Reading Comics Collaboratively and Challenging Literacy Norms

ABSTRACT

This article draws from a year-long ethnographic study documenting the use of comics in a school. Focusing on literacy work in a social studies classroom, it documents how comics were welcomed into and challenged classroom spaces. Comics were introduced, read, and engaged with collaboratively. While comics were able to support strategic practices, such as a standardized curriculum implemented by the school system, their presence and use in classrooms helped to surface teachers’ and students’ awareness of their typical rhythms. There were impacts to the ways in which students and teachers recognized and critiqued literacy practices in their school. By inviting a comic into their curriculum, teachers were also inviting changes to the space in which they and their students were learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Adolescent literacy
• collaborative learning
• literature-based instruction

Acknowledgements

Ashley would like to thank Caroline Clark and Laura Uchil, along with the editors and reviewers at Literacy Research and Instruction for their thoughtful readings and feedback on this manuscript. She is also incredibly grateful to the teachers and students who participated in this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Finn was also a focus teacher in the larger ethnographic study this work is a part of. This group was the only compete team (including a social studies, English language arts, and science teacher) that participated. For this reason, I concentrated on this team as a focus group, as all of their students were experiencing comics across their curricula. While I spent the same amount of time co-teaching and co-planning with all three of the seventh-grade social studies department teachers, there is more video data from Finn’s classroom and focus participants were selected from his class.