New Book on Visual Literacy Forthcoming!

My friends and colleagues Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey have an edited collection coming out soon, and it is all about Visual Literacy!

Teaching Visual Literacy :Using Comic Books, Graphic Novels, Anime, Cartoons, and More to Develop Comprehension and Thinking Skills is currently in the copy editing stage and is set for an early 2008 release from Corwin Press. Here's how Corwin describes the aims of the project:

"Educators today understand that literacy involves at least five processes: reading, writing, speaking, listening, and viewing. This thoughtful and practical book by a team of literacy experts offers classroom teachers a guide to using visual forms of information as tools for literacy development. Teaching Visual Literacy offers strategies for fostering visual and critical literacy competencies and increasing student engagement through the use of picture books, comic books, graphic novels, traditional films, anime, and other visual sources of information. Each chapter examines relevant research and theory, and presents practical applications for the classroom."

Among the chapters is an essay I wrote that details one possibility for why sequential art narratives are still struggling for legitimacy in the classroom and how teachers seeing themselves as active policy makers can change that.

Here's the full table of contents. Lots of great work on sequential art in there!

Acknowledgments
About the Editors
About the Contributors
Introduction
1. Visual Literacy: What You Get Is What You See
(Lynell Burmark)
2. Graphic Novels: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
(Jacquelyn McTaggart)
3. Comics, The Canon, and the Classroom
(James Bucky Carter)
4. Seeing the World Through a Stranger’s Eyes: Exploring the Potential of Anime in Literacy Classrooms
(Kelly Chandler-Olcott)
5. “Literary Literacy” and the Role of the Comic Book Or, “You Teach a Class on What?”
(Rocco Versaci)
6. That’s Funny: Political Cartoons in the Classroom
(Thomas DeVere Wolsey)
7. Learning from Illustrations in Picturebooks
(Lawrence Sipe)
8. An Irrecusable Offer: Film in the K-12 Classroom
(Lawrence Baines)
9. "It Was Always the Pictures…": Creating Visual Literacy Supports For Students With Disabilities
(Paula Kluth)
Index

I'm very excited about this project and to have been a part of it! Look for this book from Corwin Press soon.