The Graphic Classroom is a resource for teachers and librarians to help them stock high quality, educational-worthy, graphic novels and comics in their classroom or school library. I read and review every graphic novel or comic on this blog and give it a rating as to appropriateness for the classroom.
Increasingly comic books and graphic narratives/novels find their way onto literature syllabi. Recent anthologies such as _Teaching Visual Literacy: Using Comic Books, Graphic Novels, Anime, Cartoons, and More to Develop Comprehension and Thinking Skills_, edited by Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher, and _Building Literacy Connections with Graphic Novels: Page by Page, Panel by Panel,_ edited by James Bucky Carter, emphasize the use for such texts in secondary schools. But what are the benefits of teaching comic books and graphic narratives/novels in college? And how do we best go about doing it? This panel seeks papers that discuss the benefits of teaching these new genres in the Literature classroom. Papers may address pedagogical issues and concerns as well as sample lesson plans and/or anecdotes from experience.
Don Jackson teaches "the art of sequential storytelling" as a constructivist pedagogical method to help students develop higher-order thinking skills. His "Cognitive Comics" approach grew from Jackson's original enterprise of developing interactive multi-media comics for promoting literacy in teaching English comprehension.