The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast, Episode 126 Transcript
Jennifer Gonzalez, host
Every now and then a teacher shares something with me that so completely blows me away that I know in an instant that I’m going to be sharing it on my site.
That happened this past March, when I shared an old post on Twitter about graphic novels. A teacher named Shveta Miller just happened to see it and responded by telling me not about the graphic novels she and her students were reading, but about the graphic novels her students had written. “My students have often used their graphic novel projects to explore a private aspect of their identity,” she wrote. “The genre allows our young writers a language they can use to describe complex emotions and concepts before they have the skills to do so in narrative form alone.”
I was intrigued, so I asked her to tell me more. Through direct messages she started showing me images from a graphic novel one of her students had created, and right away I saw exactly what she was talking about. The story—simply constructed with just a few words, basic lines, and stick figures—was deeply personal, and it was told with a kind of minimalist elegance I had never seen in my own years in the classroom.
The more Shveta talked to me about the reasons this form enabled so many of her students to put out work like this, the more I was convinced she was really onto something, and we needed to share it here.
So that’s what Shveta and I are going to dig into today: How teaching students to write in the graphic novel form can produce some incredible results: It not only enables students to tell richer, more personal stories, but it also helps teachers understand their students on a completely different level, making the graphic novel form a powerful tool for social-emotional learning and relationship-building.
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Now here’s my interview with Shveta Miller about student-written graphic novels.
GONZALEZ: So I would like to welcome Shveta Miller to the podcast. Shveta, thank you so much for coming on.
MILLER: Happy to be here, Jenn.
GONZALEZ: We talked, gosh, I think it was probably two months ago now, where you had posted something on Twitter of just pictures of these graphic novel sort of personal narratives that your students had written. And I, like, was so excited about the results that you said you had from these kids that I immediately went on Twitter and talked about what an amazing post this was going to be someday, and I wasn’t going to tell anybody what it was about, but this is what it was because I thought it was just so, I don’t know. I was just floored by it. And so finally we have worked on putting together a really nice post on it, and we’re going to talk a lot about this whole topic. But let me back up for a second and just tell our listeners what you do.
MILLER: Okay. Well I taught English at the high school and college level for nearly 15 years. Now I am a consultant who coaches teachers on English language and literacy instruction.
GONZALEZ: Fantastic. Okay. So we’re basically talking about graphic novels, and really the focus is on not only teaching students to read and appreciate the graphic novel but how to actually write their own sort of shorter version using the style and the genre of the graphic novel. So if you could, just tell us a little bit about your experience and when you realized that having students write their own could be so powerful.
MILLER: Right. Well like you said, my initial plan was to really just equip students with the close reading skills they would need to critically read and analyze visual text, visual narratives like graphic novels. And as the assessment, I wanted them to actually put what they learned to use by creating one. And, now I had had students write personal narratives before, like any English teacher. And they’re always exciting because you get to learn more about your students’ experiences, and I had definitely read engaging ones before.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: But once they turned in their graphic novels, and I started reading page after page I realized that something about the way they were telling these personal narratives was very different. I really just —
GONZALEZ: Right.
MILLER: I wasn’t prepared for how deeply personal, often traumatic, the subject matter was going to be.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: So my students, I mean they covered things like mental health issues in their families, learning disabilities they’d been struggling with their whole lives. Some of them announced sexual identities for the first time in their graphic novels —
GONZALEZ: Wow.
MILLER: — experiences with racism. So it really started to appear like they were serving as a way for students to express and visualize their anxieties, and it looked like the graphic novel was a means even for them to alleviate those anxieties.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: So even more surprising was as I was reading page after page of these stories, I was actually starting to see myself, and my own teaching reflected back to me in the illustrated pages. I was, I was just seeing the complex backgrounds and experiences my students were coming into class with every day, and I, I just found myself rethinking conversations I had had with them in light of what I was now learning.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. And you, this was actually the example that you had first shared with me online of one particular student where you really just learned so much about him and saw yourself in his story.
MILLER: Yes, yeah. So that would be, we’ll call him Lewis. And Lewis was at the time what we call selectively mute. So an anxiety disorder where a child doesn’t speak in certain social situations but can communicate freely in other, in other areas. So coming into, and again, this was high school, so it was known that Lewis was mute all through his high school years. So he was a very studious person, always completing assigned work but, you know, sitting quietly in the back of the class, never asking questions or responding. And so Lewis chose to write his graphic novel about his mutism. And it was a way for him to really finally speak, and what he communicated, just like you said, really changed my teaching in profound ways. I, he narrated and drew his obstacles that he had experienced with trying to overcome his mutism. So really he was trying to show, “I want to speak, but I’m experiencing these really debilitating obstacles like stereotypes and stigmatizing labels from peers and teachers alike.” And so, so the way that he was able to use the form and the devices that we had studied and practiced to narrate this had this surprising impact on me as a reader, just really seeing my own teaching behaviors and how they were maybe complicit in what he had experienced.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. What, give me an example of one of those behaviors that you sort of saw. Because I’m remembering the panels and he definitely never named you, but you still kind of saw something that very well may have been you or somebody else like you. And what was that teacher doing?
