Sylvia Pantaleo’s qualitative research case studies were conducted at a school in western British Columbia, Canada. 26 sixth grade students read and analyzed graphic novels and picture books to develop understanding of visual elements “and how combinations of elements can work together to create meaning (Machin, 2007)” (Pantaleo, 2013a, p. 355). Lessons on color and line, perspective, and point-of-view engaged students in discussions of visual techniques in picture books followed by work with graphic novels where they learned about speech bubbles, thought bubbles, and the importance of typography.
Concurrently, Pantaleo
(2011) worked with 25 sev-
enth graders who studied
metafictive devices such as
overt intertextuality, parody,
stories within stories, and
narrators and characters who
directly address the readers.
Pantaleo (2012) explicates 11-year-old Anya’s use of color to make meaning. Anya and her classmates learned a metalanguage to discuss their construction of multimodal texts. To analyze the meaning-making of the student comics, Pantaleo employed Halliday’s (1978) three metafunctions of language [ideational, interpersonal, and textural], an analysis further refined and elaborated in relation to the use of color, conceptualized by Kress and van Leeuwen (2002, 2006) as a “semiotic mode in its own right” (2002, p. 350).
Pantaleo (2013b) worked for ten weeks with 20 fourth graders to develop their visual literacy metalanguage. Student research participants created graphic narratives where the work centered around “affordances of paneling” that included “border colors, border style, intensity, shapes and sizes, and sequencing” (Pantaleo, 2013b, p. 157). Once again employing Halliday’s (1978) three metafunctions of language in her analysis of student work, Pantaleo concluded that the students had demonstrated ability to use the semiotic resource of paneling, central to the identity of the comics as a unique medium.
Conclusion
Comics still struggle to recover from the negative associations of their genesis. The literature in this review indicates that the comics medium has won only slight consideration in the nation’s elementary and secondary classrooms, nor have its texts won widespread support from the adult decision makers responsible for education of the nation’s children.
Where comics’ multimodal texts have made positive inroads is on the margins. Comics persist in the community of out-of-school
practice, the province of nerds,
marginalized students, and
alienated young adults. Still,
where researchers and scholars
of teaching and learning have
used comics in studies such as
those reported here, students
have responded positively. In
the special circumstance of
formal research, afterschool programs, alternative schools, and extracurricular reading groups, students have engaged with a community of learners in deep, literate practice. Provided adequate instruction and space, students appropriate the rich metalanguage of the comics medium and intentionally design (New London Group, 1996) their own, significant, multimodal texts. Further research is needed to determine how specialized contexts and instructional models might be recreated at scale to afford the benefits of studies in comics and graphic novels to a widespread student population.
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"Comics still struggle to recover from the
negative associations
of their genesis."