The Pen(cil) Is Mightier than the (S)Word? Telling Sophisticated Silent Stories Using Shaun Tan’s Wordless Graphic Novel, the Arrival

Abstract

This research study focuses on four teacher-researchers’ experiences with Shaun Tan’s (2006) The Arrival, a wordless graphic novel that is in their elementary, middle school, high school, and university classrooms. While in each case, many readers approached The Arrival with resistance, the aesthetic style and lack of recognizable language also invited readers to enter and participate in the story. The teacher-researchers found entry points through dialogic and embodied ways of meaning-making in order to engage students in a deep exploration of issues surrounding diversity and social justice. Drawn together by the common threads of critical multimodal literacies and arts-based pedagogies, the authors found that readers responded powerfully and empathetically to the text as they worked together to construct and expand meaning.