MILLER: Yeah. So, so we’ll talk more about this a little later too, but one of the, you know, defining characteristics of graphic novels and comics is cartooning.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: And, so the, the nature of the cartoon is that it’s this super abstracted image where you’re, Scott McCloud in his groundbreaking work called “Understanding Comics” describes it as amplification through simplification. So Lewis drew the teachers, the students and the protagonist, himself, as stick figures. So the most abstract cartooning you can do. And the teacher drawings were, you can picture a stick figure with a large circle face but nothing in the face, so no eyes, nose, mouth. So first of all, just that absence of detail there to me really emphasized the meaning, the essential meaning I think he was trying to convey, which was sort of this inability to relate.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: And they, the reason I kind of knew immediately this was the teacher, even though it was just a stick figure with an empty face is that they’re drawn at an intentional distance from the students. You know, there’s not much in these panels. Two stick figures, but the size and distance of the teacher makes it clear that this is an authority figure.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: And then there’s a little rectangle on the stick figure arm and it looks like a briefcase, which to me kind of is like, okay, if you could choose any symbol to attach to a stick figure to indicate “teacher” he chose a briefcase? Like to me that, that really made me think of this, like, no nonsense attitude, I’m all business, kind of persona that he at least was seeing in his teachers.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MILLER: Which I’ll say, yeah, I was, I could see myself in that at that time.
GONZALEZ: Right. Well, and because you were, you had been frustrated with him in your class, not really understanding how to meet his needs, how to bring him into the fold of the classroom, and so you saw your own sort of impatience in the way these, these figures were drawn.
MILLER: Yes, yes. At that point in my career I, I definitely didn’t have that expertise to, to draw him out and, you know, with large class sizes and, and all that it was easier at the time to kind of say, okay, well he’s always been like this.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: It was just kind of more convenient at the time to really work around that.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MILLER: Um, so yes, I was, I was, I started to really question, you know, how, what was my role in the pain my, this student and all my students were experiencing in their school days and beyond?
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. So, and so this really was sort of the point that you had, had brought to me was just that having, allowing students to use this form brought so much out. It helped you to get to know them so much better, and it also just made you a much more sort of intuitive, sensitive teacher to them. So, and we’ve started to kind of dive into the why of all of this and why it actually has this impact. So let’s now like shift gears and talk about those reasons, because since then, you’ve really started to study the, the genre of the graphic novel. And it’s sort of no accident that these things ended up coming up when the kids started to use the form. So what are the reasons, what have you learned about with the graphic novel form that makes it such a powerful medium for kids to actually use as, as a creative tool?
MILLER: So all compelling text I think we, as teachers would agree are, share characteristics. They’re ripe with ambiguity. They take time, attention, and care to create and consume. They provoke thinking, challenge assumptions, they can initiate and weave a conversation. They’ll nudge us to act and connect deeper within us. So graphic novels, with their combination of words and pictures, can tell stories like this for yeah, like you said, so many unique reasons. And one of them is what we talked about a little bit, the cartooning.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MILLER: And how representing, really doing that, amplifying certain messages and meaning through simplifying your drawings actually invites readers to participate in ways that are personally meaningful and relevant. And I want to share one kind of illustrative example here with L— recently I read an interview of Chris Ware, American cartoonist Chris Ware, in the Paris Review, and he describes in detail his early experience with comics, reading them as a kid and how he so empathized with Charlie Brown’s predicaments in the, in Peanuts that he actually mailed a valentine card to the newspaper to express his concern for, for Charlie Brown. And, and later he actually describes that he even cut out his face and superimposed it onto the bodies of the superheroes he was reading in his comics. And I thought, wow, that just perfectly illustrates what I was describing happened to me with Lewis. I didn’t cut out my face and put it in his, in his graphic novel.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: But that’s essentially what I was doing.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MILLER: And so that, that form of abstracting, you know, I just wondered would Chris Ware, would I, would readers really have that empathy for what they’re seeing in these panels if they were drawn with much more detail, if they looked more like portraiture or realistic drawings.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MILLER: And, and I, you know, from what I’ve learned, no, you know, that, that’s harder to do.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: And so, like another example from Lewis’ would be, you know, we talked about how I as the teacher was empathizing with what I was reading, but the students, his peers, could see themselves in the anonymous way that these stick figures were drawn, the other students in his, in his comic. And, you know, they were also sort of complicit in, in the stigmatizing labels that he encountered throughout his school day, the anonymous drawings like they did for me and for, you know, other, other readers of comics for the history of the form, really make that, make that participation possible.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: So for example the hallway that he’s sitting in, you know, is just, there’s just a line halfway through the panel to demarcate, you know, wall from the ground, and he’s sitting on the ground as a stick figure and really there’s just so much generality to that picture that anyone looking at it could really fill it up with any, with any place that would be personally relevant.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: So this doesn’t have to be in a school, you know, it could be anywhere.
GONZALEZ: When, when you talked about this, when we were sort of working on the, the post and everything, it was such an epiphany to read about this, because you know, when somebody describes something that you’ve always experienced but you didn’t know that it was a thing. I mean, and I’ve never really been that drawn to the types of comics that are very realistic looking. And I, I never understood why, I never understood why I was more drawn to the more cartoony, simple ones. And, and now I understand that there is a psychology behind that, because you fill in your own details when, when it’s really, really simple and kind of spare. Versus when something is really drawn very detailed, then it’s being given to you instead. And so you may or may not relate to what the author is doing.
