Here's a great article on the literacy "crisis" facing young boys. Thanks to Mr.M for drawing it to my attention.
It's very thorough and hits all the main points about fiction, nonfiction, curriculum, choice, etc. and how boys respond to them.
Among the points is this gem:
"'Nontraditional materials such as comic books and sports-themed materials can provide an important “hook” to get boys more involved in reading,' [William]Pollack [of Harvard Medical School] says, 'and serve as a helpful bridge to more advanced types of reading later on.'"
So, we get a little but of pro-comics stance. In the next paragraph, though, we get:
"If there are kids out there who are, for whatever reason, really reluctant readers or low-level readers, then anything that gets them hooked into spending time on reading is a good thing,” [Catherine]Snow [of Harvard Graduate School of Education] says. “But the problem is that whereas those can be great places to start, they don’t get you where you need to be to succeed academically. You’ve got to be able to access serious academic texts.”
I'm not sure if Snow is referring directly to comics, since Pollack was the one who mentioned them. If so, we've got another example of folks not realizing that some comics are very sophisticated texts, but I think this might be an example of the writer of the article merging concepts for story flow rather than a blanket statement from Snow, especially since we're talking about two different people's statements here.
But, if a representative from Harvard is acknowledging comics' role in facilitating literacy, I ain't gonna complain.
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