With Great Power Comes Great Pedagogy
With Great Power Comes Great Pedagogy
Teaching, Learning, and Comics
Contributions by Bart Beaty, Jenny Blenk, Ben Bolling, Peter E. Carlson, Johnathan Flowers, Antero Garcia, Dale Jacobs, Ebony Flowers Kalir, James Kelley, Susan E. Kirtley, Frederik Byrn Køhlert, John A. Lent, Leah Misemer, Johnny Parker II, Nick Sousanis, Aimee Valentine, and Benjamin J. Villarreal
More and more educators are using comics in the classroom. As such, this edited volume sets out the stakes, definitions, and exemplars of recent comics pedagogy, from K-12 contexts to higher education instruction to ongoing communities of scholars working outside of the academy.
Building upon interdisciplinary approaches to teaching comics and teaching with comics, this book brings together diverse voices to share key theories and research on comics pedagogy. By gathering scholars, creators, and educators across various fields and in K-12 as well as university settings, editors Susan E. Kirtley, Antero Garcia, and Peter E. Carlson significantly expand scholarship.
This valuable resource offers both critical pieces and engaging interviews with key comics professionals who reflect on their own teaching experience and on considerations of the benefits of creating comics in education. Included are interviews with acclaimed comics writers Lynda Barry, Brian Michael Bendis, Kelly Sue DeConnick, and David Walker, as well as essays spanning from studying the use of superhero comics in the classroom to the ways comics can enrich and empower young readers.
The inclusion of creators, scholars, and teachers leads to perspectives that make this volume unlike any other currently available. These voices echo the diverse needs of the many stakeholders invested in using comics in education today.
The applicability of this volume is perhaps its greatest strength, with each contributor providing clear examples of both the why and how of reading and making comics in instruction.
Although comics studies has now rightly claimed its role in academia, a potential gap remains: the discussion of pedagogical practices about how best to incorporate, teach, and use comics in the classroom. The book With Great Power Comes Great Pedagogy: Teaching, Learning, and Comics, edited by Susan E. Kirtley, Antero Garcia, and Peter E. Carlson, is an excellent foray into this arena as it offers fantastic essays and insights into how comics function in the classroom from early education to college-level courses. . . . This collection is a remarkable one. . . . All the elements of this collection work in tandem to offer a unique, helpful resource that would be a wise read for any comics scholar or educator looking to utilize comics in the classroom.
As someone who regularly reads and teaches comics in a range of disciplinary contexts, I found With Great Power Comes Great Pedagogy an intellectual treat as scholars and artists share the tools, techniques, and theories that inform their teaching students to draw and critically engage with graphic storytelling. It’s great to learn about the classroom experiences of thoughtful educators as they recount what did and did not work with their students. And at the same time, the essays question established wisdom in order to provoke us to think in new ways about what it might mean to study comics or to break down the boundaries between thinking and making, between theory and practice, as they relate to this medium.
Susan E. Kirtley is professor of English, director of composition, and director of comics studies at Portland State University. She is winner of the 2013 Eisner Award for Best Educational/Academic Work for her book Lynda Barry: Girlhood through the Looking Glass, published by University Press of Mississippi. Antero Garcia is assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. He is author of Good Reception: Teens, Teachers, and Mobile Media in a Los Angeles High School.Peter E. Carlson is literacy curriculum specialist and English instructor at Green Dot Public Schools in Los Angeles, California. Carlson’s research has appeared in journals, and in the book Literacy Enrichment and Technology Integration in Pre-Service Teacher Education.
With Great Power Comes Great Pedagogy
Teaching, Learning, and Comics
Edited by Susan E. Kirtley, Antero Garcia, and Peter E. Carlson
