Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

This article explores how teachers and pupils construct and negotiate discourses around comic books as part of interaction in the classroom from a New Literacy Studies perspective. The combination of imagery and text, the essence of comics, makes them relevant tools for exploring how literacy is constructed in social interaction in the classroom. The analysis is based on video material from two different Swedish schools, one class in Grade 3 and one class in Grade 8. Nine interactional sequences were initially found, and these have been analysed using a qualitative discursive psychological approach, investigating how assessments are utilized to perform social actions – how participants use assessments of comics as easy or difficult reading, or assessments of themselves or others as being or not being comic book readers – to make something happen in interaction. The results show that participants utilize discourses of personal, visual and textual literacy to construct a comics literacy in which image and text are both construed as important for, as well as a difficulty in, reading comics. This demonstrates constructions of comics literacy and readership, how personal experiences of reading comics are important and the importance of broadening the view of comics as school literature.

Keywords

Comics comics literacy discursive psychology multimodality new literacy studies social interaction visual literacy

The current article explores classroom literacy discourses around comics,¹ grounding this exploration in New Literacy Studies (Gee, 1992, 2000). In 1996, the New London Group, a collaboration between leading literacy researchers, stated that the future of literacy pedagogy lay in broadening the scope of what literacy entails, in order to account for ‘the context of our culturally and linguistically diverse and increasingly globalized societies’ (p. 61). This entailed a view of literacy as multimodal, that is, consisting of several modes of communication including ‘visual images and their relationship to the written word’ (The New London Group, 1996: 61; see also Kress, 2003, 2010). As such, instead of a narrow view of literature as ‘text’, and literacy practices as consisting of reading and writing text, school literacy practices need to reflect the literacy practices of society at large, allowing children to explore diverse, multimodal media as well (see, e.g. Sousanis, 2015). Furthermore, literacy, here, is also viewed as not just the cognitive ability to read and write, but as a broader view of our means to construct social meaning (Gee, 2002).

Comprised of image and text, comics – alongside much of online media – are a prime source for pupils to engage with texts and narratives (Versaci, 2001, 2008). Versaci (2008) argues that comics, more so than, for example, film – another sequential medium – allow pupils to engage with meaning production with images and text at their own pace, actively analysing the material. Further indication of the uniqueness of comics is their multimodal layout, use of onomatopoetic language and ability to illustrate time and movement in narratives (McCloud, 1993; Ripley, 2012; Wallner, 2017a, 2019). Combined with their popularity with children and youth (Allen and Ingulsrud, 2003, 2005; Bitz, 2004; Heaney, 2007; Simon, 2012), this makes comics attractive tools for working with literacy in schools. As Simon (2012) puts it, the affirmation of comics as a viable option within the school context ‘suggest[s] their potential for creating alternative inroads into class work that draw upon pupils’ languages, abilities, and interests’ (p. 524).

However, popular as they may be, children’s preferences differ – not all children love comics – and, just as any literary format, comics can be perceived as difficult for an inexperienced reader. In this article, teachers and students studied in naturally occurring classroom interaction (Potter, 2010; Wiggins, 2017) make assessments of comics and comics reading – being a fan, not being a fan, being easy to read, being difficult – thereby constructing discourses of comics literacy (Wallner, 2017b) and negotiating what this literacy could entail.

1. Comics literacy: literacy and comics discourses

Comics have been part of school practices for a long time (Tilley and Weiner, 2017). Throughout the past 20 years, New Literacy Studies has promoted a two-part shift in perspective from viewing literacy as a cognitive ability of reading and writing to viewing it as a sociocultural practice (Gee, 1992, 2000, 2002) as well as widening the literacy term to include the reading of non-text, such as images, sounds, symbols and more (Kress, 2003, 2010; The New London Group, 1996).

Similar to the New Literacy Studies view, discourses around literacy are also considered situated and culturally constructed (Potter, 2012; Triplett, 2007), rather than ideologically based or institutional (Heritage, 2004; Peplow et al., 2016). For the current study, this means that participants are not assumed to be doing institutional, classroom talk; rather, the analysis is done on the participants doing talk (Heritage, 2004), and whether this is a construction of classroom discourse (or other types of discourse) is left to the analysis of the participants’ own perspective. As such, discourses of literacy are analysed as situated social action – what participants do with their constructions of discourse – rather than something that exists objectively.

This article uses terminology from Allen and Ingulsrud (2005) in discussing personal literacy, whereby participants draw on their previous experiences of engaging with narratives in their engagement with new texts. This is akin to Gee (2000) who demonstrates how pupils’ discourses around literacy are intertwined with their identity work and the development of their reading practices, and Wolk (2007) who argues that merely ‘picking up something with words and pictures to read, you become the sort of person who reads comics’ (p. 60). In relation to, for example, visual literacy, which tends to focus on the material aspects of reading, and the individual processing of images (Burmark, 2008), personal literacies are instead viewed as a social competence. For example, through interviews and surveys, Allen and Ingulsrud (2005) demonstrate how readers of manga develop their personal literacies and how they invoke factors such as gender, family and friends, and school reading practices as an influence on this.

