In the spring, I was in a class on rhetoric and composition for my master’s in English program. We focused on many different ideas, from threshold concepts in writing to multimodal composition to inclusive practices for international and L2 students. For our summative assignment, however, we had to choose a focus that we hadn’t covered, or at least hadn’t dived deeply into as a class.
Some teachers already use comics in the classroom. What are the benefits to students?
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Given that I run a language arts website that aims to help students write better in the classroom, and given that I make comics to that end, I decided to research the use of comics composition in the classroom for my final paper.
I assumed that this line of inquiry would be fruitful. (After all, comics tend to make ideas feel more accessible, right?) What I did not anticipate is that my mind would be altogether blown by the power of comics on theoretical and practical levels to help students understand various aspects of writing, from the rhetorical situation to interpretive lenses to even plagiarism.
Yeah, I said it. Using comics to compose can help students potentially understand and more capably avoid plagiarism. (And in a world of new fears about AI and student writing, this is a more pressing issue than ever!)
There’s a lot to untangle here, so for today’s blog post, I decided to share a slightly modified version of my final paper from the class. It contains a review of some of the available literature on comics composition in the classroom, as well as my own thoughts for the directions in which we can push comics composition further. My hope is that you find this literature review and discussion helpful in your own thinking about how to teach composition in your classroom. (And, of course, that you consider incorporating comics composition in your pedagogy!)
Comics Composition in the Classroom
Research Questions
- What are the potential benefits of comics composition in the classroom?
- While it may be true that reading comics improves students’ multimodal literacy and makes them more critical readers of multimodal texts (Comer 76), how can students use the composition of comics to achieve desired learning outcomes?
- What possibilities have been explored? What unexplored territories remain?
Method
To answer these questions, I turn to the existing research on comics composition in the classroom within composition studies, while also bringing in case studies from the related fields of education and literacy studies, to discuss what we know and what’s been done. I conclude with a discussion of the possibilities for pushing comics composition further in the classroom, as well as how this research can impact how teachers can approach composition instruction.
Comics and Composition: The State of Things
Like most academic disciplines, the field of rhetoric and composition has been slow in its admission and adoption of new strategies. Thus, it is not surprising that the admission of comics to the composition studies fold is relatively new. As of 2015, many instructors still “[treat] comics as pedagogical tools for building conventional literacy, only hinting toward an expanded view of multimodal literacies” (Sealey-Morris 33; emphasis added). This is not to say that the comic genre has been ignored or dismissed in previous decades; as Bahl points out in her sketching of possibilities for comics in the classroom, scholars have published on the literary, theoretical, and pedagogical implications of the comic genre as early as 2005 (178). Nor should it suggest that no attention has previously been paid to the visual rhetoric of the comic genre. One need only look to the work of Scott McCloud, who has described not only the ways in which readers can navigate the rhetorical strategies used in sequential art in Understanding Comics (1993), but also the ways in which writers can intentionally and meaningfully harness these strategies for the production of their own comics in Making Comics (2006). What it does suggest, however, is that the acknowledgment of comics composition as a legitimate form of multimodal literacy that is not a scaffold for “conventional literacy” is a fairly recent development in the field of rhetoric and composition.
Scott McCloud explicates how to utilize the visual rhetoric of sequential art, or comics, in Making Comics.
Though new on the scene (at least as far as rhetoric and composition is concerned), scholarship on comics composition and its possibilities and benefits in the classroom is burgeoning. One case study done by Kathryn Comer explores the ways in which upper-level undergraduate students can use rhetorical strategies of the comic genre (narrative gaps, narration, and focalization) to compose graphic memoirs. Comer observes that by reviewing a number of graphic memoir mentor texts and then composing using the convention of the comics genre, students are sensitized to “the relationships among the different personae of ‘the self’ as author/narrator/character” (80). This occurs because of the graphic memoir’s unique ability to show an author’s selves in tandem, with the author acting simultaneously as character in the frame (the past) and narrator in the text box (the present). This notion of self is complicated further if students decide to depict themselves as characters outside of the frame narrating their past selves in the present. Comer also points out that composing in the comics genre allows students to “make manifest their own interpretive lenses” (81) through choice of moment, framing, metaphor, etc. Moreover, Comer explains that when students compose in the comics genre, they engage in “strategic invention, creative problem-solving, and rhetorical awareness” (82-83) in that they must determine the best strategies for constructing their comics within the constraints of the narrative they want to tell, their own artistic abilities and technological know-how, their purpose for writing, and the audience for whom they write. As Gabriel Sealey-Morris explains in thorough detail, these learning outcomes—sensitizing students to the use of rhetorical strategies, authorial voice, interpretive lenses, and rhetorical situations—speak directly to the learning outcomes described in the Council for Writing Program Administrators (WPA) Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition Students, which “places ‘rhetorical knowledge’ at the head” (33); it also outlines the importance of establishing authorial identity and ethos (36). Thus, Comer’s case study is a compelling example of how comics composition can be used in the classroom to answer the exigencies of writing instruction.
