Advancing Literacy Beyond the Classroom

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Emily Smith
Welcome to Advancing Literacy Beyond the Classroom. This podcast is for families and caregivers to support the literacy learning that goes on outside of school. We welcome all of you to join us to make learning fun and purposeful. We know that literacy learning is a life thing and not just a school thing. As family members and caregivers, we know your role is central to your kids literacy development.

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Emily Smith
You may have young children, kids and or young adults. We have recommendations to support their literacy journey. Let's get started. I'm Emily Smith.

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Molly Picardi
And I'm Amanda Hartman, and I'm Molly Picardi. We are staff developers at Advancing Literacy at Teachers College in New York City. We are a center within the Teacher Education and Community Partnerships Division, providing professional development for school districts in the NYC metro area across the country and worldwide. This school year, we have offered over 20 free workshops for families, caregivers, and educators.

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Molly Picardi
You can find our events and future workshops on our social media pages at TC AdvancingLit and our website. Advancingliteracy.tc.columbia.edu. Great.

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Amanda Hartman
So, Emily, maybe you can start us off today and talk a little bit about our title and the genesis of this idea for this episode. Why is it important to talk about graphic novels?

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Emily Smith
Thanks, Amanda. Thanks, Molly, for joining us. I think this is really such an important topic because people often feel conflicted about this topic. It's something we hear about from families, from teachers we work with, from our friends. We're constantly being asked the question like, is this good enough? Are graphic novels really worthwhile for kids? And of course, we all want to support kids as readers.

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Emily Smith
We know that kids love this form, but should we be worried? People feel conflicted about it. And I felt this way even as a teacher and certainly as a parent. Is graphic novel reading, real reading. Is it enough?

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Molly Picardi
Yeah. You know, I felt the same way. And here's the thing. I think sometimes when we feel unsure about a type of reading or really like anything that our kids are into, the best thing that we can do is kind of try it out for ourselves.

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Amanda Hartman
Sure, sure. I mean, I think that makes a lot of sense. I mean, for me, some of the most powerful reading experiences I've had, even as an adult reader, have been through graphic novels. For example, I read Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. It's a coming of age story about her life in Tehran growing up in the 70s under the Shah and during the Islamic Revolution, as well as living through the devastating effects of war.

00;02;54;07 - 00;03;26;07
Amanda Hartman
And so it's actually now been made into like a three part trilogy of her life. And it's a powerful memoir in graphic novel form. And I think it might have even been one of my first graphic novels that I read, but it certainly gave me an important entry point in understanding and raising curiosity about her life in Iran and the history that I never learned in school.

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Amanda Hartman
I think a book like Persepolis is a really powerful book, and I have to say, I think it would be a great suggestion for high school readers as well.

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Emily Smith
I think it's interesting, Molly, to go back. Also, just that point of like, if there's something that kids are enjoying, we should try it. And I think it's also, of course, good for us to be thinking about our own experiences. So I remember similarly, Amanda, I had learned a lot about the Holocaust growing up in history class in various forms.

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Emily Smith
But when I read Art Spiegelman Mouse, a graphic graphic comic about the Holocaust and his father's experience, it really resonated in a much more personal, visceral form, created a more visceral experience for me than history books did. So I think that's another aspect for us to think about is like, what does this form do for readers?

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Amanda Hartman
Yeah, when we're able to experience it for ourselves, we become much better at being a reading mentor, a model for our children. It's hard to champion a form of reading when we are selves haven't necessarily given it a chance. But before we get into all of the nuances of how kids learn from and experience this format, maybe Molly, you can help us understand what do people mean actually by graphic novel?

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Molly Picardi
Yeah, it's such a good question. And it's really helpful to be clear about terms here, because graphic novel gets used as a sort of catchall, and there's actually a whole landscape of forms that are sort of related under that. So let's quickly map them out. So a graphic novel is actually a book length story that's told through a combination of illustration and text, where both of the illustrations and texts work together to kind of carry the plot.

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Molly Picardi
So for example, Mouse by Art Spiegelman, Dragon Hoops by Gene Luen Yang, the Dog Man series, which is so popular. So those are graphic novels, something that is often sort of like alongside that is manga. And then sometimes we use the word anime alongside manga, and manga is a Japanese version of a graphic novel, so it's comic book style.

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Molly Picardi
It's originally created in Japan, and it's typically read from right to left. So, for example, if you've ever seen the Pokemon Adventure series or Chai Sweet Home and then anime is actually the animated TV or movie version of that manga story. So if you have a kid who's really into an anime series, there's usually a manga that's waiting for them.

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Amanda Hartman
Interesting.

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Emily Smith
And these I feel like in my local bookstore, I see the teenagers hanging out, reading these nonstop. They're sitting on the floor reading these books.