In Wallner (2017b), I argue for comics literacy as the collaboration between, on the one hand, communication through combinations of image and text and, on the other hand, constructions of discourses around comics. In the current article, I take an interest in how both teachers and pupils, drawing on their personal literacies, construct discourses around comics as part of natural classroom interaction – interaction around such activities that would take place regardless of the presence of the researcher (Potter, 2010; Wiggins, 2017) – exploring this from a perspective of literacy as socially and culturally situated (cf. Gee, 1992, 2000, 2002)

2. Research on comics as classroom literature

There has been some interesting research done on comics and education since the early 1940s (Hammond, 2009; Pantaleo, 2011; Witty, 1941a, 1941b; for a review, see, for example, Tilley and Weiner, 2017). For example, Hammond (2009) explores 12th-grade pupils’ reading responses to the graphic novel American Born Chinese, in which she demonstrates the affordances of picture-text combinations, and concludes, among other things, that ‘schools need to reflect the wide range of multimodal literacy practices in which students engage’ (p. 144). Furthermore, Pantaleo (2011, 2015) has conducted case studies of younger children’s use of multimodal texts, such as picture books and graphic novels. For example, through observations and interviews with a pupil in Grade 7, Pantaleo (2015) shows that the development of visual literacy skills requires particular knowledge, awareness and focus from the teacher, and offers the potential for the pupil to develop a meta-language and a deepened complexity of textual composition.

There are also a few studies that investigate pupil and teacher attitudes to comics (Allen and Ingulsrud, 2003, 2005; Sabeti, 2011, 2014). For example, through survey and interview studies with over 800 Japanese participants, ranging from elementary school pupils to college students and parents, Allen and Ingulsrud (2005) show how patterns of personal literacy and belonging to a literacy community are important for young readers. In her articles on after-school comics reading groups, Sabeti (2011, 2014) similarly demonstrates the importance of the social group and belonging, in relation to literacy. The teenagers in Sabeti’s studies strongly express connections between personal identity and literacy, how school can be either helpful or disruptive in forming this identity and that knowledge of comics affords the pupil a position of authority in the classroom.

However, there has been little research on the naturally occurring use of comics in classrooms. ‘Naturally occurring’ should here be understood as settings and activities where materials are not introduced by the researcher, and the researcher’s presence has minimal impact on the activities (Potter, 2010; Wiggins, 2017). Most studies of the use of comics are experimental studies, in which the researcher introduces the materials and focuses on the effect this has on already set learning goals (increased vocabulary, motivation, etc.). Often, these are based on interviews and ethnographic observations. Thus, the natural interaction perspective would offer new insight into how these literacy practices are done in situ, rather than as studies on ‘inner’ knowledge or attitudes (for examples of this, see Allington and Swann, 2009; Eriksson, 2002; Peplow et al., 2016).

Further exploring the use of comics as a literary format for classroom activities could offer more insight into ways for teachers to reach pupils, help find alternative forms of literature and further encourage discussions around comics as a part of literacy in education.

3. Aim and purpose

The aim of the current article is to increase knowledge on how participants – teachers and pupils – assert, challenge and negotiate literacy discourses with comics. In order to investigate this, the following research questions were asked:

How do participants construct assessments of comics and comics reading?

How do participants construct discourses around literacy with comics?

4. Participants, data and transcription

The materials analysed in this article were recorded as part of a larger study of comics in education, which involved six teachers and 77 pupils in Grades 3 (9 years old, three classes) and 8 (14 years old, one class) at two Swedish compulsory schools, totalling approximately 36 hours of video over the course of 15 lessons (for details, see Table 1). All names have been changed for reasons of anonymity, and the pupils’ guardians have given written consent for their children’s participation in the study.

Table 1.

Overview of data.

Grade, (no. of classes), Subject	Participants	Type of interaction	Type of material	No. of lessons	No. of hours
Grade 3, (3 classes), Language (Swedish)	5 teachers 52 pupils (15–19 per class)	Group work, pair work, whole class instruction	Donald Duck comic books and comic strips, work sheets, copy material, instructions	10	20
Grade 8, (1 class), Social studies	1 teacher 23 pupils	Group work, whole class instruction	Comic strips from newspapers (various), comic books, toys from different comic books, instructions	5	16

The current article relates to sequences recorded in one of the classes in Grade 3 and the class in Grade 8. The phenomenon depicted here – assessment of comics and comics reading – was prevalent throughout the data, and the excerpts included here were considered, in terms of quality and clarity, to be the primary examples of the phenomenon. These two classes conducted different lessons, based on different curricula (depending on subject and age group). Nevertheless, these phenomena seemed to be consistent throughout the material. A qualitative discursive psychological approach was used (Edwards and Potter, 1992; Wiggins, 2017), focusing on how participants make assessments of comics and comics reading. This way, how participants construct what could otherwise be viewed as internal states of mind, such as preference and assessment, can instead be viewed as socially constructed aspects of discourse (Wiggins, 2017).

Four video cameras and three audio recorders were used in order to capture talk, gestures, gaze and use of materials. The recording devices were set up and turned on before the start of the lesson, and the researcher left the room in order to minimize the risk of disturbing the class. In Grade 3, the class took a break in the middle of the lesson (as lessons could sometimes be up to 1.5 hours long), and this meant that the cameras would also record any activity in the classroom during this break. Generally, these activities would consist of teachers preparing the next part of the lesson (as shown in Excerpt 2). This material was included as part of the data, as it was recorded and considered part of the class activities.

Written transcriptions were made based on the Jeffersonian style (Jefferson, 2004, see also Appendix 1), covering talk and embodied actions, whereby these actions are made relevant, verbally or physically, by the participants.² For example, if one participant’s gesture was made relevant by another participant, and it was in turn considered relevant for the analysed phenomenon, it was included in the transcription.