A similar case study by Michael L. Kersulov looks at the ways in which high school students classified as “gifted” used comics composition to explore self-perceptions of identity. Whereas Comer’s students used the comics genre to produce memoirs, Kersulov’s students composed poems about their “nerd identities” before remediating these poems into comics. It is helpful to take a moment to detail the students’ process in order to better understand how this project achieves specific learning outcomes salient to the composition classroom. As in Comer’s study, students in Kersulov’s study first analyzed mentor texts—in this case, McCloud’s Understanding Comics to understand the grammar of comics, followed by a selection of superhero comics to understand the conventions of that subgenre. Then students created an inventory of artifacts and activities that represented their “nerd identities,” or what distinguished them from their peers as “gifted.” After creating their inventories, students wrote autobiographical poems about their “nerd identities,” using the superhero alter ego as a metaphor for understanding and constructing the “gifted” part of themselves. Only after these poems were written and revised did students set about the task of composing comics, using their poems as the verbal component around which they constructed additional meaning through the arrangement of words and selection of images, framing, pacing, etc. Though poetry is not typically the purview of the composition classroom, this case study is an exciting example of how students can use mixed media to develop multimodal literacy. Defined by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), multimodal literacy is “the interplay of meaning-making systems (alphabetic, oral, visual, etc.) that teachers and students should strive to study and produce” (qtd. in Sealey-Morris 38; emphasis added). Moreover, the multi-step process of brainstorming the inventory, writing and editing the poem, and then re-composing the poem as a comic is an example of how composition teachers can use similar strategies to help students develop a more global understanding of process, or, as the WPA’s Outcome Statement explains, the idea that writers must produce “multiple drafts to create and complete a successful text” (qtd. in Sealey-Morris 40). Moreover, per the Outcome Statement, the project demonstrates that sometimes this process also involves “later invention and re-thinking to revise their work” (qtd. in Sealey-Morris 40).
The students in Kersulov’s study first created inventories of their “nerd identities,” then remediated those inventories into poems, then remediated them again into comics.
Other case studies have also shown the benefits of comics composition in middle and elementary school classrooms. In the same vein as Comer, Dallacqua describes how composing graphic narratives in a seventh grade ELA classroom can be used to help students “understand ways to construct and manipulate structure to impact their readers/audience” (275), thereby developing students’ rhetorical awareness and use of rhetorical strategies. Additionally, Dallacqua and Peralta’s work on the use of comics composition to rewrite informational texts in a fifth-grade science classroom challenges students to be “critical consumers” (113) of texts; in this case, they do so by taking an active role in deciding what information is most important to include, how to organize the selected information, how to visually style it, and what kind of authorial voice is most appropriate. This latter example speaks to the second section of the WPA Outcome Statement titled “Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing,” which states that students should “use writing and reading for inquiry, learning, thinking, and communicating” (qtd. in Sealey-Morris 37). In this case, students read informational texts, and then used the writing process to produce comics that helped them inquire, learn, think, and communicate clearly on a topic related to science. Such examples underscore the degree to which comics can and have been used to achieve desired learning outcomes for composition in the classroom, and at all levels, no less.
Less Explored Territories
One kind of composition that I did not see in my survey of the available research on comics composition in the classroom was that of the persuasive or argumentative essay. Though Sealey-Morris asserts that students can demonstrate mastery of conventions by “mak[ing] their own comics essays” (39), most of the work I read focused on producing graphic narratives (which, admittedly, can be implicitly or explicitly persuasive). Given the strengths of the comics genre outlined above for addressing desired learning outcomes for rhetoric and composition, I believe that the genre and its rhetorical strategies can give students the tools to produce robust arguments that match, or perhaps even exceed, that which they might produce in a traditional essay format. Specifically, I think that the interplay of words and images gives the comics genre a boost above its more textual generic peers when it comes to the incorporation and explication of evidence to advance an argument.
Example Comics Essay
There are already comics essays out in the world, so this is not a new idea. Check out this comic-style essay from NPR on the difficulty of getting a college education while in prison. You can also check out other exemplars on the NPR Comics page.
