Go Read: _Manga High_ by Michael Bitz

Michal Bitz's new book Manga High: Literacy, Identity, and Coming of Age in an Urban High School details the educational successes and amazing students associated with the Comic Book Project. Bitz' s four year longitudinal, qualitative study of the first CBP site, Martin Luther King, Jr. High School in New York City, is represented via crisp, informed, accessible writing and via compelling testimonial and art work from students and staff.

Bitz's goal is to illustrate how creating comic art gets at every major literacy skill. The examples culled from the MLKHS account for superb evidence of his points. Bitz also seeks to remind educators about the power of students' internal motivation and the authenticity of student-directed research and composition. Furthermore, Bitz hopes his research will speak to school world/real world schisms about literature, literacy, creating, and learning. Whereas traditional schooling often failed students in the project, their once-weekly Manga jam sessions opened pathways to higher-level literacy and learning from one another in fulfilling, inspiring ways.

Though there is little statistical data illustrating students' individual growth in specific subjects, Bitz shows how the project helped students overcome myriad obstacles in their personal- and school lives. It is clear that, if not for participating in the project, many students would have been lost in a crumbling bureaucracy of a failed education system and/or complicated family dynamics. Many would have most probably failed to earn a diploma.

Strong, moving accounts of several students and their artwork, Manga-style comics, help drive home his points.

If readers aren't driven to consider use of comics and Manga in their own classrooms or in after school programs after reading Manga High, I don't know what it will take.

I highly recommend reading Manga High: Literacy, Identity, and Coming of Age in an Urban High School, available now from Harvard Education Press.