Comic Book Teachings

Submitted by: Charlene Sacher

I just returned home from Chicago after attending the Popular Culture Association conference over spring break, thanks to the support of the Manitoba Association of Multiage Educators and the PD Funding grant. It was a great conference, but definitely out of my comfort zone. In this academic conference, I found that in every session, I could pull some information from and apply it to my teaching role. 

There were many sessions on the censorship of media within schools and the impact on learning, the impact of isolation on families and communities and how we can address it, and many sessions on viewing literacy and other media through anti-racist, inclusionary lenses to support and lift up all folks. 

In a couple of the sessions, they examined comic books and looked at them in interesting ways. One researcher looked at the environmental comic books often in our classrooms. When she examined these texts, she noticed that half of them are solo female characters out to "save the day" and the remaining half is split between mixed genders and solo male characters (although these were typically shown as animals). When she looked closer at these texts, she noticed that the solutions tended to be very individual-focused (recycle in your home, turn off your lights) and less on collective efforts, despite the collective efforts of many being more effective. I have also looked into this and will share an article I recently wrote Learning from Eco-Texts. 

Another really interesting way that was suggested to use comic books, a great hook for many of our students, was to use them to teach about diversity, equity, and inclusionary practices. Some examples shared were using Thor to demonstrate moving to a new country and the culture shock that comes with being in a new community, using "Dr. Strange" and "Iron Fist" to discuss cultural appropriation, looking at the impacts of colonization by looking at examples where colonialism did not occur such as in Wakanda and the Talokan community. Other suggestions were to look at the impact of race, privilege, and power in the movie "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier", and look at sexism in the workplace as seen in "Captain Marvel" and "Agent Carter". These were just some of the suggestions that were shared by the participants to hook our students to discuss complex issues. 



Thanks again MAME for supporting this learning. If you are interested in applying, please go to the website and click on Professional Development.