With Great Power Comes Great Pedagogy

Teaching, Learning, and Comics

Susan E. Kirtley, Antero Garcia, Peter E. Carlson

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781496826053
• eBook ISBN: 9781496826060
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities
• Index: Literature

Contributions by Bart Beaty, Jenny Blenk, Ben Bolling, Peter E. Carlson, Johnathan Flowers, Antero Garcia, Dale Jacobs, Ebony Flowers Kalir, James Kelley, Susan E. Kirtley, Frederik Byrn Køhlert, John A. Lent, Leah Misemer, Johnny Parker II, Nick Sousanis, Aimee Valentine, and Benjamin J. Villarreal More and more educators are using comics in the classroom. As such, this edited volume sets out the stakes, definitions, and exemplars of recent comics pedagogy, from K-12 contexts to higher education instruction to ongoing communities of scholars working outside of the academy. Building upon interdisciplinary approaches to teaching comics and teaching with comics, this book brings together diverse voices to share key theories and research on comics pedagogy. By gathering scholars, creators, and educators across various fields and in K-12 as well as university settings, editors Susan E. Kirtley, Antero Garcia, and Peter E. Carlson significantly expand scholarship. This valuable resource offers both critical pieces and engaging interviews with key comics professionals who reflect on their own teaching experience and on considerations of the benefits of creating comics in education. Included are interviews with acclaimed comics writers Lynda Barry, Brian Michael Bendis, Kelly Sue DeConnick, and David Walker, as well as essays spanning from studying the use of superhero comics in the classroom to the ways comics can enrich and empower young readers. The inclusion of creators, scholars, and teachers leads to perspectives that make this volume unlike any other currently available. These voices echo the diverse needs of the many stakeholders invested in using comics in education today.

PART I

FOUNDATIONS OF COMICS PEDAGOGY

As we come together to cultivate and delineate the field of comics pedagogy, scholars currently continue to struggle with issues of identity and definition. Yet despite any differences, those we’ve met at conferences and in classrooms all share a similar desire to serve our students in the best possible way and a belief that comics function as useful teaching tools that engage multiple intelligences and diverse student populations. Furthermore, we as instructors (and editors) recognize that our students often enter the classroom, even at an early age, with advanced skills in translating the signs, symbols, and images that bombard them every day, a keen and finely tuned visual literacy rarely recognized in the academy. As scholar Gail Hawisher and her colleagues note, “People often acquire and develop the literacies they need in places other than the classroom where, often, instructors tend to limit literacy activities to the narrow bandwidth of conventional written English” (670). The reading of graphic texts, of the images, icons, and symbols of the everyday, is a fundamental literacy, one that can help bridge divides, between home and school, between people, and between disciplines.

However, despite the potential identified by so many educators, comics have long been considered lighthearted entertainment for children at best, and immoral and corrupting tales of crime and horror at worst, and the image of the mischievous student hiding a thoroughly noneducational comic book inside a much more edifying textbook has become a frequent trope in popular culture. Thus, even though comics are now enjoying an increased profile, particularly in educational journals and university circles, teachers may still encounter resistance when incorporating comics into classrooms. Therefore, in this section on “Foundations of Comics Pedagogy,” we present four different pieces that address the fraught development of a theory of comics pedagogy with all its fits and starts. These chapters represent a variety of perspectives on this developing field—K-12 instructors, theorists, university instructors, and creators. In the first piece, Dale Jacobs acknowledges the decidedly conflicted history between educators and comics, setting out some of the central concerns of teachers. He argues for an approach that moves beyond current comics pedagogy, which seems to primarily focus on using comics as a means to teach other subjects. Instead, he urges instructors to embrace the study of comics for what they are and what they do, not forgetting the unique affordances of the form, but rather emphasizing the distinct vocabulary and interdisciplinary nature of comics. Aimee Walker maintains that female creators have long been marginalized in comics history and comics classrooms, and educators and scholars have a responsibility to incorporate and recognize female comics creators, a project now much more accessible to students and creators through the web. Bart Beaty also looks both to the past, noting the narrow scope of foundational work in comics pedagogy, and to the future, contending that educators have an opportunity to move beyond the comics canon and encourage students to study new texts through online tools. A vision of this new kind of comics classroom is very much in evidence in high school teacher Johnny Walker’s interview with comics writers and now educators Brian Michael Bendis and David Walker, who offer insight into their teaching styles, as well as their own literacy narratives as students. As Walker explains, “I’m a published writer, I’m an educator, but I still want to learn stuff.” These practitioners of the craft argue for the importance of acknowledging representation, in classes and comics, an imperative point that must be considered in any comics pedagogy. While these pieces all represent different aspects of the past and future of comics pedagogy, they share an understanding of the value of comics in classrooms, believing, as we do, that exploring the relationship between word and picture allows students to draw on their own “insider” knowledge as they negotiate the challenges of entering the academic community.

