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Compiling Artifacts with Graphic Memoirs by Emily Wender

3/28/2022

Today's Monday Motivator Post was written by Emily Wender, an Associate Professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Wender’s work focuses on response to literature, emotion and literacy, composition theory and pedagogy, and teacher development and identity.

Graphic memoirs for young adults have become a favorite sub-genre for me as both a reader and a teacher. Some of the most impactful titles I have brought to my college classrooms over the past decade are award-winning young adult graphic memoirs, such as Persepolis by Marjane Satripi, the March trilogy by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell; El Deafo by Cece Bell; and Stitches by David Small.

Graphic memoirs invite us into a person’s life story in multiple ways: we have to negotiate sequences between panels, words, and images, and we hunt for significance in an author’s life story through the visuals, the words, and their relationships. Memoir is always a product of authorial wrestling, as writers work to make a compelling narrative out of the hugeness and messiness of life. Graphic memoirists have even more at their disposal to accomplish that goal, and the images force us to see both the specificity of their unique experience as well as the larger contexts in which that experience might fit.

They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, Justin Eisinger, and Steven Scott. Illustrated by Harmony Becker.

One of the titles that most accomplishes that zooming in to a single person’s life experience and zooming out to societal contexts is George Takei’s graphic memoir, They Called Us Enemy. In this graphic memoir, Takei walks us through so much:

his childhood in Los Angeles
his family’s abrupt and traumatic forced removal to two Japanese internment camps
his parents’ incredible job sustaining a childhood for their children while in the camps
his emerging understanding of personal and societal prejudice
his eventual recognition of the reality of internment and what his family and other Japanese Americans went through due to legalized discrimination
his eventual career as an actor
his lifelong advocacy for democracy and civil rights in the United States

There are countless broader contexts in which readers can fit Takei’s story, yet the specific reactions of his parents on a single day in a single moment are what make this story, especially its images, linger with the reader.

Takei’s goals for readers are clear by the end--increasing people’s awareness of Japanese internment during WWII, and more broadly, helping readers see how their involvement in democracy is crucial. Takei put it this way in a PopCulture Network interview about the graphic memoir: “I hope the young people that read this book understand the importance of their being active participants in the process of our democracy. Our democracy is great, but it depends on us as a people to make the ideals of this country true.”

Compiling and Connecting
One of my favorite projects with Takei’s graphic memoir (or any graphic memoir) is to send students outside of the text to compile artistic artifacts that speak to the memoir in some way. Students can choose artifacts that capture Takei’s particular experiences; that speak to broader contexts, such as Japanese internment, the Civil Rights Movement, or LGBTQ rights; or that elaborate on a theme.

I ask students to choose 3 types of artifacts--a poem, a song, and visual art or visual document-- which they then represent and explain in a slide deck. Their slides include their artifacts, panels from the graphic memoir that connect to those artifacts, and written explanations of those connections.

To help students get started, I ask them to brainstorm responses to the following categories.

What issues & ideas, emotions, conflicts, and questions matter to Takei in his memoir? What page numbers are most relevant to each category?

Then I give them directions for choosing their artifacts and explaining those choices:

For each element of the compilation:
Describe each piece of art or literature. Why did you choose it? It might be because it fits a specific moment in Takei’s life or it might be because it speaks to the larger issues he confronts.

Zoom in: Think of a moment or moments in Takei’s life when this piece of art would have been something he or others would have connected to . How does this piece of art fit those moments?

or

Zoom out: How does it relate to your graphic memoir as a whole? Which of the issues and ideas, emotions, conflicts, or questions that your memoirist experiences connect to this piece? Or what overarching societal reality does the piece reveal? What might Takei want us to consider about this reality?

Reference specifics from the piece of art (the poem, song, or visual art) and from the graphic memoir (please refer to specific pages and panels).

When I write about graphic novels, I often include pictures of specific panels as evidence for my ideas. You will want to do the same.

So what might show up in an artistic compilation for this memoir? Here are a few examples for each category.

Poems: Poems often push students to think thematically about the memoir or to consider powerful panels or moments of heightened emotion.

