Reading Comics Collaboratively and Challenging Literacy Norms

This article draws from a year-long ethnographic study documenting the use of comics in a school. Focusing on literacy work in a social studies classroom, it documents how comics were welcomed into and challenged classroom spaces. Comics were introduced, read, and engaged with collaboratively. While comics were able to support strategic practices, such as a standardized curriculum implemented by the school system, their presence and use in classrooms helped to surface teachers’ and students’ awareness of their typical rhythms. There were impacts to the ways in which students and teachers recognized and critiqued literacy practices in their school. By inviting a comic into their curriculum, teachers were also inviting changes to the space in which they and their students were learning.