Initially, transcriptions of talk and movement were made, and through repeated study of the video material together with the transcriptions, patterns of interactional phenomena (Wiggins, 2017) were found. These phenomena consisted primarily of sequences in which participants either make assessments of someone, for example, describing oneself or someone else as ‘a comic book reader’ (cf. Eriksson Barajas and Aronsson, 2009), or make assessments of the comics, for example, describing a comic as boring, fun or difficult. As the analysis focuses on social interaction, an assessment made that is not sequentially addressed by other speakers, or an assessment not seemingly responding to what someone else said or did, would not be considered for analysis. However, as of writing, no such assessment has been discovered.

With this focus, nine excerpts were found to be of interest for the aim and purpose of the current article. As the interest is in how participants construct assessment in talk, the focus of the analysis has been on conversation-analytical aspects such as intonation, repetition of phrases and words and participants’ embodied talk (gestures, gaze, etc.). The excerpts were then analysed systematically, using a participant-oriented perspective, asking how a certain action is performed (Potter, 2010; Wiggins, 2017). Videos were viewed repeatedly, exploring the sequentiality of the phenomena, for example, how a participant makes an assessment of a comic (using tone, body language, wording), and how this assessment is responded to by other participants. Three excerpts are presented in the current article to demonstrate different aspects of the discursive literacy work. Nevertheless, the current article makes a qualitative contribution to the study of comics and classroom literacy practices, demonstrating the work of comics literacy in the classroom and how teachers and pupils construct comics discourses through their assessments.

5. Establishing a personal literacy with comics imagery

In a Grade 3 Swedish lesson, the pupils and teachers are working with different types of speech and thought bubbles, using Donald Duck comic books and a teacher’s guide showing different types of bubbles (Galaczy, 2013: 1), and have had discussions on different types of emotional expressions, using bubbles (for more on this practice, see Wallner 2017a). During the first excerpt, Andreas (pupil) and Wilma (teacher) are sitting at a table flipping through a Donald Duck comic (Carlsson, 2012) with the task of finding different types of bubbles for Andreas to copy to his sheet of paper, in order to then design a character of his own expressing something in a bubble. Wilma is doing the flipping, while Andreas cuts in now and then to examine an image. The two other teachers in this class, Petra and Jonna, are standing next to the table, talking between themselves about the difference between various bubbles, pointing out visual differences (cloud-shaped and bubbly, jagged edges, etc.) and connecting this to dialogue and narrative style. Overhearing this, Andreas shows significant interest in this discussion, constantly raising his head to listen to them (Table 2):

Table 2.

Excerpt 1.

1	J	men de här e väl mer en tanke å de e en dröm.
		but this is more a thought and this one’s a dream.
2	P	mm
		mm
3	J	eller?
		or?
4	P	den e ju mer arg (.) >[e den inte de]?< än den?=
		that one’s of course more angry (.) >isn’t it?< than that one?=
5	J	[(mm?)]
		(mm?)
6	J	=å de här kanske e en pang.
		=an this might be a bang.
7		(0.4)
8	P	de e de no ja.
		it probably is yes.
9		(0.4)
10	J	m.
		m.
11		(0.4)
12	A	jonna den dära ä arg=
		jonna that one is angry=
13	J	=den ja. ((pointing to speech bubble on paper))
		=that one yeah.
14		(0.2)
15	A	ja:
		ye:s
16	J	den ser man på hela den pratbubblan att de e no nån som e arg
		you can see on that whole speech bubble that that’s probably someone who’s angry
17	A	((nods))
18	J	.hja
		.hyes
19		((Petra and Jonna leave the table, Wilma is flipping in the comic book album next to Andreas))
20	A	vänta vänta ja (vi) se den ((stops Wilma’s flipping))
		wait wait I (wanna) see it
21	W	.h
22		(0.7)
23	W	ja ja ser knappt skillnad för ja e (0.6) ((takes off glasses and puts them on the table)) absolut ingen seriefantast. ((puts glasses back on))
		well I can hardly tell the difference cause I am (0.6) absolutely no comic book fan.
24	A	((flips and draws comic bubbles))

In the first lines of this excerpt, a visual literacy is established between the three participants, Jonna, Petra and Andreas. The two teachers are ambivalent about assigning emotional or sensory qualities to different speech and thought bubbles, this is seen in lines 3–4 (‘or?’; ‘isn’t it?’). However, the pupil, Andreas, has no problem stepping in and declaring his competency on the matter (line 12). This is then confirmed collaboratively between Jonna and Andreas in lines 13–15, culminating in Jonna emphasizing the visual quality of the bubble’s expression of emotion: ‘you can see on that whole speech bubble that that’s probably someone who’s angry’ (line 16). Thus, Andreas without hesitation declares his reading of one of the bubbles being discussed, which settles the matter in the eyes of his teachers about how to interpret the bubble. His confidence in relation to his teachers’ hesitation shows his competence as a comics reader in identifying the visual aspects of the dialogue, and the confirmation he receives from his teachers affirms this competence. This exchange both establishes a literacy in reading this material (the bubbles) as a literacy specific to comics, and also constructs a joint assessment of the different competencies of the participants in regard to these materials.

About half a minute passes in silence, with Andreas having taken control of the flipping, and drawing bubbles on his sheet of paper. At this point, Wilma turns to face Petra, who is standing slightly behind her. The following takes place (Table 3):

Table 3.