Text, Object, Transaction: Reconciling Approaches to the Teaching of Comics

—DALE JACOBS, University of Windsor

At the beginning of “The Practice of Book and Print Culture: Sources, Methods, Readings,” Leslie Howsam poses several important questions related to practice. She asks, “How do scholars actually ‘do’ studies in the history and culture of the book when it comes down to working with sources, adopting methodologies and constructing arguments? How do our chosen source materials and methods shape our (mostly unspoken) definitions of ‘book culture’ or ‘print culture?’” (17). Substitute comics studies for book/print culture here, and the questions, as well as the necessity of asking them, still function in ways that emphasize the similarities of concerns between the two fields. As Blair Davis and Benjamin Woo note in their introduction to “Roundtable: Comics and Methodology” in the inaugural issue of Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, “Comics scholars come from departments of literary studies, film and media studies, history, and so on, bringing with them different research traditions and assumptions” (57). Questions of methodology are, consequently, central to our pedagogical approaches and to the ways we, as comics scholars, teach comics studies in our home departments.

Over the long history of comics, educators have had a vexed relationship with the medium. In the terms of literacy education, comics have moved from distractions seen as antithetical to both literacy and morality, to a site on which alphabetic literacy might be scaffolded, to a set of multimodal texts that use a combination of sequential art and text in order to create narrative meaning for the audience. Currently, judging from the number of journal articles and conference presentations on comics and composition in the past few years, it is clear that comics have become an accepted part of and tool for teaching multimodal composition. In a quotation that sums up much current thinking about comics within the field of composition studies, Gabriel Sealey-Morris writes in “The Rhetoric of the Paneled Page: Comics and Composition Pedagogy” that “comics complicate notions of authorship, make sophisticated demands on readers, and create a grammar and rhetoric as sophisticated as written prose, while also opening up new methods of communication” (31). The attitudes towards comics among literacy educators have changed drastically over the years.

Similarly, when viewed through the lens of literature pedagogy, comics have moved from disposable, dangerous entertainment, unwelcome in schools in any form, to pop culture supplements to the alphabetic literature it was assumed students needed to study, to “graphic novels”—literary works worthy of study in their own right. Now comics such as Maus, Fun Home, and Persepolis are regularly included in literature classes, whether the main focus is on comics or not. These parallel developments of comics pedagogy within English departments, in both high schools and universities, present us with two distinct ways of thinking about teaching with comics that seldom overlap or take into account ways of teaching comics that predominate in other disciplines.

