Where image and text meet identity: Gifted students’ poetry comics and the crafting of “nerd identities”

This article reports on a study of how a class of fifteen- and sixteen-year-old gifted high school students “mixed” the media of poetry and comics to unveil and interrogate (what they called) their “nerd identities.” Both co-authors constructed and co-taught a class within a literature-based comics course that led students through various writing processes that focused on the visual and textual properties of poetry and comics. Researchers asked: How may gifted students use poetry and comics to write about identity? How can the mixing of poetry and comics contribute to media literacy education? Using their poetry comics to connect their “nerd identities” to superheroes, students reported seeing parallels between the trials and tribulations of superhero origin stories and their own “gifted” identity

Framing Narratives: Gifted Students' Comic Memoirs in the English Classroom

This dissertation focuses on the literacy practices of three focal students who composed multimodal comic memoirs about the emotional struggles and obstacles they faced related to being labeled academically gifted and talented. As a qualitative action research study (Hewitt & Little, 2005; Munn-Giddings, 2012), in which the teacher of the focal classroom was the primary researcher, a sociocultural framework (Dunsmore & Fischer, 2010; Wertsch, 1991) was employed to investigate the three focal students’ uses of multimodal composition to address the research questions: RQ1, In what ways do gifted secondary students use the comics medium to produce multimodal memoirs? RQ2, What experiences do gifted secondary students represent when they design comic memoirs? and RQ3, What do gifted secondary students reveal about competing representations of race, gender, class, and giftedness as they depict themselves in comic memoirs? To address the research questions, the researcher used a qualitative case study design (Merriam, 1998; Yin, 2009), collecting data over five years (2013–2017) while teaching a literature-based comics class at a summer enrichment program for gifted secondary students. Based on a conceptual framework comprising the intersections of literacy practices related to multiliteracies (Sanders and Albers, 2010) and multimodalities (New London Group, 1996) in connection with visual literacy skills (Frey & Fisher, 2008), data analysis included a variant of grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), Situational Analysis (Clarke, 2005), which takes a cartographic approach to the collection and analysis of data within the study’s situation, including its environment, social spheres, and setting. Findings point to the focal students’ deep-seated emotional turmoil related to gender, racial, and gifted identities; reports of emotionally debilitating social and academic expectations connected to giftedness; and personal narratives of being silenced and socially alienated. Implications are discussed concerning how the unique visual literacy strategies available while making comic memoirs helped the focal students gain perspective on and insight into their struggles with identity and related social and cultural practices