Graphic Novels

Hosted on this blog are a number of syllabi from universities all across the country for classes in a wide variety of subjects. See what comics and graphic novels other professors use and what assignments they're paired with!

English and social studies teacher Larry Ferlazzo explains why and how he uses graphic novels in his classroom in this Education Week blog.

See how professors at other universities are incorporating Graphic Medicine into their courses. Courses range from undergraduate to post-graduate levels with subjects pertaining to health careers, English, Art, and more.

This Columbia University Libraries digital exhibit provides examples of graphic novels assigned in their classrooms. Each example is accompanied by bigger picture questions the graphic novels are having students engage with.

This recording of a Comic-Con International panel outlines how professors are using comics and graphic novels to explore complex and diverse topics in their classrooms.

Professor Billie Hara outlines how she implements reading and creation of comics into her university English classes and includes examples of student work created with the Comic Life computer program. Instructions on how to access The Chronicle of Higher Education can be found here.

This article examines the phenomenon of graphic novels generally, and in particular, their utility in second-language contexts via the example of the graphic adaptation of Klaus Kordon's Der erste Frühling. This text lends itself especially to bridging thematic gaps in 20th-century German literature courses, as well as the "language/literature divide," which is a current topic in language pedagogy. The article provides specific classroom techniques, in-class tasks, and writing assignments that will accommodate the varying student proficiency levels that often challenge instructors in second- and third-year college German courses. Although this article discusses a specific novel for a specific class, the techniques and activities described in clear detail can be applied to a wide variety of texts and subjects.

Scholarship suggests that writing teachers and instructors looking to integrate multimodal composition into their secondary or post-secondary classrooms should consider graphic novels as a mentor text for multimodal literacy. To help those pedagogues unfamiliar with graphic novels, we offer three titles—The Photographer, Operation Ajax, and Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow—students have responded positively to. Herein we offer a summary for each text, a discussion of their uses to teach multimodal literacy, a range of multimodal assignments to pair with each text, and a variety of assessment methods.