Moving Our Can(n)ons: Toward an Appreciation of Multimodal Texts in the Classroom

The growing popularity of graphic novels for younger readers is hard to miss. This article provides specific ways to think about, recognize, and teach with multimodal texts that leverage student interest. In this English language arts unit, we taught a sixth‐grade class how to read and comprehend the complex design elements common to the graphic novel form. The class used both student‐selected graphic novels made available to them by the researchers and a whole‐class graphic novel, One Dead Spy by Nathan Hale. Teaching students how to effectively comprehend graphic novels is much like teaching anything: By identifying the content and strategies that need to be taught, we then identified the corresponding teaching strategies needed. This article reports on the content and strategies, specific ways to help students come to a greater understanding of the text in hand, and graphic novels as a literary form.