What counts as literacy has been redefined in today's classrooms.
Teachers must address what it means to read and live in a multi-literate
world that includes both print text and image text. Focused specifically
on young adult graphic novels in the four primary content areas--math,
language arts, social studies, and science--Using Content-Area Graphic
Texts for Learning: A Guide for Middle-Level Educators by Dr. Meryl
Jaffe and Dr. Katie Monnin empowers twenty-first-century, middle-school
educators to not only better understand content-area graphic novels, but
also teach them. Like their print counterparts, graphic texts reinforce
traditional content-area thinking skills like memory, attention,
cognition, language learning, and sequencing. Unlike print texts,
however, comics and graphic novels reach out to diverse types of
literacy learners and their particular reading strengths, making them
the perfect, high-quality, literary-level texts for core content-area
classrooms. Using Content-Area Graphic Texts for Learning begins with
the building blocks of graphic novel terminology 101, moves into a
detailed look at how graphic texts specifically help and empower
different types of learners, and then branches off into specific
chapters for each of four content areas: math, language arts, social
studies, and science. Each of these content-area chapters includes: an
overview of how graphic novels help students tackle, integrate, and
enhance content-area material; two content-area lesson plans, each
utilizing graphic novels in different ways; a demonstration of what that
lesson plan is asking students to do, focusing on five learning
skills--attention, memory, language, sequencing, and cognition--and how
the lesson aligns with the appropriate content area's Common Core
Standards; a discussion on how graphic novels help different types of
learners succeed in the content-area classrooms; and a list of suggested
graphic novels for each content-area classroom. Jaffe and Monnin more
than make the case for using graphic novels as valid young adult
literary texts that engage students and meet Common Core State Standards
within the content-area classroom.
