"Comic Book Literacy" Brings the Links

If you're not facebook friends with the folks hocking the documentary Comic Book Literacy, you're missing out on tons of interesting links. It's like they have all day to comb the web to look for evidence to support their claims yet never bothered to give me a ring on the telly. ;)

Anyway, here's a link to an article from the North Bay Nugget detailing how Lynda Marshall uses comics to help teach canonical works like those from Shakespeare in here high school English classes at Widdifield Secondary School.

An excerpt from the article:

Students were sent on their Christmas break with the graphic novel version of Hamlet (which resembles a big comic book), as well as the original play.

"I told them to just read the graphic novel and we'd review the original play in class," Marshall said. "When they came back, they had read both. For the first time every student in the class understood the play, cover to cover."

There was also a big comics-and-literacy shindig at North Texas that featured a lot of good speakers. Apparently UNT gets it. Still, it might have been nice to get a call, but the UT system is different from the UNT system, so I can understand the homegrown pride.

But the student newspaper at UT-Arlington is getting in on the action. Here's a link to an article from The Shorthorn that covers the documentary that Texas-based Todd Kent is showing across the state currently. Here's another English teacher, this time at the college-level, talkin' graphica:

English assistant professor Carolyn Guertin uses comics in class to help her students create digital narratives. She believes comics should be taught to children because they help them understand information by using a more visual approach to presenting it.

“Comic books are the fastest-growing form of storytelling,” she said. “I think it’s really a good approach to making [information] understandable, and they’re fun. You can never beat the fun factor in learning. It’s very important to making it accessible.”

Finally, here's a link to a Youtube video featuring a discussion of the documentary after it had been screened.