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Podcast: Drawing a Dialogue
Episode:

Promoting Literacy with Comic Art Education
Category: Arts
Duration: 00:00:00
Publish Date: 2025-10-27 13:34:07
Description:

Comic art education is an incredibly effective tool to promote literacy in young people. Recently I had a 10 year-old student say to me: “I read that graphic novel quickly because it didn’t have a lot of words.” And I said, “Oh, but you aren’t just reading the words, you are also reading the images!”

Comic books use two types of literacy: Reading and Visual. Visual literacy can be defined as the ability to effectively interpret and create an image. This is a vital skill for young people to develop in our world filled with images! So while it seems like reading should take our young people longer, the skill of interpreting information from images quickly is a powerful and important skill to grow.

Lesson Plan Idea: Adaptation

Do you have a learner who is only interested in reading graphic novels, but you would like to encourage them to read prose books as well? Here are some different ideas and approaches you can take in your classroom to get your readers to branch out!

Comic page to prose page

Ask your reader to adapt a page from a comic book into prose. Use these questions to prompt the exercise:

  1. What information is the text telling the reader?

  2. What information are the images telling the reader?

  3. How can you translate the images into prose?

Prose page to comic page

Ask your reader to adapt a page from a prose book into a comic book page. Use these questions to prompt the exercise:

  1. What information is important to keep as words?

  2. What information can we communicate through images?

  3. How can our character’s feelings be seen on the outside?

  4. How can backgrounds and objects share information with the reader?

Examples and References

There are many graphic novels available that adapt classic literature. Here are a few:

  • Kindred (1979) by Octavia E. Butler, graphic novel adaptation by John Jennings and Damian Duffy (2018).

  • The Great Gatsby (1925) by F Scott Fitzgerald have a number of adaptations, including by K Woodman-Maynard (2021).

  • To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) by Harper Lee, graphic novel by Fred Fordham (2018).

  • Anne Frank's Diary (The Diary of a Young Girl) by Anne Frank, graphic novel adaptation by David Polonsky and Ari Folman (2018).

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 Kindred.jpg
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 ToKillAMockingbird.jpeg
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