When it comes to showcasing the power of the comics genre for incorporating evidence, one need look no further than Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. As Janine Morris explains, Bechdel intersperses her memoir with visual representations of source material, including “letters, photographs, poetry, drawings, maps, diary entries, and newspaper clippings” (195). In so doing, Bechdel presences for readers how her “source material and research inform her composing practices” (195). Students can use this same strategy when producing persuasive or argumentative essays in the comic genre, creating faithful representations of their source material like Bechdel. Conversely, they can present their evidence in ways that underscore the points they are supporting, such as by juxtaposing or overlaying their textual evidence on an image that serves as an example. In this way, the comics genre empowers students to “explain and demonstrate conventions of argument and academic inquiry simultaneously, as opposed to an explanation followed by a separate illustration or example, as in a conventional textbook” (Sealey-Morris 39). Moreover, as Morris points out, as students “draw on visual and spatial modes of meaning-making that go beyond the textual” (198) in their visual depictions of evidence, they may find that the evidence they’ve chosen doesn’t work; in that way, it encourages students to “consider the relevance of the sources to arguments they wish to forward” (198).
Bechdel painstakingly recreates original documents to provide evidence for the reader. Imagine if students did the same in their argumentative essays. How might that help them analyze the relevance of their evidence to their arugments? And how might it also help them understand and avoid plagiarism?
In addition to the potential that visual representations of evidence hold for advancing an argument in the comics genre, there is also potential for helping students understand plagiarism and how to appropriately cite sources in an essay. The comic book-style textbook Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing addresses this in chapter five by showing the authors literally taping a picture taken from the internet to a panel without citing the source. The narrating characters playfully explain, “The panel just wasn’t working—and we didn’t have time to start all over” (203, qtd. in Sealey-Morris 39). This is followed by a discussion of why it is important to cite sources and how to do it. Thus, an argumentative essay composed as a comic in which students visually represent their evidence—perhaps in different visual styles to emphasize the “outside” nature of the texts they are bringing in to support their points—has the potential to help students develop deeper understandings of appropriate textual borrowing and avoid plagiarism.
Final Thoughts
I feel I’ve barely scratched the surface of possibilities in this brief literature review of comics composition in the classroom. For instance, I have not looked into the benefits of comics composition for L2 students or international students, including the ways in which this mode might help presence and privilege the cultural and linguistic practices they bring to the classroom. However, given the research explicated above, I have a hunch that were I to probe further, I would find that this genre of composing is just as beneficial (if not more so) for this population of students.
This mode of composition offers so many possibilities and benefits in terms of helping students develop rhetorical knowledge and understand the decisions available to them as writers and active makers of meaning that I could not have imagined when I started researching this topic. Certainly, this rhetorical knowledge is transferable to other generic contexts, while remaining a legitimate multimodal form of composing on its own. The possibilities I find the most intriguing stem from the composition of persuasive or argumentative comics essays. Specifically, I’m interested in how composing in this mode could help students develop a deeper understanding of selecting and integrating relevant evidence to support an argument, as well as an understanding of textual borrowing and avoiding plagiarism. I can’t help but also hope that students would be surprised and delighted enough with the notion of drawing an essay that they might actually find it—dare I write it?—fun.
Works Cited
TL;DR List of Takeaways
- Composing graphic memoirs can sensitize students to their different personae as author, narrator, and character (Comer 80).
- Composing comics allows students to illustrate their own interpretive lenses through choice of moment, framing, metaphor, etc. (Comer 81).
- Composing in the comics genre requires students to practice “strategic invention, creative problem-solving, and rhetorical awareness” ( Comer 82-83).
- Composing comics speaks directly to learning outcomes defined by the Council for Writing Program Administrators (WPA), including rhetorical knowledge and establishing authorial voice (Sealey-Morris 33).
- Composing comics can help students develop multimodal literacy (see Kersulov’s case study as an example).
- Composing comics helps students develop a more global understanding of the writing process, including the need for multiple drafts and revision (see Kersulov’s case study as an example).
- Elementary and middle school students have successfully used comics to develop rhetorical knowledge and become critical consumers of texts (see Dallacqua, as well as Dallacaqua and Peralta for examples).
- Composing persuasive or argumentative essays in the comics genre—including the visual representation and organization of outside textual support—can help students evaluate the appropriateness of their sources (see Alison Bechdel’s representation of visual and textual sources in Fun Home).
- Composing persuasive or argumentative essays in the comics genre can help students develop an understanding of plagiarism by opening up discussions of how to integrate outside textual support; it can also support students in avoiding plagiarism by requiring them to document their support visually, which presences the idea that these are not their original thoughts, but ideas from external sources.