Abstract
This article explores how teachers and pupils construct and negotiate discourses around comic books as part of interaction in the classroom from a New Literacy Studies perspective. The combination of imagery and text, the essence of comics, makes them relevant tools for exploring how literacy is constructed in social interaction in the classroom. The analysis is based on video material from two different Swedish schools, one class in Grade 3 and one class in Grade 8. Nine interactional sequences were initially found, and these have been analysed using a qualitative discursive psychological approach, investigating how assessments are utilized to perform social actions – how participants use assessments of comics as easy or difficult reading, or assessments of themselves or others as being or not being comic book readers – to make something happen in interaction. The results show that participants utilize discourses of personal, visual and textual literacy to construct a comics literacy in which image and text are both construed as important for, as well as a difficulty in, reading comics. This demonstrates constructions of comics literacy and readership, how personal experiences of reading comics are important and the importance of broadening the view of comics as school literature.
Highlights
This article explores how teachers and pupils construct and negotiate discourses around comic books as part of interaction in the classroom from a New Literacy Studies perspective
The current article explores classroom literacy discourses around comics,1 grounding this exploration in New Literacy Studies (Gee, 1992, 2000)
Teachers and students studied in naturally occurring classroom interaction (Potter, 2010; Wiggins, 2017) make assessments of comics and comics reading – being a fan, not being a fan, being easy to read, being difficult – thereby constructing discourses of comics literacy (Wallner, 2017b) and negotiating what this literacy could entail
Summary
Comics have been part of school practices for a long time (Tilley and Weiner, 2017). Throughout the past 20 years, New Literacy Studies has promoted a two-part shift in perspective from viewing literacy as a cognitive ability of reading and writing to viewing it as a sociocultural practice (Gee, 1992, 2000, 2002) as well as widening the literacy term to include the reading of non-text, such as images, sounds, symbols and more (Kress, 2003, 2010; The New London Group, 1996). This article uses terminology from Allen and Ingulsrud (2005) in discussing personal literacy, whereby participants draw on their previous experiences of engaging with narratives in their engagement with new texts This is akin to Gee (2000) who demonstrates how pupils’ discourses around literacy are intertwined with their identity work and the development of their reading practices, and Wolk (2007) who argues that merely ‘picking up something with words and pictures to read, you become the sort of person who reads comics’ I take an interest in how both teachers and pupils, drawing on their personal literacies, construct discourses around comics as part of natural classroom interaction – interaction around such activities that would take place regardless of the presence of the researcher (Potter, 2010; Wiggins, 2017) – exploring this from a perspective of literacy as socially and culturally situated (cf. Gee, 1992, 2000, 2002)
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