The Irony of 'Cool Club': the place of comic book reading in schools

Comics and education is usually synonymous with low literacy levels, reluctant readers and a predominantly male audience. Through an ethnographic study of an extra-curricular Graphic Novel Reading Group set up in a secondary school, this paper questions such assumptions and discusses some of the complex issues around the place that comic book reading occupies amongst adolescent readers in educational institutions. It demonstrates the sophistication of their readings of comics through the value placed on form (Groensteen) but acknowledges that it is the marginal cultural position (Pustz) that comics still occupy in Britain which also constitutes much of their value for these teenage readers. The place of comic book reading in schools is thus problematized when one considers actual, as well as implied, readers

'Arts of time and space': the perspectives of a teenage audience on reading novels and graphic novels

This paper explores the different claims teenagers make about their experience of reading novels and graphic novels using empirical data gathered through interviews and reading group discussions. Employing theories of reader response (Iser, Fish, Eco), multimodality (Kress and van Leeuwen), as well as theories of how comics work (McCloud, Groensteen), it argues that the students perceive differences in the areas of participation, imaginative engagement, control and temporality. Reading graphic novels, it concludes, offers these teenagers 'choices', not just in the reading process but in terms of the physical event of reading itself. These 'choices' offer potentials for reading which need to be explored further in educational contexts

'Arts of time and space': the perspectives of a teenage audience on reading novels and graphic novels

This paper explores the different claims teenagers make about their experience of reading novels and graphic novels using empirical data gathered through interviews and reading group discussions. Employing theories of reader response (Iser, Fish, Eco), multimodality (Kress and van Leeuwen), as well as theories of how comics work (McCloud, Groensteen), it argues that the students perceive differences in the areas of participation, imaginative engagement, control and temporality. Reading graphic novels, it concludes, offers these teenagers 'choices', not just in the reading process but in terms of the physical event of reading itself. These 'choices' offer potentials for reading which need to be explored further in educational contexts

Reading Graphic Novels in School: texts, contexts and the interpretive work of critical reading

This paper uses the example of an extra-curricular Graphic Novel Reading Group in order to explore the institutional critical reading practices that take place in English classrooms in the senior years of secondary school. Drawing on Stanley Fish's theory of interpretive communities, it questions the restrictive interpretive strategies applied to literary texts in curriculum English. By looking closely at the interpretive strategies pupils apply to a different kind of text (graphic novels) in an alternative context (an extra-curricular space) the paper suggests that there may be other ways of engaging with text that pupils find less alienating, more pleasurable and less reminiscent of 'work'

Coming ‘Face to Face with the People who Shaped Scotland’: Portrait Galleries, Creative Writing and the Pedagogical Dynamism of the Portrait Image

Museum education literature has paid surprisingly little attention to the distinctiveness of portrait galleries or portraits as a genre, despite the fact that they provide ‘powerful spaces for pedagogy’ (Hooper-Greenhill 2020: 24). Taking an ethnographic approach, this article offers a detailed analysis of such pedagogies at work in one creative writing class based at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. It describes two pedagogical regimes – the institution’s and the guide’s – and explores how they compete to frame the portraits in different ways. Focusing on two specific portraits, and the creative writing produced in response to them, it argues that while the portrait gallery’s implied pedagogy insists on the subject in the portrait, the class tutor focuses on the portrait as object. Employing Hans Belting’s theory of images (2011), the article concludes that there is a distinctive pedagogical dynamism inherent in the portrait genre, which can be mined for different educational purposes