Especially in a classroom full of sophomores at vastly different skill levels as readers and writers, tackling a graphic novel whole-class this year was transformative—a word that I really don’t like to use because of its overuse but, in this case, feels, well, useful.

There are lots of great resources out there regarding strategies to bring graphic novels into the classroom, too, so I don’t plan on being exhaustive here. Rather, I want to point out three things I prioritized and why I believe they worked so well:

1. We were intentional about reading together as much as possible as a classroom community, allowing for more support as well as collaborative discussion

2. We emphasized structural technique analysis with models and guided practice, equipping students with different lenses to use for commentary

3. We shifted to a meaningful summative assessment by having students create their own graphic novel panels and analyze them (and the results, as I’ll showcase below, were simply mesmerizing.)

(Note: even if you stop right here without reading through our full processes and reasoning with graphic novels, I’d encourage you to consider this takeaway: if you are an educator who currently assumes that a graphic novel has little to offer within a classroom, I urge you to reconsider that mistaken assumption—as I have this year.)

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Priority 1: Moving Slowly and Collectively

Looking back, one of my errors last year with a choice-based approach for this graphic novel unit was how thin I found myself stretched trying to read and prepare to support for several graphic novels simultaneously—often resulting in me reaching a point where students were just embarking on their own. We would begin our independent reading and I would quite literally watch every student in the room moving at their own pace with their own books.

That’s fine! We all read differently—but there is something lost about the classroom learning experience when everyone is discussing a different text at a different pace. Further, graphic novels create the temptation to read far more quickly than one ought to. (I even found myself doing this last year when trying to stay simultaneously updated on the several choices students were offered!)

The result was that when we tried to come back together as a classroom community, students had a difficult time collaborating meaningfully given their vastly different reading experience—which meant missing out on the genuine, important learning that comes from engaging with different perspectives on a single text.

So how did we try and adjust for this during our experience this year with our graphic novel, They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, being read by everyone at once?

1. Modeling what close-reading of pages/panels can look like early and often collectively—noting not just the dialogue but also the imagery and structural choices available to observe and analyze (more on that in next section, too)

2. Pacing out the readings in short, structured chunks (usually 15-20 minutes of reading max before we came back together) with individual work to purposefully complete/share with small groups before…

3. Prioritizing whole-class debriefs in a way that brought the entire classroom community back together to discuss what they read. Often times this began with something as simple as them reflecting on what panel they found to be most meaningful and moving around the room to share this finding with peers—and then we’d launch from there in our classroom conversation.

(Here is how their spiral was often set-up for these type of sequences, too, if that is helpful to visualize!)

This all made a difference, especially compared to last year. There is something really powerful about moving through a book together as a class, and when books like graphic novels are automatically tossed into “personal-choice” units or even literature circles (small groups reading the same text), something is lost.

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Priority 2: Emphasis on Structural Analysis

Once we slowed the pace of reading down deliberately and set norms of how intentional and precise our analysis would be, the next shift was to bring in specific tools for students to use as lenses: structural techniques.

As someone who also teaches AP Literature, a lot of these techniques overlap into that way of reading/thinking—but the beautiful thing is that they are much easier to teach with a graphic novel. (And huge credit here to the remarkable text that is They Called Us Enemy, which makes doing this work with students all the more accessible and meaningful.)

Color symbolism/archetypes? Jump off the page.

Parallelism? You visually can see it happen.

Juxtaposition? Piece of cake. I mean…

(note: if you’d like the Google Slides we used to introduce/practice each of these techniques, here they are! feel free to use/adapt)

Were students engaged in the reading and discussion? Yes, without question. And that has immense value by itself.

However, another very important takeaway I had from this unit was that this was some of the most across-the-board, high-quality analytical writing around structural techniques I’ve seen in my entire career. Students showed out even in the most rigorous and formal assessments we moved through, a reminder that my previous doubts about the impact graphic novels would have were completely unwarranted.

Without a doubt, the shift in genre to a graphic novel enhanced the learning and skills of students—and their assessment results proved as much.

The best part, though? It didn’t stop strictly with their analytical writing in response to Takei’s text. It kept going into our summative projects:

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Priority 3: Meaningful Summative Assessment

Following the more-traditional constructed response analyzing the text itself at the midway point of the unit, students were then given a chance to try their own hand at not only creating a graphic novel page of their own but also utilizing the very structural techniques we had been observing and commenting upon throughout the reading.

The kicker? They then had to turn around and write an analytical commentary on the choices they themselves made in their own narrative version of a graphic novel page.

Did they step up to this challenge in the best of ways. You betcha. (Seriously, click on that link and check out what students created and then how they self-analyzed. They were incredible.)

Plus, as much as I loved-loved-loved the visual creations from students—which featured some of the best artistry I’ve seen in 11 years of teaching—the quality of analysis from students explaining their own choices was what honestly blew me away.

Just a few snippets:

• …The middle at the foreground of the graphic novel page is also cut off by the bottom right to show the tension between the person in power, and the only person who sees past his facade.

• …Another choice I made was to color my last panel in black in white to show how the darkness of after graduation is slowly coming upon me. Most importantly, this panel juxtaposed against my first panel that I colored with bright colors that shows how excited I was to receive TAG as a label; this demonstrates that by graduation I am more melancholic by seeing those achievements fade away into nothing.

• …The change in perspective as well as my absence from the panel was meant to show how when I take a step back, I see that these things I get so frustrated with are often largely irrelevant, but I can only see that when I myself am separated from the task.

I mean, this was more than cool.

So how did we set this project up, aside from our work with the graphic novel within the unit? 1) students were given three different samples to look at (here’s one)—though now I very much intend on replacing those with this year’s student samples going forward; 2) students moved through various brainstorms, including a poetry reflection early in the unit using Clint Smith’s “Something You Should Know”; and 3) students had a hard copy template that was only 7.5” by 7.5” to work with, a constraint but also a structure that felt like the right amount of space for students to fill purposefully.

I want to emphasize, too, that it wasn’t just the “high-flyers” who excelled at this; on the contrary, this project resulted in some of the highest-quality critical thinking and analytical writing from students at all levels in our classroom.

If you’re curious about more details regarding this unit and especially this end-of-unit project, let me know and I’m happy to share more! Though it has been over a month since we moved on from this unit, it is one of the lasting memories of my school year as far as convictions I’ll take with me going forward—and part of that conviction is helping others to realize what I did this year: graphic novels belong in the classroom because graphic novels help students belong in the classroom, opening the eyes of students to a different way of reading and thinking and writing and reflecting.

What more do we want in our rooms, after all?

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A Closing Note

With several weeks left in the school year, a lot of my time will be taken up by giving feedback to final projects and trying to make sure our classroom communities come to a meaningful, affirming close.

However, my guess is that once the dust settles on another fantastic year in the classroom, there will be ample time to reflect and converse for both Jim and I—and if you have any suggestions of topics you’d like us to center on The Broken Copier podcast, let us know!

Finally, for those who are even nearer to the finish line than I am, I wish you the best! It is a minefield of emotions at this point, and this year has been as exhausting as any I’ve encountered.

You’re seen and appreciated, and I wish you the best of closings no matter the arc your year travelled within the classroom and beyond it.

My best to you, and all of you!
—Marcus