As an interdisciplinary field, however, those of us who teach in comics studies in universities need to not only acknowledge these disparate disciplinary approaches, but attempt to capitalize on their various strengths as we engage with students in the classroom. Rather than focus on the multiple ways that comics can be used for specific pedagogical purposes (as in the recent collections Graphic Novels and Comics in the Classroom and Teaching Comics Through Multiple Lenses) or on using comics as a means of teaching specific subjects (as seen in another recent collection, Teaching Comics and Graphic Narratives), we need to “move beyond instances of comics integration as a means of teaching other ideas—of teaching through or with comics—and make space for studying comic as comics,” as James B. Carter asserts in his short “Pioneer’s Perspective” contribution to The Secret Origins of Comics Studies (30). Further, as Charles Hatfield argues in “Comics Studies, the Anti-Discipline,” the foreword to that same volume, “Comics Studies forcefully reminds us that the disciplines cannot be discrete and self-contained; in effect, our field defies or at least seriously questions the compartmentalization of knowledge that occurs within academia” (xix). This vision for the field can, however, only come to fruition if we make a concerted effort to bring it about. This chapter focuses on what it would mean to teach comics as comics and comics studies as a fully interdisciplinary endeavor. As I pursue this notion of interdisciplinarity, I want to begin by examining the ways in which questions of definition influence our teaching and research methodologies before turning to the field of book history, not only for the kinds of practical questions seen above, but also for the utility of its own hybrid methodologies to the current state of comics studies.

Within interdisciplinary fields such as comics studies and book history, terminology is often the locus of anxieties that carry over into discussions of how we teach and research. In discussing the very term “book history,” Howsam notes how “‘book’ itself is beset with multiple meanings and shifting form—even while casual use of the word appears to refer to something that was fixed by the technology of printing with movable type” (“Practice” 18). Defining comics is, if anything, an even thornier proposition; as Charles Hatfield has written, “Definitions [of comics] are not merely analytic but also tactical” (“Defining” 19). That is, the very act of defining is a way to make an argument about the field, a way to stake out one’s methodological position. Consider Scott McCloud’s famous definition of comics as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer” (Understanding Comics 9). The emphasis here and in Understanding Comics as a whole is on the way that this definition emphasizes that comics is a medium with its own particular set of affordances. Henry Jenkins, in his response during the aforementioned roundtable to a question about how he teaches comics, is typical of many teachers of comics studies: “My approach in the classroom was inspired by Scott McCloud’s insistence that comics are a medium and not a genre” (59). Even if one disagrees with elements of McCloud’s definition, his overall approach is accessible to students and works well as a starting point from which to discuss how comics work. So ubiquitous is Understanding Comics in undergraduate comics-studies classes that it is impossible to overestimate its pedagogical influence.

This emphasis on form can also be seen in the Comics and Methodology roundtable when Scott Bukatman states that “being in an art department has freed me from emphasizing narrative in the way that comics scholars in English departments would be encouraged to do” (59). Within Bukatman’s disciplinary context, form and art are more important than narrative in the study and teaching of comics. Such an emphasis opens up a productive theoretical and pedagogical conversation about how comics operate as a medium and how they convey information through their unique affordances. However, if we look again at McCloud’s definition and Bukatman’s statement, and the way they privilege image, we can see how this emphasis reveals their methodological biases as artist and art historian, and constricts how we might view even the workings of the medium itself.

Consider another definition: Robert C. Harvey’s argument that comics are “a blending of visual and verbal content” (76). It is a statement on which I tried to build in Graphic Encounters: Comics and the Sponsorship of Multimodal Literacy, writing,

comics—comic books, comic strips, and graphic novels—are media that use a combination of sequential art and text in order to create narrative meaning for the audience. This combination of words and images—multimodality—works to create meaning in very particular and distinctive ways; in a multimodal text, meaning is created through words, visuals, and the combination of the two in order to achieve effects and meanings that would not be possible in either a strictly alphabetic or strictly visual text.… As cultural artifacts, sites of literacy, means of communication, discursive events and practices, sites of imaginative interplay, and tools for literacy sponsorship, comics are far more than simply “sequential art.” (5)