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Molly Picardi
Also in this constellation of formats, we've got comic books, and comic books were something I know I grew up on. And so those are shorter. They're often magazine style publications. They go in sequential panels, they have illustrations with dialog bubbles, and they're usually part of a longer series. They get released in episodes. So Spider-Man. Superman. And then there's also comic book anthologies.

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Molly Picardi
So things like Charles Schulz's classic peanuts series, which I was in love with as a kid. Or if you've ever done like Calvin and Hobbes, those are all comic anthologies. And then also not quite a graphic novel, but often grouped in this in this chunk is highly illustrated novels, and those are traditional chapter books or novels, but they have a significant amount of illustration in them.

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Molly Picardi
So you might think about something like Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney, or like the Ricky Ricotta series. Those are probably some of the best known examples of that.

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Amanda Hartman
Yeah, all three of my nephews love graphic novels like all of these formats, and they read them pretty furiously and gobble them up independently. It's usually their first choice of what they want to read, and they will read them on their own without a lot of prompting or reminders. They will just pick them up on their own, whether it's at home or in a library, or even like what you were saying.

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Amanda Hartman
Emily at a at a bookstore. My eldest nephew loves history graphic novels, my middle one loves the manga series, and the youngest one really likes the fiction. Like the Jerry Craft books and the comics like The Boondocks.

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Emily Smith
Yeah, I think it's really helpful to have the distinctions between these different types of graphics, and I think it's also helpful for us to really think about what they have in common, and that is they are highly engaging text and illustrations. I think for us as literacy teachers, as lovers of literacy, and really always thinking about ways we can foster both literacy, growth but also joy, it's helpful for us to think about frameworks and in particular to be thinking about in reading development, the framework or the idea of will and skill.

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Emily Smith
Sure. Amanda do you want to talk to us a little bit about that?

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Amanda Hartman
Well, I mean, I just think that when children are motivated to read, they will read. And then when their skill work to develop, if their motivation is there, it makes it an easier endeavor to work on those kinds of skills. So their desire to pick up a book, to read widely, to read a lot, to read with excitement and investment is really important.

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Amanda Hartman
And we shouldn't underestimate that value because it can help to develop actual knowledge. It can develop deep and purposeful understanding and work on things like comprehension, our inference skills, our sequencing skills build our vocabulary.

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Emily Smith
Yeah. So I think going back to our original question like why this topic? Part of it is it's a topic that has some tension inside of it. And then also so much potential. Molly, you want to talk to us a little bit more about will and motivation?

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Molly Picardi
Yeah. So it's interesting. So when we were getting ready for this podcast, I was chatting with one of my friends who works at one of my favorite children's bookstores in the city, and one of the things that she told me that she hears the most often sort of echoes what you were saying earlier. She has it from parents, grandparents, friends of the family, all these people.

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Molly Picardi
Is this concern of our graphic novels really reading? And so I think that's like a really real thing to wonder about. Like a kid is obsessed with Dogman or loves to read smile, or has this manga series that they can't put down. And then there's this nagging feeling that it's somehow like, doesn't count.

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Emily Smith
Totally. I felt it as a parent and I've felt it as a teacher too. I have this concern. Is this enough? But there is something to really looking at the research, and I think there's a lot to say in the research about the reading of illustrated texts. And Molly, you want to take us a little bit into some of the science on this.

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Molly Picardi
I mean, totally. And before we even get to that science, it's like helpful to zoom out and think, like, Emily, you and I both studied art history in undergrad, and one of my favorite topics when I did that was the caves in France, Lascaux Cave. And it's this cave in southern France. It's like 17,000 years old, and it's got all these detailed pictures of animals and humans on the wall.

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Molly Picardi
Right? Like this idea of pictures to tell a story. It's not new, right?

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Emily Smith
I absolutely I started art history in college and studied illuminated manuscripts, and part of all of that was about the ways in which people communicate. This is not a new idea. This is as essential to human existence as we could get. Really thinking about cave paintings or Egyptian hieroglyphs, or even the Bayou tapestry. This is basically an 11th century comic strip of the Norman Conquest.

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Molly Picardi
I mean, it's even got like action sequences, right? And so it's interesting, like visual storytelling, it's not a shortcut or somehow like a less form of expression. It's actually one of the oldest and most universal ways that people have communicated and have preserved meaning over time. And that makes a ton of sense, because the sciences that our brains are actually really built for this, there's this whole concept called dual coding.

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Molly Picardi
And it was first developed by the psychologist Alan Pavia back in the 70s. And then it was later expanded by Richard Mayer into this or multimedia learning theory. And it's this idea that when we have two separate cognitive channels for processing information, one is for language and one is for imagery, and when both are activated at the same time, we actually understand and remember information even more deeply.

