Pilgrimage In A Foreign Land: The Lived Experience Of Teaching With Graphic Novels In The Secondary English Classroom

Abstract

In the context of a multimodal and multimediated textual landscape, a substantial body of research and literature endorses the value of graphic novels as a means to provide authentic literacy experiences for students. A less substantial body of discourse, however, submits that graphic novels have not been embraced as classroom texts to any great extent by teachers. To investigate this disjuncture between theory and practice, and to add to the small body of research on teachers’ practice with the graphic novel format of the comics medium, this study explores nine teachers’ experiences with graphic novels in the secondary English classroom. A hermeneutic phenomenological approach informed by the work of Max van Manen frames this study. Data collected via semi-structured interviews were interpreted and are presented through individual participant stories and thematic considerations. Commensurate with the chosen methodology, literature, poetry, anecdote, images, and metaphor are employed to create an evocative text designed to bring the reader more directly into contact with the participants’ experiences. In particular, the notion of participants as pilgrims in a foreign land is considered. The study revealed graphic novels being used in a variety of ways by teachers who varied significantly in their level of comics capital. That said, all participants struggled in one way or another to teach the graphic novel, a situation that reflected a lack of support from curriculum documents, a paucity of professional development opportunities, and their struggle to balance the needs and interests of their students against the pressures of a crowded and prescriptive curriculum that privileges traditional prose texts. In the face of such challenges, however, it was apparent that the positive outcomes of teaching with graphic novels far outweighed teachers being pedagogically destabilised and rendered vulnerable. In light of the inclusion of graphic novels as recommended texts in the Australian Curriculum: English, it is hoped that teacher-readers of the research will be encouraged by this study’s findings to reflect on their use of graphic novels and that agencies who support teachers in their pedagogy will recognise the value of graphic novels as texts and support teachers’ efforts to use them accordingly.