MILLER: Yeah, and, and it’s, it’s also just that by choosing, like, there’s a lot of care and thought put into because you’re only drawing so much, a lot of attention put into well what are you going to include?
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah.
MILLER: So why am I going to put a rectangle there to signify a briefcase?
GONZALEZ: Right.
MILLER: What are the implications of that?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: So, you know, not that they’re sort of off the hook for, you know, including so much detail, but really that there’s a lot of attention to what is being included to, to signify meaning.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: Also, I think that because it sort of creates this very universal response and participation and empathy, you know, having studied a graphic novel, you know, in our unit before creating their own and really observing that at work, I can’t help but, but wonder if that was influencing students to really broach topics that they wouldn’t ordinarily, you know, when they thought about the way that they, we had studied Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis,” which we can talk about more later. But, you know, when they found themselves, you know, experiencing empathy for Marji —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: — and other characters in the, in the novel, really kind of somehow maybe subconsciously invited them to —
GONZALEZ: Oh I bet it did.
MILLER: — cover topic, yeah.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. I bet it did. I mean that’s, that’s the great thing about any kind of literature is it shows you this, somebody else has gone before me and done this, and it gives you permission to do the same thing. And you know this whole, before we leave this topic of the cartoonish, the simplistic thing, I think the other great thing about that is that for any of your students who don’t feel that they are artistically gifted, it’s, it gives everybody, you know, free rein to, look, you can convey incredibly strong emotions with very simple lines and stick figures. You don’t have to have great artistic skill.
MILLER: Right, exactly.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: And they finally just one, one important piece was that I think that it, another reason students really kind of dove into really emotional stories was, that there was this distance from the stories, that they might not have been able to have if, were they to narrate them completely in prose.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: It, it really helped, like, okay, this is an anonymous stick figure.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MILLER: Like, this could happen to anyone.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MILLER: Wasn’t necessarily happening to me.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. That’s an important point. That really is. Because it’s another thing that I don’t think people would necessarily be able to articulate, but it’s so true that if you, it’s just this little doodle that you’re drawing, it’s like, ah, this is just a little story I’m telling, and, and that gives them permission to, to do some pretty serious revealing of themselves.
MILLER: Right.
GONZALEZ: So okay. So one, one feature of the graphic novel form that allows it to become so powerful is that this cartoon form can, can really create empathy in your audience, because they can fill in a lot of their own details. What is the, what’s the second feature?
MILLER: So the next thing I want to talk about is how really no story is too complex for the graphic novel form. And this is kind of a well-known, I think, or increasingly known idea with teachers teaching the graphic novel is that it, it builds content schema for readers. So you often hear or read articles about graphic novels being used to build content knowledge, background knowledge in science or social studies, you know, there’s a huge field of science comics, mental health comics and now even graphic medicine is a growing genre.
GONZALEZ: Oh wow.
MILLER: Yeah. I, I could talk on and on about just that, but — so why? You know, why is, why can you build content knowledge in the graphic novel form? So obviously it’s that combination of words and pictures but more specifically it’s the interdependent relationship between the words and pictures. So Scott McCloud and also seminal comics influencer and writer Will Eisner talk about this in great detail as the difference between visuals and illustrations, so.
GONZALEZ: Let me stop you for one second, because I want to make sure that we say these book titles to people, and we’re going to have links over on the blog post. Are these two separate books? There’s one called “Understanding Comics,” right, by Chris Ware?
MILLER: Yes.
GONZALEZ: Or no, Scott McCloud.
MILLER: No, so, yes, Scott McCloud wrote “Understanding Comics” and you’ll find it a lot of high school teachers’ classrooms already. And then a key draw is from an even more foundational text called “Comics and Sequential Art” by Will Eisner.
GONZALEZ: Eisner, got it, okay. I wanted to just make sure we really clearly said both book titles in case people are listening and wanting to look those up right now while they’re listening. Okay.
MILLER: Sure. So they talk about visuals versus illustrations and how, you know, an illustration kind of repeats the text whereas a visual really works interdependently with it. The combination of that visual and the text, the caption or the dialogue really create more than what either could do alone. And, so one example of how this kind of builds background knowledge for, for readers so that they can, they can read and participate in concepts that are really complex for them is in “Persepolis,” in one of the very early pages, she uses the word “prophet.” And that’s a pretty heavy term for a lot of readers.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: And, you know, she doesn’t need to explain or qualify that term with a positive, you know, phrase in the caption. She shows the person, you know, dressed in what looks like a holy robe and carrying a holy book and pointing towards God and she has disciples around her. So, you know, kind of the concepts can become clear with this interdependent relationship.
GONZALEZ: Right, right.