Excerpt 1 part 2.

25	W	asså ja tycker de e jättesvårt för ja har ju aldri gillat att läsa serier har inte gjort det som barn heller
		so I think it’s really hard cause I’ve never liked reading comics haven’t done it as a child either=
26	P	=na:ej=
		=na’ah=
27	W	=ja ser liksom skillnad typ på: (0.4) pratbubbla å: tankebubbla=
		=so I can see like the difference betwee:n, (0.4) speech bubble an: thought bubble=
28	P	=(mm)=
		=(mm)=
29	W	=men sen är de ju: massa ((pointing to comic book)) som, (0.3)
		=but then there’s of course: lots that, (0.3)
30	P	en massa ut- ass- [som e:h ligger (liksom på) å som e]
		a lot out- like u:h that is (sort of on) and that is m
31	W	[ja? dom ligger liksom utanfö:r ] absolut där e ju jättemycket e:h
		yeah? like that is outside absolutely there is of course a lot u:h

In this latter part of the transcript, as this visual competence with comics literacy has been established between the other teachers and Andreas, the third teacher, Wilma, enters the talk to express her confusion around the matter. She expresses her non-competence as a comics reader: ‘well I can hardly tell the difference’ (line 23), and she accounts for her problem reading the bubbles due to her being ‘absolutely no comic book fan’ (line 23). Thus, she assesses her own competence, as well as the materials, through a discourse of personal literacy (cf. Allen and Ingulsrud, 2005) and makes herself accountable as an amateur in response to the task they are currently working with – she is, after all, accountable for not being knowledgeable in the subject she is teaching. She then establishes that she has basic knowledge, mitigating her previously expressed ignorance, in that she recognizes the basic visual differences (the difference between thought and speech bubbles, line 27), but insists that comics literacy is more than this (lines 29–31), and that this reading requires a certain literacy competence from readers. Her action can be viewed as a form of category entitlement (e.g. Potter, 1996; see also Peplow et al., 2016), whereby she is asserting that those who are comic book fans (belonging to that category) can ‘see [—] the difference’ (line 27) whereas those who are not fans cannot. Thus, she constructs something similar to the two positions that Eriksson Barajas and Aronsson (2009) call ‘avid reader’ – what Wilma calls the comic book fan, represented by Andreas – and the ‘struggling reader’, represented by Wilma herself. The difference here is that it is the teacher positioning herself. This relates to the earlier statement by Jonna that ‘you can see on that whole speech bubble that that’s probably someone who’s angry’ (line 16). Wilma is arguing that it takes a comic book fan in order to see this, and apparently Andreas is such a fan and Wilma is not.

As her statement follows on the discussion between Petra and Jonna in which they, and Andreas, demonstrated knowledge on the subject, Wilma’s assertion could be seen as contrasting her own knowledge (as well as interest) with that of the others. Her affirmation of a lack of interest would explain why she cannot tell the difference between the bubbles in the way Andreas can. This way, Wilma’s construction of personal literacy highlights comics as a specific type of literacy, one that she herself is not competent in. She goes on to pinpoint certain key elements in this literacy, such as speech and thought bubbles (which is natural in the context of the lesson), and claims a certain competence of visual literacy, but further affirms that ‘there’s of course: lots that . . . is outside’ (lines 29–31), demonstrating that bubbles are not the only thing that is complicated in this literacy.

Wilma further attributes her difficulty reading comics to not having ‘done it as a child either’ (line 25), suggesting that comics literacy is something readers (normatively) engage with as children. The topical material is a children’s comic book, but Wilma’s assertion is general, and not obviously linked to any specific book. Indeed, she could have said she is not a fan of Donald Duck, but she specifically uses a general approach. This makes sense, since the difficulties she is experiencing are not unique to this comic. Wilma’s explanation also helps to downgrade her ignorance and emphasizes ‘slow reading as a matter of practice’ (Eriksson Barajas and Aronsson 2009: 290), and that comic book reading takes practice just as other forms of reading.

In sum, through their assessments of reading competence and the material itself the participants construct a discourse of comics as something requiring certain literacy skills, whereby one can be a competent or non-competent reader of comics. Furthermore, Wilma specifically demonstrates how this is done as a matter of personal literacy, whereby her lack of interest and childhood experiences of comics affects her literary capabilities as an adult.

6. Comics literacy from a textual perspective

In Excerpt 2, during the break between two lessons in Grade 3, teachers Jonna and Petra are cutting comic panels from a teacher’s guide for the next lesson. Primarily, the discussion shown below concerns the comic book panels they are cutting out, and the comic they are from, Snålheten bedrar visheten (Troelstrup and Santanach, 2013, Eng: Penny wise but pound foolish), a Donald Duck story from 2006 (Table 4). This story has been previously published and was reprinted as part of a teacher’s guide, together with copy material of exercises. These materials were part of a project the publisher (Egmont Publishing) marketed for free to schools in return for feedback on the usability of the comics and materials. This project is ongoing at the time of writing and includes multiple schools throughout Sweden (see Egmont Publishing, 2015). I was not part of this project per se, but contact between the school and myself was established through the publisher.

Table 4.

Excerpt 2.

