Here's a silly piece I wrote for a class this semester,

and by silly I mean dead serious.

This one goes out to all the haters: the back-to-basics, the five-paragraph-essays, the your-not-you’res and the you’re-not-yours, to the SATs and the ACTs, to the canonical-texts, and to the Standard-Englishes and English-Onlys; this one goes out to the cartoons-are-Saturday-morning-kid-stuffs: y’all are missing OUT!

I call urgently for inclusion of comics in language arts classrooms because:

1. It allows language arts teachers to be language and art teachers.

In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud maps out what he calls “the pictoral vocabulary," a comprehensive and multidimensional system of understanding how we represent what we’re thinking, feeling, seeing, being, wanting, needing, doing, etc (51-3). When classroom literacy gets isolated into one corner of Scott’s map, boringness threatens, but more importantly, students miss out on learning vital literacy skills. Go ahead and teach traditional text after traditional-ol’ text, and come crawling back to the graphic novel when you can’t peel your students away from the television and computer screen as they desperately seek ways to practice their visual literacy skills. The point is, whether we give students the opportunity to practice visual literacy in classrooms or not, they are going to seek out and encounter visual texts on their own anyway. Now, we could leave them to their own devices, and let them find and use their own strategies for understanding the visual texts that inundate their everyday lives, or we can guide them to critical readings and analyses of these texts, just as we guide them into critical reading and analyses of traditional texts. Why not show students that even a TV show is a text, a text ripe for questioning like any other text they’re used to seeing in English class? Take those close readings, those understandings of symbolism, irony, paradox, and ambiguity; take those deconstruction methods; take those contextualization skills, and apply them to Will Eisner’s texts as well as Will Shakespeare’s! That’s all I’m saying! (Except that I’m also about to say that reading comics takes those skills and more!)

2. Yeah, students need visual literacy skills.

I’m going to loosely define visual literacy as what it takes to make meaning of magazine ads, billboards, movies, facial expressions, hairstyles, flow-charts, tabloids, Picasso, and maps. More or less. Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, in The Grammar of Visual Design, write about the ability to understand and produce “a complex interplay of written text, images and other graphic elements, and ... these elements combine[d] together into visual designs, by means of layout” (15). If you don’t teach students to read this stuff, and further, to compose this stuff, they’re not going to ask pressing questions about what they see in a world that requires them to take in and put out visual messages all day. Students who have practice with reading and manipulating visual texts will have an advantage over those who don’t. Let’s eliminate the “those who don’t” category. Students who are well-versed in visual semiotics, for example, will be able to look critically at a political debate before they vote, at advertisements for products they’re considering purchasing, at graphs they’re preparing for presentations, at their homes when they’re attempting to sell them, at clothes they’re considering wearing to job interviews, and at countless other nontraditional texts that nonetheless send messages. Pictures aren’t just for kids; they can be difficult and engaging – but not so difficult that students can’t learn their grammar. Kress and van Leeuwen observe that, “visual communication is either treated as the domain of a very small elite of specialists, or disvalued as a possible form of expression for articulate, reasoned communication, seen as a ‘childish’ stage one grows out of.” Word. (/Picture.) So comics can be eschewed from the language arts classroom as a way to ask students to grow out of their old picture books, or they can be held off as art teachers’ territory. Or, language arts teachers could embrace the opportunity that comics give them to draw on students’ prior experience with their childhood picture books and build into reading images using complex reading strategies. I’ll take what’s behind door number three, please!

3. All texts are visual, but comics are ultra-visual, and therefore better.

When we read any written text, we see the ink on the page, we process the arrangement of ink, and we make meaning from that arrangement. But check this out [image of traditional text], and check this out [image of Palestine]. Teach comic books and teach sequencing (McCloud 5), juxtaposition (7), iconography (26), closure (95), composition of space, time, change, and memory (115), synaesthtics (123), interdependency (149); give students the opportunity to think critically about what’s language and what’s art; what’s both (164). What could happen to students who don’t learn to read and write visually? I’d rather not think about it. But for the sake of going there, here’s what might happen:

4. Students might not learn to scrutinize essentialism if they don’t learn how to read comics.

Cat – it’s the ultimate classroom example for understanding deconstruction (Parker 54). When you have the word cat, Parker explains, "you can imagine a reference to the familiar domestic feline, or to a hugely inconsistent range of felines, domestic and wild, living and extinct. It can also refer to a bulldozer, a stylish man, any of several different colleges of advanced technology, the act of masculine philandering (catting around), a backbiting woman, a catfish, a CAT scan, a catalytic converter, and so on through a long and continuously evolving list of other meanings" (54).