MILLER: And you can just imagine that really honest brutality. You can approach, you can, you can have when you’re, when you’re talking about things like anxiety disorders or death or racism or other, other traumatic experiences.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: I wanted to mention this experience I had when I was sort of reading more about trauma informed teaching and just the traumatic experiences that inform the behaviors that we often see in the classroom, that we can see in our students in the classroom. So when you learn about, you know, toxic stress and having a dis-regulated stress response, often the medical field and professionals will, will talk about it in terms of using an allegory of encountering a bear in the wild. So you see a bear and, you know, your, your cortisol increases, you have more adrenaline. You have this flight or fight response. And then when talking about young people with dis-regulated stress responses, they say now what would happen, now imagine what happens when the bear is in your home, you know, when you’re living with the bear, when essentially you’re experiencing traumatic stress on a daily basis. So when I was learning about that, my daughter was actually reading “Real Friends,” a graphic novel by Shannon Hale, which I think a lot of listeners will recognize, and you might, you might recall that in that graphic novel, she’s narrating her experience growing up with a sister who had a specific mental health issue that, that was very prominent in her upbringing.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: And she’s illustrated, the sister’s illustrated as a bear for, for many pages. And so I just remember looking over my daughter’s shoulder and seeing this and just thinking about exactly that, that content schema that, you know, writers of graphic novels but also young readers, all readers, can really access these complex issues and, you know, health issues or, or whatever variety of traumatic experiences through that relationship between text and, and visuals.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MILLER: Another, you know, kind of distinct characteristic when anyone opens a comic or graphic novel that they’ll notice is boxes, right?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: So panels and frames and there’s a space between those boxes.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MILLER: And the professional, the official term for that space are, it’s “gutters.” And so every time you move from an image and text within one box to the next, you are drawing conclusions, what happened in between.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: And sometimes those conclusions you’re drawing are pretty basic, like the, the transitions are just moment to moment, action to action. But sometimes they’re very large, gaps that occur between, between each panel. So in terms of communicating complex experiences, what this allows and, a graphic novelist to do is, for example, show a variety of perspectives just within two panels or within one page, a variety of time periods. So in “Persepolis” you see a lot of examples of this. You know, she catches us up on thousands of years of Iranian history —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: — through, through carefully composed panel transitions.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MILLER: And Marji the narrator herself, you know, describes her whole life by jumping back and forth between when she was a baby to being a teenager to 10 years old.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: All within one page.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: So, so just, you know, that time jumping, that ability to create flashbacks and also just to really invite readers to draw difficult conclusions on their own —
GONZALEZ: Right.
MILLER: — between those panels.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: So going back to Lewis, and, and his story about his mutism, you know there’s one scene in there that I can imagine for him was probably, would have been very difficult to describe in, in prose where he actually has his moment to, to try to speak, and he’s built himself up, you know, in the, in the pages beforehand to say, I’m going to do it this time.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: And, and he doesn’t, you know, he doesn’t, he isn’t able to do it. A student calls out, “Oh he doesn’t talk,” you know and that’s, that’s one of those labels that, that prevents him from really, really going through with what he wanted to do. And so in his, in his side by side panels, you don’t see the moments where he’s just standing there, hands sweaty, peers snickering, teacher rolling their eyes. You don’t see all of that. That’s not all described or visualized. You jump to the next panel where he’s lying down on the floor.
GONZALEZ: Right, oh.
MILLER: And, and he’s just clearly defeated there. So, you know, those, those gutters of spaces, you know, not only do they help build reader participation, but they really kind of influence the writer to, to really kind of go there, go to, to moments that maybe they wouldn’t have gone in a different form.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MILLER: Knowing that, that they’re, that they don’t have to really say everything.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MILLER: So another, another piece I want to mention about the value here of, of our students creating these graphic novels is, is who they get to share them with. So another defining feature of graphic novels and comics is the wider audience they appeal to, which, you know, you don’t have to go far to find articles written about that and, and how they engage all types of readers of different skill levels and interests. So I want to just kind of start with an experience I had at home. I was reading Jerry Craft’s “New Kid,” a new graphic novel that came out to much praise this year and my daughter was sitting next to me and just couldn’t help but peer over my shoulder.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: And essentially read the entire graphic novel with me over the shoulder. And so there’s just this real, real potential for communal experience with graphic novels that I, I don’t, I, at least, don’t have at home when I’m reading really dense prose text.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MILLER: And then she, when she’s reading her graphic novels and she’s laughing out loud and she really wants to share something with me, you know, she wants to read them aloud to me and she kind of describes what’s, she holds the book in her hands and describes what’s happening and, and reads the captions and I’m just sitting there like, ah, ah, ah, I need to see it for myself.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: And I just take it and put it in my lap and just have, you know, so I can kind of control my own pace of reading. And this is something that Scott McCloud talks about and also Gene Luen Yang, who’s an award-winning graphic novelist who wrote “American Born Chinese.” He talks about, he’s also an English teacher, and he talks about how this is why we, you know, more teachers can be teaching graphic novels in the classroom is that students can take ownership of their own learning. There’s this ability to control time when you’re reading a graphic novel. You know, you can really look at the panels in your own order, really dwell on one image longer than another. So when I was reading about that, reading what was written about that, I couldn’t help but think about one of these other graphic novels my student, one of my students had made. And it was about how his baby brother had nearly died and, and the anxiety that that caused for him up into his teen years. And I just imagine, like, that student being able to really share his story with his family or with a young brother, with an inexperienced reader, and I started imagining the implications for, for their relationships with, with people outside of the, the skilled readers in their classroom and, and their teacher.
GONZALEZ: So this, this genre, this form, really seems to have just a ton of factors in it that make it so powerful for, for students telling their stories.
