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DescriptionClass, Please Open Your Comics: Essays on Teaching with Graphic Narratives by Matthew L. Miller English | PDF | ISBN-10: 0786495146 | ISBN-13: 978-0786495146 April 23, 2015 | McFarland  Comics & Graphic Novels, History & Price Guides, Antiques & Collectibles CONTENTS Front Cover Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction—Graphic Novel Pedagogy Working on Understanding Comics Comics as Literature, Comics as Culture Comics Make Great Prompts “Outside the Box” Graphic Interventions (Religious) Fun Homes Multimodality 101 Talismans More than Storyboards Teaching Alison Bechdel’s Coming to Terms with the Past Defending the Graphic Novel Old Father, New Artificer Author/Character Intertextual Journeys Doing Justice to the Graphic Novel A Mission Appendix: Best Practices Assignments About the Contributors Index Excerpt: As a child of the 1980s, I grew up admiring Ferris Bueller in John Hughes’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). The character represented what all kids wanted to be: a smart, popular, outgoing rebel who used his wits and charm to stick it to authorities, particularly the egomaniacal principal Rooney. This film, and many of his others, makes John Hughes seem like a prophet for today’s age. After all, the film introduces its own brand of crowd-sourcing, a campaign via party- lines (yes, using land-line phones) and large-scale fundraising, selling t-shirts to save Ferris’s life. Indeed, one can even see in Ferris the college students we teach today: millennials. For me, the most powerful glimpse of this current generation appears in the classroom scene starring Ben Stein as the economics teacher. Upon giving a lecture about the ways Congress tried to improve the economic recovery during the Great Depression, the teacher states, “In 1930, the Republican con- trolled House of Representatives in an effort to alleviate the effects of the—any- one? anyone?—the Great Depression passed the—anyone? anyone?—the tariff bill....” Hughes zooms around the room and gives us close-ups of the students to show their utter boredom and disinterest in the lecture and the teacher. Some blankly stare back at us, some look stunned, and one even quietly snarls in hatred. And while Hughes’s example may seem extreme, students today often make me feel like that teacher: engaged in a one-sided conversation with a room full of students unwilling to learn or unable to care about the topics I want to teach them. As professional educators, we have all had times when the students do not respond to the texts we chose. I recently taught Charles Chesnutt’s 1900 novel The House Behind the Cedars in my Survey of American Literature course. This engaging novel about the legacies and consequences of miscegenation in the South provides a number of challenges (especially considering part of the book is set in South Carolina where I teach). Like many students nowadays who do not often read books, they seemed disinterested in the novel. To overcome this problem, I go to direct passages and engage students into the details the writer uses to make ideas about society and culture. Pulling out the language usually arouses student interests and begins a classroom conversation. For instance, I read a passage where the main African American female character Rena (who has been passing as a white person) is spotted in a drug store with other black people by her suitor George Tryon (a wealthy white aristocrat) (94). At that crucial moment, Tryon realizes that Rena has been lying to him. Chesnutt puts readers through Tryon’s horrible thought process in this scene, moving from denial to hatred (95–9). A great teaching moment occurs here when students can see the poisoned mind of racism take hold, especially through the arbitrariness of skin. Usually a strategy like this pays off, as it did by the end of the class about that novel. Sharing Widget |