In more technical terms, one signifier, cat, has multiple signifieds, all of the above. But when you’ve got [an image of “the familiar domestic feline”], the bulldozer possibility becomes a little less probable. A more problematic example? Signifer: woman. Signified: [image of a stereotypically feminine woman]. Now what? McCloud goes on and on about how cool the “universality of cartoon imagery” is because “the more cartoony a face is, for instance, the more people it could be said to describe” (31). Read: the more cartoony a signifier gets, the more we can make generalizations about the signified. Which would seem rather limiting. Except that I have this theory of the wink.

The wink: ;-)

The wink is a visual icon for “I’m kidding/I’m just playing/I’m being a little facetious here” (For the purposes of this text, I’ll refrain from deconstructing ;-) into “Come hither,” “Hey, kiddo,” “You know what I’m sayin, dawg?,” “My eye’s twitching,” etc. – or at least I’ll refrain from doing so outside of these parentheses.) So: given that the production of a text involves an innumerable set of choices (this-word-or- that, this-character-trait-or-that, this-event-or-that – or that or that or that), and given that comics bring together words and pictures and therefore multiply the range of choices by this-image-or-that, this-line-or-that, this-color-or-that, this-size-space-or-that (– or that or that or that), comics texts, even when they seem to send irreconcilably essentialist messages (i.e. This is what a woman looks like; this is what a Black person looks like; this is what God looks like), can wink at readers, can signify nuance.

They can wink at readers, that is, if readers know how to and so wish to make eye-contact with the text, get intimately critical with that text. When the reader is aware of the text’s creation process, that is, the set of innumerable choices the creator made, s/he can look for and find instances of textual ;-)ing. Paulo Freire might have called this ;-)-search in the classroom a type of “problem-posing education [that] involves a constant unveiling of reality... striv[ing] for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality” (68). And when students do that, there’s nothing absolutely wrong with using a problematic text. In fact, it’s useful. In one of her many works on the importance of prioritizing critical literacy in English language arts classrooms, Hilary Janks “uses critical discourse analysis to show that [certain advertisements put out by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)], designed to dispose us kindly to refugees, are premised on a discourse of sameness that constructs difference negatively” (1). She goes on in this article to deconstruct this discourse of sameness communicated by both images and written text in one of the advertisements:

In Spot the refugee, an obvious place to begin is with the opening instruction, prominent because it is printed in capital letters in a large bold font. This is the only command in a text that is otherwise made up of statements. If you respond to this imperative by looking carefully at the lego figures, trying to find the one that stands out as a refugee, the text has already constructed you as someone who thinks of refugees as visibly different. If you refuse this construction, but are nevertheless intrigued by the juxtaposition of lego dolls and refugees, you may start reading the text. If you then look for the refugee in the Fourth row, second from the left. The one with the moustache, you will nevertheless have been reeled in by the text, only to discover that you have been cheated, because—

The unsavoury looking character you’re looking at is more likely to be your average
neighbourhood slob with a grubby vest and a weekend’s stubble on his chin. And the real refugee could just as easily be the clean-cut fellow on his left.