MILLER: Right, yes. So, so like I said earlier, a big surprising outcome here was what it was doing for students, for, for them to deal, kind of navigate their, their experiences and, and that it was even potentially healing for them. But in terms of for me, what it did for my teaching. So in trauma-informed teaching, it’s known that it kind of takes a community response, right, to really, to really address the pain in our classrooms and the experiences students are coming in with.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: But it’s also acknowledged that it can really start with relationship-building in the classroom. And I think that that starts with hearing students’ stories.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: And because our students are coming into the classroom with trauma, the graphic novel’s unique form really allows for communication of that trauma to the teacher who can then potentially serve as that buffering adult, that trusted adult who can teach in, you know, what Zaretta Hammond calls the culturally responsive way, a way that will, you know, influence teachers to think how am I, you know, how am I decreasing cortisol for this student today?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: How am I building dopamine? How can I be responsive to those needs while still building critical literacy skills.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. So my guess is that by this point, people listening are really going to want to learn how they can actually do this with their own students. And you really did sort of develop over the years a process that, that leads students in through the process of studying the form as readers first and then transitioning into using those skills themselves. So can you sort of walk us through how a teacher might replicate this in their own classroom?
MILLER: Yes, let’s dive, let’s dive into that. So I taught this, like I said, using Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis,” as our mentor text, and this was in a high school setting. But the results can be accomplished at any grade level with a variety of graphic novels being used as the mentor test.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MILLER: So one thing to start with would be learn about the form yourself. So those titles I mentioned earlier are really a central place to start. I can also recommend kind of a shorter read, Barbara Slate’s “You Can Do a Graphic Novel” too. And also Raina Telgemeier of, you know, of middle grade graphic novel fame is, just released “Share Your Smile,” which is a guide for younger readers to think about, start journaling and writing their own graphic novels.
GONZALEZ: Fantastic, yeah.
MILLER: Yeah. So those are some ideas. Next, you would want to choose a graphic novel for your mentor, to serve as your mentor text. And just like not all short stories are the same, not all graphic novels are the same. So you can, you’ll find plots of simple obvious action and also subject matter and theme of, of great sophistication.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MILLER: So kind of consider what will be age appropriate in terms of text complexity and themes, but rich enough in terms of the devices and techniques that you’ll learn about when you read those initial books. Also consider what will connect with students’ experiences but also expose them to new ideas and concepts, and, and you might consider, you know, connecting to social studies or science content students have learned or are learning. So next, when you launch the unit with students, over time I really took to heart what I learned from Zaretta Hammond and others about building a relational trust with students to kind of, as she puts it, get their permission to push them into their proximal zone of development. So when I started launching the unit with students later I, I first made sure to, to give them an opportunity to show me what they already knew, and I think this is increasingly important now with how common graphic novels are in classrooms and in, in the hands of our student readers.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: So they’re coming in with some, with some skills here. So I like to use a KWL chart, which stands for know, want to know, and learn, so students can share what they already know about reading graphic novels, questions they have, and then of course at the end they get to confidently fill out that learned, that learned column.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MILLER: I also photocopy a page of a graphic novel, usually not the one I’m going to teach, and just ask students to do a quick free write. I say, what’s happening and how do you know? That’s all I say and invite them to just free write, real low stakes, writing opportunity, so that I can kind of see where they are in terms of their ability to kind of closely read the form. And this will really help me determine what my outcomes should be for this unit, what, what the possibilities really are. So then I create a list of possible objectives, not just one, and because, you know, I want, I want students to be able to choose end goals that are, that make sense, given their starting point and where they want to be.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MILLER: So I, I provide sort of a variety of options there. And students will then kind of fill out what I, what I give as a personal goals chart where they simply indicate where I started, where I want to be, which is where they can list two or three of these objectives.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: And then at the end, where I am, which is based on their end project, feedback, and then where do I want to go next, because, you know, I want, I want students to understand that the learning doesn’t stop with that, with that culminating project.
GONZALEZ: Right. Could you, could you, so that people can sort of picture what this might look like for one individual student, can you give me an example of the type of skill within this graphic novel unit that a person, how would they describe where I am now, where I want to be, and where I go next?
MILLER: Great question, yeah. So for example, a student for “where I started” might say, you know, just copying from their KWL chart, like, what do they already know?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: A student might write, “never read a graphic novel, not too interested in making one.”
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: “Might be fun to read.” “Looks easy.” You know, things like that. Or based on their very first free write diagnostic, you know, that they basically wrote a summary of what happened, “one to two boxes didn’t make sense to me,” so things like that.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MILLER: So in terms of where I want to be, some examples of objectives I provided as options. A student who’s starting with that might choose something like, “understand that the graphic novel form has more to it than I thought and be able to explain how it can be a meaningful form of expression.” They might choose, “I want to be able to communicate ideas and emotions using graphic storytelling devices.”
GONZALEZ: Got it.
MILLER: Another student, you know if they’re coming in with a little more experience and interest might choose something like, I want to understand more about how a graphic novel author constructs the story and communicates emotion and theme. A student then at the end, where I am, based on their end assessment results will look at that same list of objectives and say, okay, well did I meet the ones that I indicated where I wanted to be or can I actually choose additional ones that I, I have accomplished as well?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: And honestly, that’s usually the case. I mean when we, when we get students to articulate their own learning goals in the beginning, they often exceed them.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah.
MILLER: And so finally, where they might want to go next, so imagine a student who, you know, really met a lot of the initial objectives they had chosen. Now they might choose one of the more advanced options like go beyond the common techniques or those we studied to actually reinvent or experiment or discover unique ways of telling a story in graphic form.
