What counts as literacy in today’s classrooms has changed little since comics were first smuggled into schools by disobedient students in the 1930’s and Gary Friedrich’s defense of comic books was published in 1961, landing him in hot water with his high school administration. What has changed in that time is the ever-increasing pervasiveness of computerized, high-stakes assessment. As a classroom teacher with twenty years experi-ence in Missouri public schools and witnessing the arc of the state’s standardized testing regime, I have seen the literacy of the domi-nant elite codified, the sum of student achieve-ment reduced to demographic data points, and the politically charged results reported to the public at the press of a button. As Missouri educators prepare for the prospects of a new, national round of automated testing, we have an opportunity to determine means and meth-
ods by which to address
the rigorous new na-
tional goals for
student literacy.
Teachers and
schools would
do well to en-
list students’
out-of-school
literacies and
the multimodal
texts that inform
much of students’
literate practice.
Traditionally printed alphabetic text is already in its advanced old age. As the 20th- century machinery for mass printing is dis-mantled, its illegitimate offspring, the comic book, lurches from troubled adolescence to troubled adulthood. Meanwhile, the multi-modal text of the digital age rockets out of a brief infancy, spreading across the planet at a pace and scale unheralded in the history of human technology. The comics medium could serve as one useful bridge for students and classroom teachers in the transition away from the mode of physically printed type, to the transcendent, digital modes of the 21st century. If we are to move as a society from one realm to the next, sound instruction in comics literacy could provide a popular avenue for that inevitable exodus.
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44
"The comics medium could serve as
one useful bridge for students and
classroom teachers.....
[to the] digital modes
of the twenty-first
century."