In addition, you will have been constructed as someone who assumes that refugees look like “unsavoury”, unshaved “slobs”. And because you are now someone who sees refugees as both different from and inferior to you, you need to learn that “clean-cut” refugees are just like you and me. But do not worry, the UNHCR is there to set us straight. (Janks 4-5)

In this example, what Janks implies but doesn’t explicitly state is how the images of the lego dolls don’t just reinforce the messages in the visual text, but are rather an integral element of the text as a whole. (Incidentally, same thing goes for comics.) The advertisement overtly commands viewers to read the lego images; this students can do, and do do, on their own every time they watch television or read a billboard. That’s where prior knowledge comes in; students are familiar with combinations of images and words. What Janks demonstrates, and what she later asks teachers to help students do, is to build on this prior knowledge by reading the advertisement critically, analyzing the ways that the lego images work with the words to alienate and stigmatize refugees even as the UNHCR purports to do the opposite.

If more students learned to look for and recognize ;-)ing texts in the ways that Janks proposes, then maybe those students would have less trouble deconstructing pervasive images like this [Bush with the Mission Accomplished banner]. What’s wrong with literacy education when students’ can’t or aren’t asking what’s wrong (or right?) with this picture? Nothing un-fixable; just teach comics!

Okay, wait. Sure, you could work to “unveil reality,” as Freire suggests, within a word-only text, but using comics to do so is way better because comics more obviously reinforce metacognition. The very form of a comic text challenges an alphabetic text in the way that critically literate persons challenge every text. When a comic means “woman” and draws a human figure wearing a dress, the comic lays down essentialist content in an essentialist form. Once students learn the grammar of visual semiotics (eg. how does one communicate “woman” with an image), then practicing that visual grammar by reading comics lets them practice their pointing and jeering at the essentialization of what it means, or looks like, to be, for example, a woman. Or if you prefer critical consideration to pointing and jeering, that could work, too. Word-only texts invite these types of critical considerations also, I know. But compared to comics that lay it all out there for the reader, for better of worse, in an image-laden and therefore familiar form, word-only texts start to seem a little dodgy. You get a text from your friend Keisha, for example, that reads “How’s it hangin?” and you might reply “Can’t complain. What’s up with you?” If Keisha clarifies her message, though, by sending a picture of the Matisse she just bought and mounted, you might more helpfully reply, “It’s upside down.” For students learning to read critically, comics are more accessibly interpretable because of the fact that they employ a pictoral vocabulary that more often than not shows the reader what they mean more statically and universally than do words with their multiple meanings.

5. Um, students are already reading comics (or comics-like texts) anyway. Use that.

And not just as a ploy to “make school fun.” No, play the game. Meet those standards. Remember at the beginning of this rant when I warned that your students are already taking in combinations of images and texts in infinite multiplicities? (Okay, well actually I said, “Go ahead and teach traditional text after traditional-ol’ text, and come crawling back to the graphic novel when you can’t peel your students away from the television and computer screen as they desperately seek ways to practice their visual literacy skills.”) Let me reiterate that. Students are interested in comics. In his introduction to Building Literacy Connections with Graphic Novels: Page By Page, Panel By Panel, James Bucky Carter cites study after study that affirms the use of comics in the classroom as valuable tools for practicing Freire’s reality unveil-ation with students who are reluctant readers, reluctant writers, English language learners, and also, um, any student who spends any time engaging with our visually-saturated pop culture. Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher, in the same volume, submit convincing anecdotal evidence to this accord: Comics, they write, “provided a visual vocabulary of sorts for scaffolding writing techniques, particularly dialogue, tone, and mood,” and that they “afforded [them] a space to provide students with instruction on the craft and mechanics of writing” (143). Finally, their students “not only became better writers, but also better consumers of ideas and information” (143). In short, by using texts, or textual formats, with which students already feel familiar, language arts teachers can affirm the knowledge and skills that students already have as a way of motivating them to learn and acquire more knowledge and skills.

So it goes that (1) if comics give teachers a way to teach language (and) arts as a broad system of representation that (2) build visual literacy which is (3) an essential skill that (4) invites students to practice critical literacy, and that (5) makes that type of literacy accessible to all students*, then not teaching comics disallows all of the above and therefore condemns students to the festering status quo.

* I'm not sure how to accommodate a graphic novel, nor therefore this text, to the literacy needs of students with visual impairments that inhibit their abilities to see a text. I'm not not thinking about this; I just haven't come up with anything yet.