GONZALEZ: Right, right. Okay. Good. That helps me to picture what this actually could look like. Okay. So once they’ve sort of set those goals, and you’ve kind of figured out where everybody is, and I love the fact that you’re not necessarily just going in with a boilerplate of, these are going to be the objectives for everybody, every year, every time I teach this, you’re adjusting based on the diagnostic. I think that’s great.
MILLER: Right, right.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: And so finally, you know, for “Persepolis” there was some context I wanted to provide initially, just politically and, you know, geographically where, where is Iran?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: What was the Islamic Revolution?
GONZALEZ: But mostly, you know, we, we encountered that, and researched references as they came up in the reading. So as, as your readers are launching their units, just kind of consider what, what do they want to front load and, and what can be learned throughout the process.
GONZALEZ: Got it. Okay, so what’s next after that?
MILLER: So then we start reading. We start reading. Now that you’ve chosen your text and gotten students invested and we have some goals, we’re ready to learn, we’re ready to see an example of this in action so over time, I found out that it works better when we, when I first give students pages to look at on their own, and just independently free write, again, like we mentioned earlier, about what they’re seeing, what they’re noticing.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: So again, simply what, what happened, how do you know? Or what is Marji feeling, how do you know?
GONZALEZ: And these would be pages, this time it would be pages from this particular book, would this be, like from the early sections of it?
MILLER: Yes, yes. So we’re, we’re essentially, at least what I did was we read the, the book mostly in class, and so, so during their, while we’re looking at the pages, before we basically discuss it, students have the opportunity to first just free write what they’re noticing. Then they turn to either partners or small groups where they can, they have something already prepared, some independent thinking that they’ve done, and now they can bring that together and try to kind of building some consensus around what happened in those assigned pages or that chapter. Sometimes it’s even just one page.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MILLER: From there I ask them to now report out to the whole group and at this point, they’re still using their own language, their very casual, everyday terms.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: So they might say something like, oh well we noticed that MarjI’s in a really small box here. She’s drawn really small.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: And so at this point is where to me it makes sense to now give them the terms, the language that they need to be more specific and precise.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MILLER: So I might say, okay, so we can say that Marji is in a narrow frame.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: Or students might say, like, oh, there’s no boxes on this page, and it’s one picture, and it takes up the whole page, and now they can learn the term “splash.”
GONZALEZ: Right, right.
MILLER: So in this initial reading process, they’re uncovering the terms and concepts and devices and strategies, so what I’ll do as well to vary the, the learning experiences and really build some long-term memory here is I might put the devices on, like, chart papers around the room and invite students to circulate and add page numbers, panel numbers of where, where they’ve seen these devices in their reading.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: And so students who are kind of struggling with certain devices and, and really finding examples of them can see a variety there and, and really all students benefit from just seeing how differently a device can be used across the whole, the whole novel.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. The, the way you’re describing this, I’m imagining there have got to be some teachers listening right now who are thinking, oh wow. When I tried to teach a graphic novel, I just handed it to students and told them to read it. And I’m sure there are people that have felt that they failed with graphic novels, say it just didn’t work with my class. And I think what you’re modeling for us is a much slower, much more deliberate process of really teaching them how to read a graphic novel, because they’re — I think when a person first experiences it, they, they may get a little lost if they don’t understand, you know, how to experience it fully and how to interpret certain things. And then once you learn you can kind of attack any graphic novel. But I really loved the way you’re, you’re kind of easing them into it and doing a lot of modeling and all of that so that they really can appreciate all of those details as opposed to just kind of glazing over them all.
MILLER: Right, and, and I think what you’ll often hear teachers say or your readers in your life say is that they devoured the graphic novel. “I read it in one night,” you know.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: Which is great, which is, which is part of it, which is part of that experience and important. But yeah, like you said, this is that, what we’re doing in, in our literacy classrooms is teaching that second and third and subsequent read for, for deeper meaning.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: And really if you’re using it as a mentor text to eventually create one on your own, you know, you’re going to need that, that deliberate attention.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: You’re right. So speaking of that, we then moved to those subsequent closer reads.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: So I’ll share some ideas that I, I learned over time have been successful with, with equipping students with that ability to not only closely read what’s happening on a given page but articulate that in writing. So first I do model close reading by just thinking aloud and making visible those metacognitive strategies we use as experienced graphic novel readers.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MILLER: So they can see that happen. So I might, you know, in that process I’ll be asking questions, I’ll use my knowledge of devices to try to answer my own questions. I’ll challenge my own answers. And then students are invited to try to do that with partners or small groups using that language I’ve modeled.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
MILLER: So then I also assign short, written close readings periodically. It might be, you know, once or twice a week where students can choose a panel or a page or I’ll assign one. And sometimes I might give a prompt like, what do you think the author’s communicating with the different uses of black and white in Chapter 8? Or notice the shapes and sizes of panels in Chapter 1. What significance do those choices have on your understanding of the story? So I might give a guide like that. Other times it might be free where students can, can write what they’re, what they’re noticing.
GONZALEZ: Got it.