1	P	>[å ] s[en< ] när man läser- va de de här de handlade [om ]
		>an th en< when you read- was it this it was about
2	J	[.hja ] [(de) ] [m: ]
		.hyea (it) m:
((70 sec omitted, the teachers talk about the copy machine))
3	P	nä men den e lite- asså- å just den här t- nu har ja ju inte läst så många av dom här serierna i den här ((DD comic)) ja har ju bara liksom ögn[at] dom
		nah but it’s a bit- so- and specifically this one c- of course I haven’t read that many of these comics in this I’ve just kind of flicked through them
4	J	[m:]
		m:
5	P	men ja tänker ändå att just den här serien e rätt så svår allt[så:]
		but I’m still thinking that this specific comic is quite difficult you kno:w
6	J	[a: ]
		[yea:]
7		(1.0)
8	P	just själva innehållet ja mena[r de: ],
		specifically the contents I me:an i:t’s,
9	J	[.hja ]
		.hyeah
10		(5.0)
11	P	men de e väl just sånt som ((the publisher)) vill ha då kanske också [på eh:]
		but it’s just that that ((the publisher)) wants then maybe too on uh:
12	J	[precis]
		exactly
13		(1.5)
14	P	lärarhandledningen [(som xx)]
		the teacher’s guide (that xx)
15	J	[men ja fö]rsöker tänka tillbaka för har inte- har de inte kommit in svårare ord eller (vad) för när ja- om ja tänker tillbaka på när ja läste serietidning när ja va liten=
		but I’m trying to think back because hasn’t- hasn’t there been more difficult words introduced or (what) because when I- if I think back on when I read comics when I was little=
16	P	=m=
		=m=
17	J	=ja har inte minne av att de va så svåra ord (2.0) e de nån skillnad e de- har de blitt en [en]
		=I don’t remember there being such difficult words (2.0) is there a difference is there- has it become a a
18	P	>[ja ] vet fa[ktiskt in]te<
		>I actually don’t know<
19	J	[en språk,]
		a language,
20		(2.0)

Here, the teachers focus specifically on the content and language of the comic. Petra uses ‘this comic book’ (line 5) as a starting point for assessing the ‘quite difficult’ content (line 8), and Jonna then upgrades this as a concern regarding comics in general and the ‘difficult words’ (line 15) comics contain today, comparing this to her memories of reading comics as a child (line 15).³ Thus, the teachers construct a discourse on what encompasses children’s comic book stories (i.e. easy-to-grasp content and simple language), which does not coincide with what this Donald Duck comic actually provides the children with. The teachers assess this story as complicated and the vocabulary as advanced.

Similar to Excerpt 1, this assessment becomes connected to Jonna’s personal literacy, her experiences with reading comics when she was a child, as an account for why she finds modern comics difficult, and this is confirmed by Petra in line 16. In fact, it appears that Jonna is both accounting for why Petra perceives the Donald Duck comic as difficult (comics have changed from their previous experiences) and simultaneously voices disagreement with Petra’s idea that the publisher should have to change the material (this is what new comics are like); but as she receives little response it is difficult to know this for sure.

Unlike Wilma, Jonna did read comics when she was younger, but the problem is instead that she cannot reconcile the classroom comics used here with those of her childhood when it comes to language level. Thus, for Jonna, her personal literacy produces an ambiguity, and she accounts for this ambiguity by a failure to recollect: ‘I don’t remember’ (line 17), and through expressing uncertainty: ‘is there a difference is there- has it become a’ (line 17), and this is confirmed by Petra’s doubts: ‘I actually don’t know’ (line 18). As such, the two participants together account for their difficulty in assessing the level of the material. They both assess it as difficult, but whether or not this is something perceived by the general audience (and their pupils), or something only they experience, is unclear to them.

The assessment made here is one in which the textual aspects (content and language) are deemed difficult for the grade level these teachers are working with (which is also the normative age group for these comics). The action performed by Jonna is then to utilize her personal literacy to account for why she would make this assessment of the material – that is, that comics in general have become more difficult. Whether or not Jonna is correct in this suggestion that comics are more difficult than they were when she was a child, this sequence suggests that the personal literacy of the teacher in regard to comics might have to be updated in order to provide the children with the proper difficulty level. Perhaps the material provided to these teachers could still contain difficult stories, but that teachers merely need to be aware that not all Donald Duck stories are easy reading.

7. A discourse of multimodal literacy with comic book classroom practice

In the two excerpts above, the participants draw on both visual and textual aspects in the production of comics literacy. In the following, I will examine pupils’ perspectives concerning these two aspects.

In Grade 8, the class has been given the task of discussing the target group (primarily in terms of age) of the comic strips and comic books they have in the classroom. Prior to the excerpt below, the pupils discuss, among other things, a Gaston album (which they deem readable by everyone), a Baby Blues comic strip (which they consider to be mostly for adults) and a Zits comic strip (which they consider to be mostly for teenagers and parents of teenagers); gender rarely becomes a talking point (Table 5). The group consists of six pupils. Niklas has brought a Donald Duck comic book from a neighbouring table, and Dalia has been tasked with taking notes on their discussion.

Table 5.

Excerpt 3.

