Teaching Multimodal Literacy Through Reading and Writing Graphic Novels

Abstract

Scholarship suggests that writing teachers and instructors looking to integrate multimodal composition into their secondary or post-secondary classrooms should consider graphic novels as a mentor text for multimodal literacy. To help those pedagogues unfamiliar with graphic novels, we offer three titles—The Photographer, Operation Ajax, and Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow—students have responded positively to. Herein we offer a summary for each text, a discussion of their uses to teach multimodal literacy, a range of multimodal assignments to pair with each text, and a variety of assessment methods.