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Amanda Hartman
So actually, the graphic novel is in giving your brain less to do. It may be even giving it more to do. So that's really interesting, because when you look at researchers who have actually studied it a bit about what the brain is doing when someone reads a comic or a graphic novel.

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Molly Picardi
There's some really interesting work on this from Neil Cohn at the Tilburg University in the Netherlands, which includes some neuroimaging studies. And what he's found is that the brain processes sequential comic panels using a lot of the same neural networks as language. So it's not the same thing as just image recognition. It's not the same brain work that's taking place when you look at a picture.

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Molly Picardi
That means that comic and graphic novel reading is really structured and active, and that neurologically it's actually reading. It's not just looking at images.

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Emily Smith
So just pause there for a second, because I think it's really interesting. If we were looking at brain scans, that means we would see different parts of the brain light up. And that's the part that's really interesting to researchers. There's so much activity happening. This is a really rich, powerful medium.

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Amanda Hartman
That's right. So what are we saying about the images. How important are the images in a graphic novel, and I guess that relationship with the words?

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Molly Picardi
So that's where the misconception often lies, right. When you're reading prose or when kids are reading prose. Right. And if you think about that, that's like the traditional text that comes in paragraphs. The brain is doing a lot of work to construct mental images from the words as they kind of go along. Right. And it's a little bit like you're building the visual world for yourself.

00;14;09;29 - 00;14;27;29
Molly Picardi
But when you read a graphic novel, you're actually doing something a little different. So now you're reading a graphic novel, you're reading the text and interpreting the images. And this is the part that a lot of people don't really realize. You have to fill in all the things that are happening in between those panels.

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Emily Smith
Right, the gutters, like you have this white space that's sort of blank space between the panels. That's actually a really important part of graphic novel reading. And again, goes back to why we think every adult should try this as well.

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Molly Picardi
Yeah, because when you read panel to panel, your brain is making all these inferences.

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Emily Smith
Right? Like thinking about when time passes or thinking about cause and effect relationships or thinking about change in setting, you're sort of looking at different actions happening. You have to like, track all of that through those, through the images and the and the panel, the sort of gutters. So it feels like what we're seeing is this is really demanding reading.

00;15;09;10 - 00;15;39;08
Emily Smith
So when I have felt, is this enough, I really need to push that thought aside, because in the end, what we're saying is this is really demanding work. And the other part to it is that research has shown that kids who read graphic novels actually develop stronger sequencing skills, have stronger visual literacy. That's a lot of practice. And maybe most importantly for us as families and caregivers and everybody who's listening, kids actually read.

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Amanda Hartman
More like the engagement, the their independence, their volume of reading goes way up with graphic novels. And of course, volume matters enormously for literacy development.

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Emily Smith
And so I think this is really great. If kids have found graphic novels that they really love to read, the biggest thing is that they're going to pick them up voluntarily. And that's a huge, huge win for all of us.

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Molly Picardi
Yeah, I think that's such an important reframe for caregivers is it's not graphic novels instead of books. It's actually graphic novels are books. They are literature.

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Molly Picardi
They're doing real.

00;16;17;24 - 00;16;19;27
Molly Picardi
Cognitive reading work inside of them.

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Amanda Hartman
That's right. And for some kids, especially kids who we see maybe disengaged with reading, or maybe they're having some sort of difficulty, perhaps with language or decoding, or even just need an introduction into a topic that's really tough and dense, particularly around history. The visual support in a graphic novel is an actual, legitimate scaffold that can really help build a pathway to more reading and understanding.

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Emily Smith
Okay, so I feel like we've made our case and why this is a form that we should have in kids hands and really all readers hands. So what we want to dig into next is that we want to really think, how do we find great ones? How do we find they're not just like any text, they're not all equal.

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Emily Smith
So how do we find great text and how do we get them into kids hands? Amanda, what would you say about that?

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Amanda Hartman
Well, I mean, this is always such a good question to be asking about all kinds of books and where to find them. Firstly, I think that asking one another about books that people suggest is always a great way to find them word of mouth. So ask other caregivers and families. In my online book club, parents and caregivers often ask each other what their children are reading, and we have found great titles in that kind of space, so this is a great way to find wonderful titles like I Found Swim Team by Johnny Christmas, a favorite to suggest because kids love it.

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Amanda Hartman
Checking in with librarians also is a great way to find titles at school or at your neighborhood library. There are whole bookshelves and bookcases now that are areas reserved for graphic novels. You can find really popular ones there, and librarians, of course, know which ones are mostly checked out, and you can just browse the shelves also with your child.

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Amanda Hartman
This is how I learned about Drawn Together by Emma Reynolds, a book about biographies of kid activists, and also found Ghost Boys that is a readaptation a revisioning of the novel that Jewell Parker Rhodes wrote. Even browsing a bookstore, bookstores will have the most recent and current books that are out, and you can suggest to your libraries to purchase them.