1	P	okej va tror vi när vi tittar på bilden.
		okay what do we think when we look at the image.
2		(1.7)
3	J	(på rocky igen)
		(at rocky again)
4	A	ja läste kalle anka när ja va åtta
		I read donald duck when I was eight
5	P	de e ju lite yngre känns de som
		it’s of course a bit younger it feels like
6	A	mm
		mm
7	N	ja
		yeah
8	D	de e ju inte så mycke direkt läsa mellan raderna utan dom säger (ju) liksom de mesta
		it’s of course not so much really reading between the lines rather they say (of course) kind of most of it
9	P	mm (.) men asså man se ju ändå om man jämför den mä (.) den andra bilden så se ju den här (.) mer ut som [för yngre ]
		mm (.) but like one can of course see still if you compare it wi’h (.) the other image then this of course looks (.) more like for younger
10	D	[barnvänlig]
		kid friendly
11	N	man skulle kunna ta (fyra ti fem år) utan kanske [läs]
		one could take (four to five years) but maybe read
12	P	[nej]
		no
13	N	elle de kanske ä [att man läs- er]
		or maybe it’s that you re- ad
14	J	[man inte- man e] inte läskunnig
		you not- you’re not able to read
15	N	[å sin (far) ]
		and your (dad)
16	P	[man kan inte] nä=
		you can’t no=
17	N	=(ner) sitter brevid å [(håller en)]
		=(down) sits next to and [(holds you) ]
18	P	[kanske nä m]an kan börja läsa.
		maybe when you can start to read.
19	D	((flips the first pages of the comic book)) va ä de för text då
		what’s the text then
20	A	ja tro ja läste nä ja va sex sju åtta nåns[tans]
		I think I read when I was six seven eight some[where]
21	P	[Aa:.]
		Yea:.
22	J	när dom ä sex nie [så (s-)]
		when they’re six nine [then ]
23	P	[när man] lär sig [läs]a helt enkelt
		when you learn to read simply put
24	D	[Aa:]
		Yea:
25		(3.6)
26	N	ja f- (0.6) ja fick börja (0.6) ja läsa serietidningar när ja va fem år- >eller ja läste inte< min pappa läste å ja satt å (0.2) kollade (på),
		I st- (0.6) I started (0.6) I read comic books when I was five years old- >or I didn’t read< my dad read and I sat and (0.2) looked,
27		(1.1)
28	D	men om man bara asså (1.0) bilderna säger ju ganska mycke också så man [kan]
		but if you’re just so (1.0) the pictures say quite a lot too so you could
29	P	[ja ]
		yeah
30	D	ju va lite yngre (om) (xx)
		of course be a bit younger (if) (xx)
31		(1.0)
32	P	så typ (0.2) från (0.2) fem
		so like (0.2) from (0.2) five
33		(0.5)
34	D	A:a ((puts the pen to the paper))
		Yeah
35		(1.5)
36	P	från att man kan läsa
		from when you can read
37	N	h. [((gazes from the table to P)) ]
38	D	[((pen-hand stops (.) smiles slightly))] (1.0) °kej° [((starts writing))]
		°key°
39	N	[läsa elle:r bara ] höra
		reading o:r just listening
40	P	a.
		yeah.
41		(0.6)
42	P	å sen båda
		an then both

Following the task they have been given, the pupils are discussing possible appropriate age groups for Donald Duck. The pupils continually refer to their own personal literacies, and their experiences reading Donald Duck. Amanda initiates this with ‘I read Donald Duck when I was eight’ (line 4), which establishes an age suggestion for the group to consider, and in the following lines, this is used by the others as a reference point. In the following, the participants assess that Donald Duck is ‘for younger [readers]’ (line 9) and ‘kid friendly’ (line 10), presumably in comparison to the previous comics they have designated appropriate for older readers. At this point, Niklas suggests ‘four to five years’ (line 11), in fact younger than the 8 years previously suggested. However, Johan and Polly seem to disagree with this, arguing that children are ‘not able to read’ (line 14), and that ‘maybe when you can start to read’. (line 18), you can read Donald Duck comics. Thus, they claim that the age suggested by Niklas is too young. At this point, Amanda rephrases her previous utterance as ‘six seven eight somewhere’, which Polly is quick to accept (lines 20–21). As such, Polly, Johan and Amanda appear to construct a literacy discourse whereby in order to be a comics reader you need to be able to read text.

As a response to this, Niklas utilizes his personal literacy, accounting for his previous suggestion by referring to his own experiences reading Donald Duck when he was ‘five years old-’ (line 26), something he immediately self-repairs (McHoul, 1990; Schegloff et al., 1977) as ‘my dad read and I sat and looked’ (line 26, author’s emphasis in italics). This adapts to the claim by the other pupils that one is not textually literate at such an early age. As such, Niklas’ construction here forms an alternative discourse of what reading is that works specifically with this material. Indeed, his perspective suggests two things: first, that reading is built on textual literacy (as his peers argue), and that he, as a pre-literate child, ‘looked’ instead of read; second, this is also a way of making visual literacy an essential part of comics reading, in the sense that the child becomes a literary participant in the act of ‘looking’, and that the images add something to the reading process of a child who has not yet managed to read text.

Indeed, this second option seems to be what Dalia picks up on, suggesting that ‘the pictures say quite a lot too so you could of course be a bit younger’ (lines 28 and 30), shifting tone from the primarily text-based view to a multimodal view of literacy, which would make possible a younger audience for Donald Duck comics. Her use of ‘of course’ here suggests that this is indeed a collaborative view of what reading entails, whereby she claims a connection with the view of the other speakers, and that this is common knowledge for them (Stivers, 2011; see also Josephson, 2011). This interpretation is supported by the affirmative responses that both Dalia and Petra receive by their peers as they use ‘of course’ throughout the excerpt (lines 6, 7, 9 and 10). It is possible that this is a way for one speaker to push their agenda on the others, but as no resistance to this is visible in the sequences, it is difficult to show this intention empirically. At this point, Polly brings back the assertion that 5 years old is an appropriate age (line 32), but does not seem entirely satisfied with this, as she then adds ‘from when you can read’ (line 36). In the final lines, Niklas and Polly seem to negotiate what this literacy entails – whether it is reading (line 36), listening (line 39) or both (line 42). The group comes to no clear conclusion.