MILLER: So what’s important about those though is that they’re not graded, you know. They’re, they’re purely formative writing opportunities that give me feedback on if students are reading beyond the surface and also like if there was a chapter or a certain panel that, you know, no one could really make meaning from. So, so from there, you know, I have my next steps in terms of what I want to review, what panels I want us all to take a closer look at together. So now remembering that this isn’t just about learning to read and analyze a graphic novel, but also create one.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: An important experience for students is what’s kind of been written about as, called micro-writing, which are those low stakes, short bursts, write to learn and share and connect, you know, practice the process type opportunities. So in a graphic novel what would that look like? So what I would have students do is choose a panel or a device that they see in the mentor text, that they seen in “Persepolis,” and attempt to create their own panel with any subject matter using that device. So, for example, in one panel in “Persepolis,” what’s happening in the story is that she’s staying in Iran even though many of her friends and acquaintances are moving out of the country. And she feels alone, and the reason she’s staying is because her parents want her to have access to, to her French education that she has there. And so the way that she communicates her feelings about this are, you know, she uses techniques like scale and shading and repetition in her drawing. And, you know, there are examples of this in, in the blog post, images of this that listeners can see. Well one of my students chose that panel, because he really related to that experience. He moved to our high school that year, and it was a new school, and he also, you know, had to leave his friends and acquaintances and was moving to this school also for access to some valuable education for some unknown future.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MILLER: And so he, he also used that same, those same devices from Satrapi’s panel to communicate that same feeling of intimidation and fear in his own. So, so examples like that really help students first of all start to see that this learning, what they’re learning is valuable.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: Like, oh, I want to talk about that fight my friends and I had, and I want to use subject to subject panel transitions so I can show what each friend was thinking in the moment. Or they can, what they also end up doing eventually is using these panels that they’ve created just as low stakes writing assignments.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: As their, you know, in their final graphic novels.
GONZALEZ: Right, right.
MILLER: So that brings us to the project, to actually assigning the graphic novel that they’re going to create. So this would be their opportunity to really experience how to create that compelling text, to experience the time and attention and care it takes to create a graphic story.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MILLER: You might consider asking, you know, think about really what your end goals are. Do they need to create a really long graphic novel? Would a six-pager suffice? I’ve seen teachers assign just really one page was enough for them to see that, that they now have these new tools and can use them with some ease, with some fluency.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: So, so you, you know, you can consider this scope. I would certainly involve students in creating the success criteria for the project. So, for example, now they, it’s not just me who’s done all this studying of, of the devices, but they have as well. And they’ve noticed strategies and techniques in “Persepolis” that I had not noticed on my own. So now together we can kind of think about, well like, what should our projects really, what do they really essentially need to have in order to be a compelling text like “Persepolis” is for us?
GONZALEZ: Right.
MILLER: And so, so we, I use, I asked them all to submit one criterion, and I consider those as I craft a, what you’ll be happy to hear is a single point rubric for, for the project, which we’ll talk about just in a moment when we get to assessment. But as students are creating their projects, I devote class time to that, to them creating it. And also something I know you’ve talked about a lot on your podcast is, you know, I’ll use your, the term you’ve used, dog fooding, is I’ll, I’ll go ahead and model it, you know, for like a five-minute do now in the beginning of class over the course of a week, I’ll create a couple of panels of my own graphic novel to sort of model that process. And like you said earlier, really helps to show students, like, you don’t need sophisticated drawing skills here, because I definitely didn’t have those.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MILLER: And they just, again, really making visible that metacognition that’s involved in the process. So, and just for listeners who are feeling like, I am not, I am not going to be writing my own graphic novel.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MILLER: I really didn’t. I know that, I know that you, you in your personal narrative articles have described writing the full story. I have only ever done just a few panels of a story.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: And then, you know, I also have like five classes, so I was doing different narratives at one time, you know, in one day.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah.
MILLER: So I just, you know, and you also don’t necessarily have to do a personal, personal memoir type experience. So if that —
GONZALEZ: Right.
MILLER: — helps teachers do that, then I would encourage, you know, thinking about different ways to dog food. Also what I ended up doing over time was I had mini lessons, like mini workshops that I would run in the class. While students were working on their graphic novels, they could sign up for a mini lesson.
GONZALEZ: Yes, and I love this, and these are voluntary for them to attend, which I think is such a brilliant idea.
MILLER: Right. And they also help facilitate that, because I certainly am not an expert in, in all of this. So, and some of them, you know, are, some of them are coming in with this, like Lewis, you know, some real great ability to use stick figures.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: So, so they can sort of do a lesson on how to, how to communicate emotion with stick figures or, you know, another one I might do is thinking about dialogue and thought bubbles, so when do you want it to be something they’re thinking, when do you want it to be something they’re saying. So, and really, I, you don’t need a master list of mini lessons ahead of time. I, I just really develop mine in response to what challenges students were sharing that they had while they were, while they were drafting.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: Also, considering that, you know, students did have opportunities to really reflect and think about how hard this work really is and to think about what their next steps are and what resources they can use, and who they can ask. So it’s certainly, we built in opportunities for reflection and peer review and ongoing feedback during the, during the drafting process. So one thing I’ll caution listeners about is, you know, because of the, now that I know how personal these stories can end up being, I really avoid, you know, sort of requiring peer review of their graphic novels. So what I, what I found has worked is I’ll ask them to just choose one random panel or, not random, but just choose a panel that they’ve worked on.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: And it, it can be part of their final project, it doesn’t have to be, but something to submit anonymously, and then ill just redistribute them throughout the class so that, and students are just asked to look at the panel they’ve received and consider again what’s happening, how do I know? And also consider the success criteria.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MILLER: You know, am I being asked to challenge an assumption here? Are the pictures and words interdependent? And so that feedback that they write will get returned to the, to each student and so that’s one way I’ve sort of managed that kind of attention to sort of the fear and anxiety about sharing them, sharing them prematurely.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah, no. I’m glad you mentioned that, because that’s, yeah. That could kind of ruin the experience for some kids who really took a risk and then found that it wasn’t worth it. Okay, so you’ve got students writing their own, their own short graphic novels. So how did you actually assess all of this work?