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Amanda Hartman
That's a great way to look for what is new. I was here in New York at the strand, and I found One Crazy Summer by Rita Garcia Williams. Another readaptation of a novel and a series. And I think when you can hook into a series, that's a great way to find books. So that's like a little mini series or I know middle schoolers love Heart Stoppers, which was a Netflix series by Alice Osman.

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Emily Smith
I think also a historical. Other historical topics are interesting. Like if you're if you know your child is going to learn about a topic in history, often having an entry point text, I think you mentioned that like that would be a great way to start to understand some of the history around it.

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Amanda Hartman
Sure. Or even like my nephews really into studying more about World War II. And there are so many biographies and memoirs, like George Takei's They Called Us Enemy or about. Yeah, and ones about the bomb. Like he's very, you know, wants to know more about that. And, and so you can find these topics in a lot of graphic novels.

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Amanda Hartman
And then my last suggestion would be to follow imprints. So there's the Fabian Cousteau expeditions, there's history comics, and there's Toon books actually made by Art Spiegelman and his wife, art editors at The New Yorker. And so I think following an imprint can also give you more books to find. Much like a series would.

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Emily Smith
Great. That's helpful. Really good to have those tips and thinking about access and and also broadening. Once kids get hooked in, I think it's nice to think about how to expand. Okay. So then also we want to circle back to that I think, Molly, your first point was engagement. Adults should get engaged in this form. And part of that could mean helping kids find more graphics that they're interested in or that are going to support their academic development, their the content knowledge, etc..

00;21;10;07 - 00;21;40;15
Emily Smith
And then also we can think about this as social. So I think when we see kids reading independently, sometimes we leave them alone. We're like, oh, they're on their own good. I would encourage families and caregivers to be engaged in the actual reading of the text, and that might mean that you're reading them aloud to your kids. If your kids are younger, or even if your kids are older, you can still read them aloud because there's great conversation, then that can happen about what you're seeing on the page.

00;21;40;15 - 00;21;59;21
Emily Smith
Certainly, you also could read side by side and talk about what you're reading or swap. If your child reads something and you want to read it and then be able to talk to them about it, I think all of that is very important in terms of the social nature of any reading that we're encouraging outside of school and frankly, in school as well.

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Emily Smith
I also think it's helpful to keep in mind here that when kids are reading graphic novels or any of these graphic forms, if the illustrator and the author are not the same person, they are in deep conversation and collaboration with one another. And that's different from a picture book form. When we look at picture books, we may have one author of the of the words and another illustrator who's creating the pictures.

00;22;26;00 - 00;22;56;11
Emily Smith
Sometimes they are never in contact with each other. They actually never have any communication. And that's different in a in this scenario, when we're talking about graphic novels, oftentimes you have the same person creating the words and pictures, but if it's a partnership of two different people in the creating, then they're working very closely together. Partly why I think that's important to note is that when you're reading these, this form, you cannot only pay attention to the words, you must pay attention to the images, as we've discussed as well.

00;22;56;11 - 00;23;08;08
Emily Smith
And so I think if you are an adult reading a graphic novel to your child or to the child in your care, you need to make sure that you're talking about the images as well.

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Amanda Hartman
There are so many entry points right to these books, and I think that one thing that I hear from families and caregivers and even educators is that kids read them so quickly and out of love and passion and and maybe because they're not spending a lot of time, you know, looking and studying at the images, blowing through the text that they're like, there are so many books that they're reading, I can't keep up with them.

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Emily Smith
So that has been an expense issue. Yes. That's why we went.

00;23;44;04 - 00;23;45;20
Amanda Hartman
To the that's why the library.

00;23;45;20 - 00;23;49;09
Emily Smith
To the library. Yes. Swapping with other people. Yes. Absolutely.

00;23;49;11 - 00;24;24;08
Amanda Hartman
Yes. And having like a text set or the next book to go to through something like our libraries can be really helpful. But also this idea to slow down. Or to reread, right, that you could come back to the book and linger over parts of it, or linger over the pictures on a second or a third read, and that rereading and looking back at parts to slow down is much like what we do with any favorite book or a favorite movie.

00;24;24;12 - 00;24;42;11
Amanda Hartman
We rewatch it, we reread it, we linger, and we make new notices about what we see and what we wonder. And I think this medium is perfect for that, because there is so much to see in the images between the panels. ET cetera.

00;24;42;11 - 00;24;58;25
Emily Smith
We've talked about where to find the text, and we've talked about some of the work we might do with the text, and I think it would also be helpful. We've said this a few times. I've been careful to say this is a form, not a genre, and I think it would be useful for us to talk a bit about the form.

