Coping with COVID -- through educational resiliency (why graphic novels are important)

Educators, parents, and caregivers have been making herculean efforts to help carry our students through the abrupt paradigm shift to remote learning. Without diminishing in any way these amazing efforts, I would assert that the ease of the transition varied with how resilient and flexible learning was prior to COVID.

More robust, accessible, flexible, multi-channel learning already designed for the widest audience probably fared better than learning approaches which were narrower and more rigid in focus. The struggles of kids with special needs and their families during this remote learning emergency have been particularly heart breaking reminders of how we still need to work harder to envision and create educational systems which can serve all kids and families even during extreme extenuating circumstances.

Which brings me to graphic novels. My students and I are spending the spring and summer reading them and… here's why they are important.

I read voraciously as a kid and as a kid I had a sort of personal “code” where I decided that books should not have illustrations of any kind. I rejected illustrations. I felt confident in my imagination's capacity to create the illustrations in my mind.

In a recent blog, I write about how Virginia Woolf’s letter writing style creates vivid imaginary shared worlds — again, no illustrations required; it’s all in the mind. When you consider my childhood “code” you won’t find it surprising that I admire this capacity of Woolf’s writing. Nonetheless, as an educator I have had to come to terms with the inherent bias of my views. Sure, I do fine with “just words”. But ample credible evidence has been produced showing that lots of learners prefer and need visual and experiential learning over “just words”. 

My own child, who is on the autism spectrum and who had a severe speech delay, absolutely needs visual and experiential pedagogy. If he’s shown how to do something and can physically practice it, he picks it up quickly. If he’s handed a paragraph of words describing what to do, or someone verbally tells him what to do, it’s nearly impossible. 

I had to come to terms with my own lifelong bias as a reader, benign as it was, and I’ve also had to come to terms with the bias of traditional educational approaches which heavily favour linguistic information transfer over visual, experiential, and other channels — which can lead to less than benign impacts on children’s learning. Yes, the education system has improved a lot, with universal learning design principles and much greater attention paid to accessibility and how different learners learn. Thankfully. 

Which is why I am honoured to be sharing this graphic novels course with my students this summer. Even though it meant unlearning my precious childhood “code”.