An Interesting Pedagogical Approach to Literacy: Using Comics to Promote Literacy Development

The YouTube video above highlights an interesting pedagogical approach to teaching literacy: the utilization of comic books in classrooms to promote literacy.  Initially I was skeptical of what this teaching approach would look like, but after watching this video I began to see connections and how using comic books can be beneficial to students.

First, comic books help students acquire certain necessary reading skills required for literacy acquisition.  Skills such as reading from left to right and from top to bottom are easily identifiable to students when they read a comic book.  The use of pictures also helps students understand the meaning of words and can aid in vocabulary acquisition.  In addition, it is easier for many students to identify with characters from comic books with which they are already familiar, further promoting interest in reading among children.

Using Comic books can also be a useful strategy when helping students learn to write.  The pedagogical approach discussed in the video is a similar one I have seen used in my Kindergarten classroom at Bailey Gatzert.  Teaching students to write starts with having students draw pictures to tell their stories and then turn those stories into spoken words and eventually written words.  Students can tell clear stories through their use of pictures and this provides them with important literacy skills as they continue to learn to write and acquire literacy.

Anne Haas Dyson, the author of the book “Writing Superheroes: Contemporary Childhood, Popular Culture, and Classroom Literacy” also advocates for the use of comic books to promote literacy among students.  Her book and research looks at the benefits of using comic books with 7-to-9 year-olds and finds many litearcy and social benefits to the process.

Here is the synopsis from the book:

“Based on an ethnographic study in an urban classroom of 7- to 9-year olds, Writing Superheroes: Contemporary Childhood, Popular Culture, and Classroom Literacy examines how young school children use popular culture, especially superhero stories, in the unofficial peer social world and in the official school literary curriculum. In one sense, the book is about children "writing superheroes" - about children appropriating superhero stories in their fiction writing and dramatic play on the playground and in the classroom. These stories offer children identities as powerful people who do battle against evil and win, but they also reveal limiting ideological assumptions about relations between people - boys and girls, adults and children, people of varied heritages, physical demeanors, and social classes. The book, then, is also about children as "writing superheroes." With the assistance of their teacher, the observed children became superheroes of another sort, able to take on powerful cultural storylines. In this book, Anne Dyson examines how the children's interest in and conflicts about commercial culture give rise to both literacy and social learning, including learning how to participate in a community of differences” (1997). 

There appear to be many benefits to using comic books during a child’s literacy acquisition, and while support for this pedagogical approach exists, more support is needed in order to see this approach utilized in more classrooms.