00;24;58;25 - 00;25;01;27
Emily Smith
And Molly, I think you have expertise on this.

00;25;02;04 - 00;25;29;22
Molly Picardi
It's an important distinction. So a genre is a category of content like mystery, fantasy, historical fiction and a form which is what a graphic novel is, is a structure. It's a structure that a story gets told through. So you could have, for example, a memoir written as prose or a memoir written as poetry, or a memoir written as a graphic novel, in the same way that you could have a fantasy story that's told as a chapter book or as a graphic novel.

00;25;29;24 - 00;25;48;23
Molly Picardi
So the form is the how and not the what. And the reason this is helpful for us to think about as caregivers, as people who are reading with kids, is that once you understand graphic novels as a form, you start to see that there are really specific things that a reader needs to learn about in order to navigate them successfully.

00;25;48;23 - 00;26;04;28
Molly Picardi
So there are real skills and knowledge that a reader needs to have to walk into a graphic novel and make the most of it. So as a caregiver, when you know about those skills, you can help your kids build them, which is one way that we sort of think about the skill piece of this.

00;26;04;29 - 00;26;39;21
Emily Smith
Yeah, understanding the form of anything you're reading is going to help you. So let's talk about some of the key features inside of graphics. The most obvious one that we've already talked about a little bit are panels. And those are the individual frames that contain the images. And the text panels are the basic unit of storytelling. And one of the first things I think kids that oftentimes pick this up intuitively, but is a helpful to make it explicit as well, because kids need to understand how to read and move through the panels.

00;26;39;22 - 00;26;49;05
Molly Picardi
Yeah, exactly. And in most Western graphic novels, you read them from left to right, the same way you would sort of a typical Western book. But of course, if you're in manga, you're reading right to left.

00;26;49;06 - 00;26;57;00
Emily Smith
Great. So that's important convention of that form. And kids who know that will be better set up to navigate it successfully.

00;26;57;04 - 00;27;18;26
Molly Picardi
Exactly right. And then there's the gutter. We've already mentioned that. So that's the blank space that's between the panels. And the gutter is really tricky because everything that happens there is an invisible. So the reader has to supply that information. A skilled graphic novel reader will constantly be asking themselves almost intuitively, wait, what just happened there? How much time just passed?

00;27;18;27 - 00;27;26;25
Molly Picardi
What's the connection between this panel and that panel? And so all that inferential thinking takes a little bit of practice and it's really learnable.

00;27;26;25 - 00;28;00;10
Amanda Hartman
Yeah. And I think, you know, there are also text elements like speech bubbles, thought bubbles. Those are quite common ones that we know. There are captions that describe and narrate. There are sound effects like onomatopoeia, like the word you might see crash or whoosh. And these are usually visually displayed and designed on the page. So these features are great to slow down on and talk about.

00;28;00;11 - 00;28;24;12
Amanda Hartman
Also not to skip. It's great to redirect kids who are skipping around to different parts, to be sure to take in all the information. And again, that could happen on a first read a second read a third, read the caption, the speech bubble. All of those things with the image are really important to take in, and it's a great skill.

00;28;24;15 - 00;28;36;24
Amanda Hartman
It's a great skill because when you look at informational books or in other situations, we want kids to know that all the text that's there, all those text elements are important to take in.

00;28;36;24 - 00;28;57;20
Molly Picardi
And another one that's in graphic novels that kids almost always recognize, but they don't necessarily know the name for is emanata. And so those are all those little tiny symbols that radiate off the characters, and they show what they're feeling or experiencing. They might be a little sweat drops that come off when a character is nervous, or maybe stars that circle their head almost like a cartoon of a bump.

00;28;57;23 - 00;29;08;24
Molly Picardi
Little hearts that float up from a character's eyes when they're excited. Or maybe if I'm in like an older graphic novel, maybe show a little crush steam rising off of a kid who's furious in the book.

00;29;08;26 - 00;29;29;14
Emily Smith
Yeah, it's this universal language of really thinking about all of us, probably, who grew up on Saturday morning comics or read them as kids. We have that, that knowledge. It's really a knowledge that we build. And once you see it and once you name it, you can notice it everywhere. And it does feel like it's almost a language unto itself.

00;29;29;15 - 00;29;48;23
Molly Picardi
Yeah, totally. It's like emanata are kind of like a visual shared set of symbols that readers and creators have developed together over time. And so it's part of being a fluent reader of the form. A skilled graphic novel reader moves between text, image, and emanata almost simultaneously, and they pull them all together to make meaning.

00;29;48;29 - 00;30;13;05
Amanda Hartman
I love that, and we can even see it in their writing, which I know we're going to talk about a little bit later. But all of those things kids can also use in writing their own graphic novels and comics. Yeah. So this relationship between the text and the image, it's not always redundant. It's not always the case that the picture shows exactly what the words say.