MILLER: Okay. So I was really unhappy with the way the assessment happened my first time.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
MILLER: I found myself doing things like correcting grammar mistakes on these actual, you know, and your readers will see this in the post, because I’ll, I have pictures of their, of their amazing powerful graphic novels with me like, “Ah, ‘you’re’ versus — ”
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: So, so I also found myself just really drawn into some fo the beautiful artwork and just getting distracted by it and writing things like “beautiful” when they really, it really didn’t advance the story, or there was no evidence of, you know, sort of attention to devices.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MILLER: So I had also used a four-point rubric and, you know, with just way too many criteria and way too much text. So over time, what I ended up doing was thinking, you know, if I have to put a grade on these really powerful, meaningful projects, I at least want students to first participate in establishing those criteria, which we’ve talked about.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: And I want students to strive for an end goal that, you know, for the whole learning experience that made sense for them, not that standard one-size-fits-all outcome like we talked about earlier.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MILLER: And I, I wanted the criteria to allow for creative independence but still, you know, provide an anchor or kind of guideline for them to be successful.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
MILLER: And most importantly I just really wanted them to see that even if they got the top mark, the A, the 100, whatever, that it wasn’t sending some message to them that they’re some master graphic novelist now.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, you’re not done.
MILLER: Yep, yeah. “I’m all done with that.” Because they’re not. They’re certainly not going to be. So, so what I ended up doing was creating that single point rubric. I did have to grade my, you know, for reasons we won’t go into, but I ended up writing that the, in the single-point column the A kind of stood for “autonomous,” like what this means is you’re ready to keep learning autonomously.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: You’re ready for those next steps. You’re ready to continue your learning trajectory outside the walls of my classroom, essentially.
GONZALEZ: That’s great.
MILLER: And so one thing I’ll mention that’s kind of funny is that when I did ask students for their suggested criteria, a lot of them did include kind of things like grammar and it should be really beautiful, you know, really well drawn.
GONZALEZ: Yep.
MILLER: And art, have artistry, and so I, I had students kind of consider that, and that was feedback for me that, you know, maybe we needed to review some of the, some of the characteristics of what, what really makes these stories powerful.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MILLER: So I think, you know, with all of that that I had learned, by the end I was able to focus my own feedback really on what, what would be meaningful for students. Like, for example, Lewis, you know. All of what he took, the risk to narrate, did he need from me a reminder that there’s a difference between “your” and “you are”? Or did he need some more meaningful feedback?
GONZALEZ: Right, right.
MILLER: So the criteria just really helped me do that.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: And essentially helped all students see that the learning wasn’t done, even, even when they got an A.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. I love that. I love that focus on what is actually going to make it powerful. Because I do think teachers tend to sometimes just put criteria on there that it’s going to make it more grade-able, it’s just easier to grade if there are things that are very clearly defined and a lot of the qualities that you’re talking about that make a graphic novel truly powerful are, are a little bit harder to, to nail down maybe the first time around, when you’re describing it, but if you give it that effort, and you’ve really studied the genre with students, and you’ve studied the devices, it, it does get easier.
MILLER: Right, right. Yeah. I mean to grade them I was essentially doing like a hundred close readings of, of all the, you know, with over a hundred students. So, but you’re right, no. It does. You do develop a fluency with that.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MILLER: Through teaching it and studying it with your students.
GONZALEZ: So we are going to be sharing all of this stuff over on the website too, so people can see examples of your students’ panels and some of the actual sort of rubrics and, and the KWL charts and stuff. We’re going to try to get a lot of that in so that people can actually picture this and try to do the same thing in their classrooms. So thank you so much for, for sharing this whole process with me and with everybody else so that other people can experience this for themselves.
MILLER: Yes, thank you for the invitation. I look forward to, you know, hearing what your readers have been doing in their classrooms with graphic novels and, and seeing what, what any questions come out of this and all of that. Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity.
GONZALEZ: No problem. And, and give us your, give us your Twitter handle so that people can contact you there if they wanted to ask you questions directly.
MILLER: Sure. You can find me at @ShvetaMiller on Twitter, and I’m happy to collaborate and, and talk about graphic novels with anyone.
GONZALEZ: Okay, great. All right, Shveta, thank you so much.
MILLER: Okay, thanks, Jenn.
For links to all the resources mentioned in this episode, visit cultofpedagogy.com, click podcast, and choose episode 126. To get a weekly email from me about my newest blog posts, podcast episodes, and products, sign up for my mailing list at cultofpedagogy.com/subscribe. Thanks so much for listening, and have a great day.