Defining literacy is complex and what it means to be literate is just as complicated. In the digital age, preparing students to be functional, literate citizens requires far more than teaching students to read and understand traditional texts. Instead, at the minimum students need to be prepared to analyze information in textual and visual modes. Yet the gap between traditional and digital literacy is too wide for many students to bridge. My work proposes that graphic novels are one way to bridge the gap between these disparate learning tasks. Graphic novels prepare students to be functional digital citizens because the multimodality of graphic novels lends itself to students’ transition into digital literacy. Graphic novels also have a long history of social justice themes that provide students language and maturity to understand the responsibility of a digital footprint and engage in digital discourse.
Past Projects