00;30;13;05 - 00;30;35;16
Amanda Hartman
And sometimes they're working together to add more layers of meaning, like there are even panels that sometimes don't have any words. So you have to take those in and think about them. The character might be saying one thing, but the image shows something different. And this could also be true in many of the picture books that you also read.

00;30;35;18 - 00;30;46;02
Amanda Hartman
For example, showing us what's really going on emotionally. Learning to read with that tension is a sophisticated literacy skill.

00;30;46;02 - 00;31;07;00
Molly Picardi
And so is reading, like the facial expressions, the body language as the story unfolds, that that's all information that the reader needs to hold on to and in prose and author might come out and tell you it. They might say she was furious or she stopped her feet. But in a graphic novel that might just be shown in a picture, it might be the set of a jaw, it might be the angle of an eyebrow.

00;31;07;02 - 00;31;13;03
Molly Picardi
And so the reader has to really be on the lookout for that visual information as part of character development.

00;31;13;03 - 00;31;38;02
Emily Smith
And I think learning about that inside of graphics and seeing the nuance, I mean, those are subtle things, but being attuned to it in a graphic reading experience and then moving to prose that transfers, you know, that idea that the details matter of how someone moves and how it's described in a text, for instance? Okay. So it is also helpful for us to think about the page layout itself.

00;31;38;02 - 00;32;06;18
Emily Smith
I think we've talked about how kids can read panels and move across panels, but even just understanding that the panels are not all the same size and that's intentional, or really thinking about how authors are using the small, tighter panel to create more attention and speed, or the large full page panel, which of course is like signaling that this is the most important thing if you're going to devote this much space to it.

00;32;06;19 - 00;32;30;23
Emily Smith
That's really part of the storytelling, and we want to make sure kids learn that, that they're not just passive in taking it in, but they're really actively thinking about the the significance of page layouts. So this is something else that you might notice and talk to, you know, your reader about saying like, oh, wow, look at that. Look at how big this is compared to these smaller panels.

00;32;30;27 - 00;32;55;04
Molly Picardi
It's like teaching them the grammar of the form. Right? It's really what visual literacy is. It's knowing how to read not just the words, the images, the layout design, the relationship between all of these pieces. And it extends beyond graphic novels too right, like these are the same skills we bring into film, into even being critical readers of advertising, into the way that information is presented to us every single day.

00;32;55;06 - 00;32;58;07
Amanda Hartman
That's right. So important that media literacy.

00;32;58;08 - 00;33;25;03
Emily Smith
Okay, so, Amanda, you mentioned earlier the concept of writing these texts because as soon as kids start to read them and become fans of graphic novels, they often will want to write them. And we think this is absolutely a phenomenal, wonderful idea to create graphic novels of their own, have an opportunity to take all of the learning about this form that we've just discussed and apply it in their own stories or topics.

00;33;25;03 - 00;33;37;27
Emily Smith
And to get started, students might extend an existing text, or they may simply be inspired by a character or a topic and create their own text.

00;33;37;29 - 00;34;09;24
Amanda Hartman
Yeah. That's right. So kids can think about this form with their own writing, depending on the that they're making, whether they're making story or informational making fantasies, they can use the graphic form. So even making paper with panels can be really helpful to have for kids. And just like we talk about reading graphic novels is real reading. Same is true for writing.

00;34;09;24 - 00;34;22;13
Amanda Hartman
Writing graphic novels is real writing. So they can make an original book. They could make an adaptation, they can make some fanfiction. It can be really fun.

00;34;22;14 - 00;34;23;21
Molly Picardi
Yeah. Super fun.

00;34;23;22 - 00;34;41;08
Amanda Hartman
We are ready to give folks recommendations of recent releases of graphic novels that we recommend for your readers of all ages. Molly, you want to start to give us some recommendations for fiction.

00;34;41;09 - 00;35;07;11
Molly Picardi
Yeah. So I've got a couple good fiction rec’s for you. So the first one that I'm really loving is for younger readers, Hilda and Twig Hide from the Rain by Luke Pearson. So this is the latest in a several book series. Now it's this magical comic series about this little girl named Hilda. She's super cute, and in this latest installment, she and her dear fox friend Twig are looking for shelter during a big storm, and they come to this cave of forest animals.

00;35;07;11 - 00;35;37;04
Molly Picardi
And then they discover that the owner of the cave is not so interested in having them there. It was the 2025 winner of the Eisner Award for Best Publication for Early Readers. Super well earned. I also really love Cactus Kid, which is another little series for younger readers. It's Emmanuel Guerrero, it's super funny, and in the latest one, Rumble at the Rodeo, Cactus Kid has to master dirt magic to have this battle with all these monsters or rock giants.

