Teaching visual literacies: The case of The Great American Dust Bowl

Teachers and students require a range of tools to engage with visual texts. Using The Great American Dust Bowlby Don Brown (2013) as an exemplar text, we outline four conceptions of visual literacy: rhetorical, instructional, industrial and visuo-spatial and discuss their use in our literacy education practice. In addition, we provide a brief model of a second text, The Arrival (Tan, 2013) and a list of suggested texts for students at different levels (elementary, middle, and high school). We argue that these tools have the potential to deepen conceptions of visual literacies and empower teachers and students to understand the many ways in which visual texts operate to send message and evoke response and engagement

Breaking the rules [of summer]

Shaun Tan’s picture book/app, Rules of Summer, challenges conceptions of literature and literacy for young people, placing visuals at the center of the narrative in dissonance with printed text. This article explores this nonlinear, yet complex text and reactions to it from preservice and practicing teachers. We explore possibilities for schools, particularly with considering intersections between art education and literacy. We believe teachers can use artful texts like Rules of Summer in interdisciplinary ways to challenge their students, and themselves, to break rules around instruction, literacy practices, art education, and the current testing culture. We find that this narrative invites discomfort and (not) knowing in ways that also challenge traditional ways of literacy teaching, while inviting all readers to question and even break the rules

Students as Critics: Exploring Readerly Alignments and Theoretical Tensions in Satrapi’s Persepolis

This essay draws on the voices of both literary critics and adolescent readers, resulting in a contextualization of critical theory exploring Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. Satrapi’s graphic novel has been praised for its complex composition and story-telling ability. But although it is both a recommended and contested text for an adolescent audience, few have examined the reactions and interpretations of young readers. By placing the voices of adolescent readers alongside critics, I will illustrate that making time for aesthetic reading of a graphic novel results in nuanced and analytical work for adolescent readers, positioning their voices as equal to critics’. This work provides evidence for the deep reading and insightful responses aesthetic reading in interpretive communities cultivates. Within interpretive communities students become critics

Teaching visual literacies: The case of The Great American Dust Bowl

Teachers and students require a range of tools to engage with visual texts. Using The Great American Dust Bowlby Don Brown (2013) as an exemplar text, we outline four conceptions of visual literacy: rhetorical, instructional, industrial and visuo-spatial and discuss their use in our literacy education practice. In addition, we provide a brief model of a second text, The Arrival (Tan, 2013) and a list of suggested texts for students at different levels (elementary, middle, and high school). We argue that these tools have the potential to deepen conceptions of visual literacies and empower teachers and students to understand the many ways in which visual texts operate to send message and evoke response and engagement

Developing Disciplinary Literacy Practices with Comics: Highlighting Students’ Strengths, Questionings, and Knowings in School Spaces

This chapter explores how comics were successfully positioned in three different classrooms, challenging school norms and supporting disciplinary literacy practices. We ask: In what ways does reading comics across content areas support disciplinary literacy practices? Our work occurred across a range of age levels and subject areas, and across diverse school settings. A group of seventh-grade students read The Black Death in social studies, #foodcrisis was used in high school science, and fifth-grade ELA students read El Deafo. Work across these spaces led to our consideration of disciplinary literacy practices and how such practices could be supported by comics

“Beyond the 'ordinariness'”: Arts-based teacher education

This article documents work with pre/in service teachers who are university students across three universities in three regions of the US, across multiple courses.  Given our shared concern about the narrowing of space for imaginative literacy practices in schools, we focus on our collective use of open-ended, arts-based pedagogies as a way to challenge how we, as instructors, and our students conceive of literacy practices. A collection of Shaun Tan texts (including picturebooks, wordless graphic novels, and other multimodal/media texts for young people) served as focus texts across our three classroom contexts.  We found surprise, a problematizing of narrow literacy definitions, and flexibility were all common ways of responding to this open-ended, arts-based literacy work. It resulted in tensions around and challenges of conventional or ordinary classroom literacy practices and pedagogical choices