Thus, these pupils form two groups, with one side arguing that textual literacy is more important in order to read comics and the other arguing for the multimodal view and the use of images to convey story. Indeed, Niklas even argues for a literacy of listening to the story (as evinced by his suggestion in line 39). Despite not coming to a united conclusion, both groups present their views of a discourse of reading and literacy, which is prompted by their use of this type of material.

8. Constructions of comics literacy – conclusion

The current article explores how classroom participants utilize assessments of comics and comics reading to assert, challenge and negotiate literacy discourses when using comics.

Pupils and teachers in this study make different assessments of Donald Duck comics as being either kid friendly or difficult. However, what is interesting here is exactly what is perceived as difficult, and how these difficulties are addressed. Both teachers and pupils in the current study utilize personal literacies to make their assessments, whereby they relate to, and use, their own experiences of reading comics to account for the difficulties they experience. The teachers construct the visual aspects as difficult for the reader if they do not have the comics literacy required, while also assessing the content of the comics as more difficult than they remember from their childhood experiences. Meanwhile, the pupil Andreas here is assessed to be comics competent by his teachers as he gets the final say in constructing a speech bubble as a specific type. The pupil group in Grade 8 discusses both the visual and textual as a combined comics literacy, with one part of the group emphasizing the textual literacy required for comics reading and the other instead focusing on the reading of images. They also do this by relating to their personal experiences of reading comics, the age they were, and how they experienced this reading.

In this analysis, I have extended on the discursive psychological approach to classroom literacy work developed by Eriksson Barajas ( Eriksson, 2002; Eriksson Barajas and Aronsson, 2009). In this article, I focus on work with comics through the lens of New Literacy Studies, as the literary didactics of the classroom is studied through a social-interactional lens and wherein visual aspects of literacy are a necessary part of school literature. This work shows how teachers and pupils relate the visual aspects of comics to constructions of reading competency. Furthermore, the analysis also verifies that comics encourage and make necessary a reflection on classroom practice and what literacy and reading entail. Participants engage with, and relate to, comics through their personal literacies, and they pinpoint comics as a specific type of reading – requiring specific skills depending on the reader’s previous experience with comics or their ability to read text and pictures. Thus, these participants construct a discourse of comics literacy, in which they relate to reading in a broader sense than merely that of decoding text, and these reading aspects influence the possibilities for early readers to be comic book literate. This should be of particular interest to scholars working in the fields of comics, education and the New Literacy Studies.

Footnotes

Appendix 1 Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Lars Wallner

Notes

Author biography

Lars Wallner is a postdoctoral research fellow in Pedagogy and Didactics, as well as an upper secondary school teacher of English, Religion and Philosophy. His research focuses on the use of fiction as a tool in educational practices, on all levels from primary school to higher education.

References

Allen

Ingulsrud

(2003) ‘Manga’ literacy: Popular culture and the reading habits of Japanese college students. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 46(8): 674–683.

Allen

Ingulsrud

(2005) Reading manga: Patterns of personal literacies among adolescents. Language and Education 19(4): 265–280.

Allington

Swann

(2009) Researching literary reading as social practice. Language and Literature 18(3): 219–230.

Bitz

(2004) The comic book project: Forging alternative pathways to literacy. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 47(7): 574–586.

Burmark

(2008) Visual literacy: What you get is what you see. In: Frey

Fisher

(eds) Teaching Visual Literacy: Using Comic Books, Graphic Novels, Anime, Cartoons, and More to Develop Comprehension and Thinking Skills. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, pp. 5–25.

Carlsson

(2012) Välkommen till Ankeborg (Welcome to Duckburg). Malmö: Egmont Kärnan.

Edwards

Potter

(1992) Discursive Psychology. London: SAGE.

Egmont Publishing (2015) Serier i undervisningen (Om oss) (Comics in teaching (about us)). Available at: http://www.serieriundervisningen.se/om-oss/ (accessed 16 June 2017).

Eriksson

(2002) Booktalk dilemmas: Teachers’ organisation of pupils’ reading. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research 46(4): 391–408.

10.

Eriksson Barajas

Aronsson

(2009) Avid versus struggling readers: Co-construed pupil identities in school booktalk. Language and Literature 18(3): 281–299.

11.

Galaczy

(2013) Kopieringsunderlag – Kalle Anka i skolan: en lärarhandledning för årskurs 3 och uppåt (Copyable materials – Donald Duck in school: A teacher’s guide for Grade 3 and up). Egmont Kids Media Nordic. Available at: http://serieriundervisningen.se/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/KA_Kopieringsunderlag.pdf (accessed 16 June 2017).

12.

Gee

(1992) The Social Mind: Language, Ideology, and Social Practice. New York; Westport, CT; London: Bergin & Garvey.

13.

Gee

(2000) Teenagers in new times: A new literacy studies perspective. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 43(5): 412–420.

14.

Gee

(2002) Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses. London: RoutledgeFalmer.

15.

Hammond

(2009) Graphic novels and multimodal literacy: A reader response study. PhD Thesis, Graduate School, University of Minnesota, Minnesota, MN.

