Abstract
This chapter explores film as one of a series of texts that teachers utilized alongside other multimodal documents for literacy instruction. In particular, this chapter aligns the process of teaching with film with the possibilities for teaching with graphic novels and other visual texts. Teacher voices and individual graphic novel works are highlighted as the author considers these texts, and a comparison of textual affordances is offered with attention to the connections between and among texts. Specifically, graphic novels and their affordances are considered along with filmic texts. This chapter culminates in an autoethnographic approach to viewing the cinematic qualities of graphic novels for identity exploration.
TopBackground
In the initial threads of this investigation, the author became aware of the collaborative and media-oriented pedagogy of two teachers through presentations at national and state-level conferences and through a series of other collaboration and communication the subject of film. As additionally suggested in a previous chapter, the audience for teacher-created films was often limited to that classroom; this dyad of educators was an exception, although budget did constrain the ability they had to present their work in many places.
Both of these first two participants in the studies work in a rural Appalachian region; their collaboration once took place in the same school, but at the time of this project they worked at two different schools in the same system. Both teachers work in the social studies content area. This initial network sampling approach (Heckathorn & Cameron, 2017), issued into a snowball sampling approach as the research processes continued over multiple years and iterations of the project (Noy, 2008). This initial and subsequently growing number of teachers have been essential in composing the story of what it means to use film and visual texts in the classroom for literacy instruction.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Graphic Novel: A contained volume of extended work in comic book/visual format, including the grammatical features of panels, tiers, and gutters.
Reader Response Theory: A theoretical lens that considers both text and reader as an interactive/transactional site for analysis.
Autoethnography: A research process that focuses on the individual’s account in which the author is also the participant.
Comic Book: A typically shorter visual narrative drawing on grammatical features of panels, tiers, and gutters.
Subjectivities: A series of considerations, including background, experiences, and biases, completed before and/or during a qualitative research project; in this chapter, the author draws on subjectivities not simply as a subset of research process but as an avenue for analysis and exploration in itself.
Multimodal Text: A text composed of a variety of modes, or textual spaces, for meaning-making.
Visual Text: Any number of texts that include pictorial or imagistic elements.