another, went to one another’s houses to
swap comics, and talked about the stories on
a regular basis. Suzanne, for example,
describes how she and her friends would go
to her grandmother’s house, staying up late
and reading Archie comics” (Norton, 2003, p.
144).
The girls’ community and
their literate practices went
unrecognized by the grown-
up world, the adults at
home, and by those at
school. Norton warns: “As
we become distant from
childhood pleasures, partic-
ularly of the popular culture
kind, our ignorance turns to fear. In order to reestablish control, we retreat to the rituals and practices that are familiar in schooling, sometimes sacrificing a focus on learning and meaning making” (Norton 2003, p 146).
It was the effort of educators like Mike Bitz (2004a, 2004b) that led to an alternative pedagogic practice rooted in physical context, but more importantly, in the valuation of a particular knowledge and discourse. He created a “third space,” neither home, nor quite school, where students could gather to engage in literate practice with the medium they enjoyed and found valuable. (Sabeti, 2012, p. 208) Bitz’s Comic Book Project was designed to engage urban youth in New York City. 733 students took part in the after-school program at various school buildings throughout the city in partnership with The City of New York, Teachers College, Columbia University, and Dark Horse Comics (Bitz, 2004a). Bitz found that the students engaged with the comic book materials they loved.
Hughes, King, Perkins, and Fuke (2011) studied twelve high school students at two different locations: six students at a workplace preparation program outside Toronto, Canada, and six students in a psychosocial program for expelled students at a facility east of Toronto. The learning space in this instance was atyp-ical of the average elementary or secondary classroom. The students were introduced to multimodal texts and created comic panels to tell the story of a significant event in their lives. The authors reported, “Rather than work as a chore… it was evident that the students found the work to be exciting and playful. … they worked to combine words and pictures to produce deep stories” (Hughes, King, Perkins, and Fuke, 2011, p. 610).
In 2009, Sabeti (2011, 2012,
2013) started an
extracurric-ular graphic
novel reading club at an
independent high school in
Edinburgh, Scotland where
she taught secondary
English. The reading group
was known as the Cool Club
and drew membership from
intelligent but underper-
forming students who Sabeti characterized as marginalized from the mainstream social groups of the school. As a participant in the group and unfamiliar with the medium of graphic novels, Sabeti was allowed, in some degree, to shed her role as expert. The infor-mal nature of the meetings allowed students to drop in. They often shared texts, rather than being issued one over which they were solely responsible as they would have been in the traditional English classroom. If a member had not done the assigned reading, he or she was still welcome to participate, bringing his or her own prior knowledge to bear in reading and sharing insights into the graphic novel under discussion.
The willingness of pupils to bring out of
school knowledges into the space of the
Reading Group in order to help make sense
of texts is important if we are to begin
thinking about how we might use these to
construct ‘third spaces’ (Moje et al. 2004)
within the curricular spaces themselves.
(Sabeti, 2012, p. 208)
Sabeti concluded that the members of the club viewed their participation as fun, while still learning and displaying the skills of literary analysis of texts taught in the tradi-tional English classroom where the efforts of the teachers were often viewed as persuasion and the enterprise of the students, resisted as work. Sabeti (2013) is again concerned with the contexts of literacy practice and how they might be harnessed for pedagogical purposes when she writes:
40
"As we become
distant from
childhood pleasures
.....our ignorance
turns to fear."