00;35;37;04 - 00;36;02;08
Molly Picardi
Giant spiders. He's super scrappy and it's just a great entry point for this format. It got ALA's Best Graphic Novels of 2025, so that's another one for younger readers. And then for more like middle grade readers. Another one that just came out pretty recently is The Cartoonist Club. Yeah, it's so good. It's this middle grade collaboration between Raina Telgemeier and Scott McCloud.

00;36;02;09 - 00;36;08;27
Molly Picardi
It's about four kids who their school librarian helps them learn about, and then start designing their own comic book.

00;36;08;28 - 00;36;10;29
Amanda Hartman
It's such a good example, right?

00;36;11;00 - 00;36;32;05
Molly Picardi
Perfect. Perfect for the. And then one that I just read and adored as an adult reader, but it's really it's a YA text. So more for like the high school set is Lunar New Year Love Story. And so this is a rom com. It's got some elements of folklore magic and it's just got like all this heart. It's daily drama.

00;36;32;05 - 00;36;42;26
Molly Picardi
It's got family drama. It's got like high school crushes. It also was a 2025 Eisner book, and it was a Coretta Scott King honor book.

00;36;42;28 - 00;36;43;16
Emily Smith
Amazing.

00;36;43;17 - 00;36;45;20
Amanda Hartman
Yeah, I mean anything by Gene Luen Yang.

00;36;45;23 - 00;36;48;01
Emily Smith
I know I was going to say I can't.

00;36;48;02 - 00;36;56;18
Emily Smith
Pass anything up. I mean, Dragon Hoops was really one of my favorite books of all time. Absolutely awesome. Okay, Amanda, you've got the next set for us.

00;36;56;19 - 00;36;56;27
Emily Smith

00;36;56;27 - 00;37;23;01
Amanda Hartman
Yeah, well, I was going to talk a little bit about narrative nonfiction books. Because there are so many. And you can find books about people that are biographies and memoirs, like some of the ones we've talked about. You can find ones about events that have happened, specific events, and also deeper and longer histories. So these are some of the examples that I have selected.

00;37;23;04 - 00;37;43;21
Amanda Hartman
The Vanishing of Lake Peignuer, a graphic novel based on a true story by Alan Wolf and Jose Pimienta. And I just think like this. It starts off with like, wait, where did this lake go? How did did it disappear? It's the lake narrates it.

00;37;43;22 - 00;37;45;20
Emily Smith
So it's really cool. Yeah, it's.

00;37;45;20 - 00;38;14;15
Amanda Hartman
Really cool. And then I'm also suggesting Black Lives Great Minds of Science by Tanya Bolden and David Wilkerson, and this is a delightful book, broken up into parts of different scientists. And it has one of my favorites, Ayana Johnson, who is a climate scientist and studies the ocean and is also a great person to read as an adult.

00;38;14;15 - 00;38;46;21
Amanda Hartman
But this is a book for kids to learn about our important scientists who are studying the world. I also included history smashers. This one is Earth Day and the Environment. It's a pretty recent one. There's one coming out about space just in time. Just in time. And Kate Messner, what she does is she teams up in this book with Justin Greenwood, and sometimes she teams up with other authors and illustrators.

00;38;46;21 - 00;39;16;28
Amanda Hartman
Depending on the content that she is writing about. It's a whole series. And kids love this series, and it's a great way of getting into histories and specific events that have taken place. And then the last one is Indigenous People's History of the United States. It's a graphic interpretation by Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, who wrote both the young adult as well as an adult version of this text.

00;39;16;28 - 00;39;39;28
Amanda Hartman
And Paul Peart Smith is the illustrator who's doing the interpreting of Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz's scholarship. And it's an entire history. So it is long, it is deep, it is detailed and a great introduction for kids.

00;39;40;00 - 00;40;08;21
Emily Smith
Really great to have that. Again, the the opportunity to learn about history and true stories through this innovative form. Ok, so we also have some nonfiction text that I was aiming for, things that were more expository versus narrative nonfiction. So not so much stories. So a few that I have on on the recommendations list here. One is Science Comics.

00;40;08;21 - 00;40;28;18
Emily Smith
That's a series. And so again, I always love a series because it just means that once you get hooked into the series, you can keep reading more. So one of the most recent Science Comics is Deep Sea Creatures Adapting to the Abyss. And really great topic to just be thinking about putting this as a tech set with other text as well.

00;40;28;18 - 00;40;54;21
Emily Smith
You can learn so much about deep sea exploration, etc. this one's by Mike Lawrence, and I just I think it's a great way for kids to learn a lot of content. And again, you could put it next to other text and or and they could be multimodal videos that you're watching to build some knowledge there. Scott McCloud, you saw paired up with that narrative nonfiction with Raina Telgemeier but this one is a book on making comics.

