Using Content-Area Graphic Texts for Learning

Comics and graphic novels reinforce traditional content-area thinking skills like memory, attention, cognition, language learning, and sequencing. Because they additionally respond to the reading strengths of diverse literacy learners, they also offer the perfect, high-quality, literary-level texts for core content-area classrooms.

Using Content-Area Graphic Texts for Learning helps middle-school educators skillfully integrate the powerful print/image format into traditional subject-area studies by: specifically focusing on young adult graphic texts in the four primary content areas of math, language arts, social studies, and science; supplying a rich overview of the instructional value of graphic novels; and providing suggested graphic novel lists and Common Core-aligned lesson plans for each content area that illustrate two different learning approaches and demonstrate how traditional learning skills manifest in graphic texts.

Jaffe and Monnin more than make the case for using graphic novels as valid young adult literary texts that engage students and meet Common Core State Standards within the content-area classroom.

Dr. Meryl Jaffe is an instructor for Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth Online Division, a teacher mentor, and an educational consultant. She writes teacher guides for prose and graphic texts, speaks at national and international conferences, and facilitates teacher workshops on the inclusion of graphic novels in classrooms.

Dr. Katie Monnin is a recognized authority on incorporating graphic texts into standards-based reading lessons for ELA and content-area literacy. She is an assistant professor of literacy at University of North Florida and the author of three other professional resources on teaching graphic texts.