While I also focus on form and on comics as a medium (or, to be more exact, multiple media), you can certainly see my disciplinary biases as someone trained in composition and rhetoric and housed in a department dominated by literature scholars. Unlike Bukatman, I cannot divorce myself from narrative, both because it figures too prominently in my departmental context and because it is a productive avenue of inquiry. Moreover, the filter of multimodality is one that for me comes from developments in the last fifteen years within composition and literacy studies, which in turn came from Gunther Kress’s work on visual literacy and social semiotics and the subsequent multidisciplinary work of the New London Group in the area of multimodal literacies. In developing this definition, I saw that McCloud’s emphasis on comics as a medium focuses our attention on form in very useful, but at the same time potentially limiting, ways. Though I do mention comics as “cultural artifacts” and “discursive events,” my research and pedagogical practices were then mainly limited to formal considerations and the ways in which comics could be seen as a medium of communication and individual comics as sites of literacy. The multiple locations that informed how I thought about comics and comics pedagogy at the time both opened up and occluded possibilities for teaching and research methodologies.

In this definitional exploration in Graphic Encounters, I also cited Dylan Horrocks and his long response to McCloud’s work, in which he proposes that comics can be seen as a cultural idiom; a publishing genre; a set of narrative conventions; a kind of writing that uses words and pictures; a literary genre; and texts (34). As I have continued to teach and research in comics studies, I realize that while I incorporated some of these ideas, simply acknowledging the existence of the others is not enough. What would it mean to take these definitions, and the disciplinary methodologies they imply, seriously? Teaching students, for example, to view comics as a common cultural or subcultural experience—that is, adopting some methodologies from sociologists or cultural historians—broadens the possibilities of the classroom. Similarly, approaching comics from the standpoint of narrative conventions or genre can give a much fuller picture than simply looking at considerations of form, just as looking at comics form adds immensely to literary discussions of comics. My colleagues in literature sometimes do not have the formal vocabulary to discuss comics, just as those of us in composition or art history or communication are sometimes without the means to adequately address narrative or genre concerns. Further, in thinking through the variety of approaches that Horrocks briefly lists, what happens when we consider comics as a publishing genre? What could the field of book history add to comics studies and to the ways in which we teach our students to think about comics? In order to explore this question further, let me begin by returning to Howsam’s initial question: “How do scholars actually ‘do’ studies in the history and culture of the book, when it comes down to working with sources, adopting methodologies and constructing arguments?” (“Practice” 17). The answers to this question will, I think, help us to be more productively self-reflective about what it is that we “do” in comics studies, while at the same time providing us with another set of pedagogical and research lenses that can inform those practices.

In addressing scholarly practices in book history, Howsam focuses on scholars’ home disciplines, much as I have been doing to this point (and to which members of the Comics and Methodology roundtable allude). She writes,

literary scholars look at a book primarily in terms of text, while bibliographers are focused mostly upon the material object. Those two sides of the biblio-coin cannot, of course, be separated; but one can face up while the other remains down. Historians, while conscious of text and object, tend to see the book more in terms of a transaction: the biblio-coin is used for exchange. The transaction occurs in a communicative relationship between and among individuals, groups and generations of human beings—readers, writers, editors, printers and so forth. The transaction is both commercial and cultural. (“Practice” 18–19)

While one of these ways of knowing and its attendant methodologies may come to the fore while the others momentarily recede, book history, like other truly interdisciplinary endeavors, succeeds when all of these strands inform the work of practitioners. That is, text, object, and process all need to be taken into account as one researches and teaches. Attending only to one’s own disciplinary notions of what is central and ignoring the questions and concerns of the other constituent disciplines results in something that may be akin to book history, but is, in the final analysis, not book history.

However, as Howsam points out in Old Books and New Histories: An Orientation to Studies in Book and Print Cultures, such an interdisciplinary approach can also lead to a kind of disorientation, “Because all these disciplines assert their own theoretical assumptions and methodological practices, and each one changes as new generations of scholars cha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface: New Directions for Comics Pedagogy
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Once and Future Pedagogy
• Part I: Foundations of Comics Pedagogy
• Part II: Comics Pedagogy in Practice
• Part III: Future Directions in Comics Pedagogy
• Conclusion: The Great Responsibility of a Comics Pedagogy
• Contributors