00;40;54;21 - 00;41;15;11
Emily Smith
So again, if your kids are interested in making their own comics, he unpacks all the the different parts of the form and gives advice along the way so that kids are getting a sort of how to guide of making comics. So that's another fun one. And then for younger kids, I mean really for everyone. But I think some of the younger kids might appreciate the super squads.

00;41;15;11 - 00;41;36;23
Emily Smith
And again, these are animal hero books. This is another series. This one is obviously about penguins and this is by Heather Lang and Jamie Harper. But there are other other books in the series as well. And so I would look out for these as a way to build knowledge about animals in this case. And again, more expository nonfiction.

00;41;36;24 - 00;41;37;02
Emily Smith
Well.

00;41;37;02 - 00;41;54;08
Amanda Hartman
I love this also because it's a picture book. It's not an early chapter book. Right. And I think that goes back to what Molly was talking about earlier, of the different kinds of books that we're talking about. It kind of fits more with that, like comic strip.

00;41;54;10 - 00;41;55;26
Amanda Hartman
Form. Yeah, right.

00;41;56;02 - 00;41;58;20
Molly Picardi
It's great. That's right.

00;41;58;22 - 00;42;00;17
Amanda Hartman
That's right. So I think that's a great example.

00;42;00;18 - 00;42;01;04
Emily Smith
Right.

00;42;01;04 - 00;42;22;18
Emily Smith
And then more for I would say again, this would fit more into the YA version of things that Jonathan Haidt, Catherine Price of Teamed Up. You may have heard of Jonathan Haidt book on The Anxious Generation, but this is The Amazing Generation. And this is giving, again, a sort of how to how to be connected. Have fun, stay off screens.

00;42;22;18 - 00;42;34;22
Emily Smith
So this one could be for us all probably, but also especially for older kids who are looking for some ways to learn from the text but learn about how to live.

00;42;34;23 - 00;42;35;07
Emily Smith
Yeah.

00;42;35;09 - 00;42;37;00
Amanda Hartman
My nephew's middle school is reading.

00;42;37;00 - 00;42;39;14
Emily Smith
This one. Nice. Yeah, I love it. Nice.

00;42;39;17 - 00;42;42;06
Emily Smith
Okay. And then, Amanda, you had one more final rec.

00;42;42;06 - 00;42;42;19
Emily Smith
For us.

00;42;42;20 - 00;43;20;10
Amanda Hartman
Well, I just I saw this come out from Teachers College Press, Gloria Ladson-Billings, The Dream Keepers. This is a famous book and scholarship that she wrote many years ago for teachers and educators. And I just saw that they're making it into a comic edition, I suppose, with the help of Rachel Branham. So those of you who are educators or who are interested in this scholarship definitely should check out this book, and I, I love that there are books for children, but also adults and educators, right?

00;43;20;13 - 00;43;35;12
Emily Smith
Professional learning. I mean, you see, this form is so innovative and it is captivating for readers of all ages. And so again, we think there's so much that we can learn from graphic novel reading or graphics in general.

00;43;35;15 - 00;43;36;09
Emily Smith
Wonderful.

00;43;36;15 - 00;44;01;09
Amanda Hartman
Well, thank you all for listening to our podcast, Advancing Literacy Beyond the Classroom. We hope that this sparks curiosity and conversation with your kids and supports literacy, growth, and enjoyment. Remember, literacy isn't just about the books they read in school, it's about the stories we share, the world we explore, and the conversations we have to stay connected with our community.

00;44;01;10 - 00;44;31;29
Amanda Hartman
Head over to Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform to follow our series and catch our new episodes once a month. Our website page will also have a reference for book recommendations, as well as a one page handout of tips based on the content of the episode. If you find value in these conversations, please leave us a five star rating and a review and share the show with someone you think would love to join the journey.

00;44;32;02 - 00;44;40;29
Amanda Hartman
You can also find our next live workshops on our website, AdvancingLiteracy.tc.columbia.edu.

00;44;41;02 - 00;45;03;08
Amanda Hartman
Please share this information with others in your community. All are welcome and if you are interested in bringing professional development to your family, school or district, please email us. We hope you join us again. Keep advancing literacy one word, one book, and one conversation at a time.

00;45;03;10 - 00;45;04;15
Emily Smith
Thank you. Amanda.

00;45;04;16 - 00;45;08;29
Emily Smith
Thanks, Emily. Thanks, Molly. Thanks, Billy.

00;45;09;02 - 00;45;10;04
Amanda Hartman
Thanks, everyone.

00;45;10;05 - 00;45;11;09
Emily Smith
Thanks, everyone.