16.

Heaney

(2007) Graphic novels: A sure bet for your library. Collection Building 26(3): 72–76.

17.

Heritage

(2004) Conversation analysis and institutional talk. In: Sanders

Fitch

(eds) Handbook of Language and Social Interaction. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 103–146.

18.

Jefferson

(2004) Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction. In: Lerner

(ed.) Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation. Amsterdam; Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, pp. 13–31.

19.

Josephson

(2011) Ju: ifrågasatta självklarheter om svenskan, engelskan och alla andra (Of Course: Questioned Givens about Swedish, English and All the Other Languages in Sweden). Stockholm: Norstedt.

20.

Kress

(2003) Literacy in the New Media Age. London: Routledge.

21.

Kress

(2010) Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. London; New York: Routledge.

22.

McCloud

(1993) Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: William Morrow.

23.

McHoul

(1990) The organization of repair in classroom talk. Language in Society 19(3): 349–377.

24.

Pantaleo

(2011) Grade 7 students reading graphic novels: ‘You need to do a lot of thinking’. English in Education 45(2): 113–131.

25.

Pantaleo

(2015) Exploring the intentionality of design in the graphic narrative of one middle-years student. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 6(4): 398–418.

26.

Peplow

Swann

Trimarco

P and Whiteley S

, et al (2016) The Discourse of Reading Groups: Integrating Cognitive and Sociocultural Perspectives. New York; London: Routledge.

27.

Potter

(1996) Representing Reality: Discourse, Rhetoric and Social Construction. London; Thousand Oaks, CA; New Delhi, India: SAGE.

28.

Potter

(2010) Discursive psychology and the study of naturally occurring talk. In: Silverman

(ed.) Qualitative Analysis: Issues of Theory and Method. London: SAGE, pp. 187–207.

29.

Potter

(2012) Discourse analysis and discursive psychology. In: Cooper

(ed.) APA Handbook of Research Methods in Psychology: Vol. 2 – Quantative, Qualitative, Neuropsychological, and Biological. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Press, pp. 111–130.

30.

Ripley

(2012) Classroom comics: Children’s medium and the new literacy. Interdisciplinary Humanities 29(1): 99–113.

31.

Sabeti

(2011) The irony of ‘cool club’: The place of comic book reading in schools. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 2(2): 137–149.

32.

Sabeti

(2014) The ‘strange alteration’ of Hamlet: Comic books, adaptation and constructions of adolescent literacy. Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education 21(2): 182–197.

33.

Schegloff

Jefferson

Sacks

(1977) The preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation. Language 53(2): 361–382.

34.

Simon

(2012) ‘Without comic books, there would be no me’: Teachers as connoisseurs of adolescents’ literate lives. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 55(6): 516–526.

35.

Sousanis

(2015) Unflattening. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press.

36.

Stivers

(2011) Morality and question design: ‘Of course’ as contesting a presupposition of askability. In: Stivers

Mondada

Steensig

(eds) The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 82–106.

37.

The New London Group (1996) A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review 66(1): 60-92.

38.

Tilley

Weiner

(2017) Teaching and learning with comics. In: Bramlett

Cook

Meskin

(eds) The Routledge Companion to Comics. New York; London: Routledge, pp. 358–366.

39.

Triplett

(2007) The social construction of ‘struggle’: Influences of school literacy contexts, curriculum, and relationships. Journal of Literacy Research 39(1): 95–126.

40.

Troelstrup

Santanach (2013) Snålheten bedrar visheten [Penny wise but pound foolish]. In: Carlsson

(ed.) Välkommen till Ankeborg [Welcome to Duckburg]. Malmö: Egmont Kärnan, pp. 87–96.

41.

Versaci

(2001) How comic books can change the way our students see literature: One teacher’s perspective. The English Journal 91(2): 61–67.

42.

Versaci

(2008) ‘Literary literacy’ and the role of the comic book. In: Frey

Fisher

(eds) Teaching Visual Literacy: Using Comic Books, Graphic Novels, Anime, Cartoons, and More to Develop Comprehension and Thinking Skills. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, pp. 91–111.

43.

Wallner

(2017a) Speak of the bubble–constructing comic book bubbles as literary devices in a primary school classroom. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 8(2): 173–192.

44.

Wallner

(2017b) Framing education: Doing comics Literacy in the classroom. PhD Thesis, Department of Social and Welfare Studies, Linköping: Linköping University.

45.

Wallner

(2019) Gutter talk: Co-constructing narratives using comics in the classroom. Scandinavian. Journal of Educational Research 63(6): 819–838.

46.

Wiggins

(2017) Discursive Psychology: Theory, Method and Applications. London: SAGE.

47.

Witty

(1941a) Children’s interest in reading the comics. The Journal of Experimental Education 10(2): 100–104.

48.

Witty

(1941b) Reading the comics: A comparative study. The Journal of Experimental Education 10(2): 105–109.

49.

Wolk

(2007) Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press.

Kid friendly? Constructions of comics literacy in the classroom

Abstract

Keywords

1. Comics literacy: literacy and comics discourses

2. Research on comics as classroom literature

3. Aim and purpose

4. Participants, data and transcription

5. Establishing a personal literacy with comics imagery

6. Comics literacy from a textual perspective

7. A discourse of multimodal literacy with comic book classroom practice

8. Constructions of comics literacy – conclusion

Footnotes

Appendix 1

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

Author biography

References