Community Connections in the Classroom
Graphic novels are a medium that tend to be overlooked or used mostly in early education environments. But, what if there was a way to incorporate this busy style of literature into your secondary education curriculum. As a fan of graphic novels and comics, I quickly became interested in how I could use them in my future classroom as a tool to help further my students' understanding of literary terms and elements. Graphic Novels created a whole new realm of possibilities, and using one of the many possibilities of how to use graphic novels in the classroom, I created a mock unit titled “Classic vs. Graphic Novels.”
This unit allows students to learn the key vocabulary associated with graphic and classic novels, create connections from one medium to the other, analyze two different types of literature in order to identify the significance of the similarities and differences, acknowledge and identify an author’s literary decisions and personal choices and how they affect the plot of the specific novel, understand how each author makes unique decisions and how these choices can affect the reader’s interpretations of a scene or plot, and how the use of visual art in the graphic novel can impact the understanding of the storyline from the original novel.
In this unit, there is a Stage 3, which discusses my many learning events tailored to “Classic vs. Graphic Novels.” One of the learning events I will be discussing is the preparation for the final fishbowl discussion, where I will have my students prepare evidence to support their thoughts and ideas about the posed questions related to classic and graphic novels. These questions can be seen on a Padlet I created as a mock prototype to see the layout of the discussion board as well as some mock answers my students may give in order to try and prepare to see what the final product for this assessment may be and if I need to make any adjustments.
To prepare for these questions, they will pull evidence from both novels read during the unit, the classic novel “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury and the graphic novel adaptation, “Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451: The Authorized Adaptation” by Tim Hamilton. To note, these novels can also be switched with any classic novel that has a graphic novel adaptation. This evidence will include specific quotes, page numbers, and summaries of certain chapters that help aid students’ claims in response to the posed questions.
In order to create another opportunity for more supporting evidence, I am incorporating a community connection throughout this phase. A community connection is the “act of involving the community in the classroom related to content” that is being taught. This community can be local through families, businesses, organizations, etc. or on a broader scale through social media. As a way to meet Maine’s ISTE Standard 11 (Empowered Professional), this means of community connection through the use social media allows me to meet Standard 11.3, which states, "Educators inspire students to positively contribute to and responsibly participate in the digital world,” and Standard Indicator 3 (a), which says that the teacher will "Create experiences for learners to make positive, socially responsible contributions and exhibit empathetic behavior online that build relationships and community."
By having my students create a public survey in class, which poses questions to the public via any appropriate social media platform my students are comfortable with that relate to the questions I will be asking my students during the fishbowl discussion, they will be able to gather various perspectives on the matter. These can then be used to help further support the evidence that has already been prepared by students. But, it can also allow the opportunity for students to revisit their claims and change them based on some of the different pieces of data they may have gathered. Using some new ideas they may have never thought about, they can then find evidence from the novels to further support this new claim.
As a juxtaposition to this community connection activity, you could also complete this learning event without having your students create a public social media survey. Although there may be pros to this, there are also cons and it is important to keep them in mind. The cons to having this community connection involved during this specific learning event are that the time they use to create the survey could be used as workshop time to pull evidence directly from the story, some students may abuse the right to use social media in the classroom, and some students may dislike surveys and find them useless and then their engagement is then decreased. However, some pros are that it creates an authentic audience to your students, real people with real responses, which leads to further engagement of your students; students are able to responsibly use social media as an educational tool and not just as a recreational activity; it provides students another means to gather data and pieces of evidence and can be used as a learning opportunity to show the multiple ways to support your claim.
I think involving any sense of community in your classroom is important, and for this specific unit, “Classic vs. Graphic Novels,” you could involve the community in multiple ways. As a way to not only teach the responsibilities of using social media, which is a very important life skill students can use in and outside of the classroom but having students pose a survey online, creates a positive opportunity for students to see how social media can be used for educational purposes, building a positive relationship not only between social media and the student but also between the student and the online community as well.