“Theme for English B” by Langston Hughes: The way the speaker teaches his instructor about his life experience as a Black man in segregated New York City speaks to the ways Takei teaches readers about Japanese internment and the dehumanizing losses it incurred. Students have also connected this poem to Takei’s involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, which played a pivotal role in his young adult life.
“For a Father” by Elise Partridge: Upon her father’s early death, the speaker recounts key memories with her father. Takei’s father is one of the heroes of this memoir, which shows readers his father’s love, leadership, and teachings. Ultimately it is his father’s critical patriotism which seems to most inspire his own.
“A House Called Tomorrow” by Alberto Rios. This poem celebrates how ancestors are always with you, even when “march[ing].” Takei depicts the ways his parents instilled in him a desire to protect democracy through participation. When he shows his own advocacy in the memoir, we see the connections to his father’s actions and words.

Songs: We talk about considering songs as one way to score the memoir: which songs might match panels in the memoir that are significant to you in some way?

“Riding in My Car” by Woody Guthrie: While living at Camp Rohwer in Arkansas, Takei features the day his family was allowed to drive off the camp site and visit a farm. This page is unique; it is one of the only moments when Takei’s family seems liberated, almost as if they were living their lives and enjoying a family trip together.It is not surprising that it was a treasured memory for Takei to represent and a stark juxtaposition with the reality of their lives.
“Safe” by rapper Dumbfounded: Dumbfounded’s song “Safe” deals explicitly with a lack of positive Asian American representation in Hollywood, something Takei’s memoir addresses directly as he describes the beginning of his acting career. (Explicit lyrics.)
Historical songs: After the attack on Pearl Harbor, popular songs featured anti-Japanese lyrics and encouraged violence. George confronts anti-Japanese racism throughout the memoir, including after the war when he returns to school in California. His teacher refers to him as a “little Jap boy” and continually makes him feel unwelcome. As he grows older, he cannot find any reference to the internment of Japanese Americans in the school’s history books, an absence that leads to his lifelong commitment to telling the story of his family and other Japanese Americans.

Art: Students go in different directions with this artifact, some connecting a piece of art to a moment of complex emotions and others looking for historical photography of the internment camps to elaborate on the settings of Takei’s memoir.

Objeto rítmico no. 2 (segunda versão) by Mauricio Nogueira Lima, found in Google’s Arts and Culture site, is an endless swirl of black and yellow layered stripes. It captures a feeling of danger and being trapped: there is no way out of the pattern or the swirl. Connect this feeling to the emotions of Takei’s parents and other Japanese Americans when they were asked on government-issued mandatory questionnaires, labeled “loyalty questionnaires,” to serve in combat and to swear “unqualified allegiance” to the United States, all while being imprisoned because of their race and ethnicity (115). As Takei describes, they were caught in a circle -- to say yes was to admit that the questions were justified at all.
Dorothea Lange’s Photographs of Japanese Internment Camps: This collection of photography captures Japanese Americans in California before internment (young children at school holding the American flag, for example), during the forced journey to leave California, and while trying to make a life in the internment camps. The photographs of so many different individuals build on the memoir’s representations of Takei’s day by day experiences of both injustice and community.
Farmer Palmer’s Wagon Ride: In the art from this picture book by William Steig, we see Farmer Palmer driving items in his wagon, a picture that echoes one of the characters from Takei’s memory of internment. Herbert Nicholson, a Quaker missionary, brought books and goods to many Japanese American families in multiple internment camps, despite being violently and verbally assaulted on his way. Takei’s admiration for Herbert’s commitment and the moments of happiness his book deliveries provided are palpable.

Why We Need Graphic Memoirs
As I write this, Art Spiegelman’s memoir and narrative of his father’s survival in the Holocaust (Maus) is being pulled off of school library’s shelves. Takei’s memoir has already been challenged. Graphic memoirs ask readers to respond viscerally and imaginatively to real life; they take an issue of public significance and make it personal; and they ask us to see someone’s experiences. Instead of taking them out of our curricula, we need to find more ways to include them.

They Called Us Enemy by George Takei

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Deploying Inquiry Based Learning Practice in the Young Adult Literature Classroom by Angela Suzanne Insenga

3/14/2022

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“Great teachers know how to ask great questions, and it is those questions they ask that form the foundation of the entire learning experience that they are creating for their students.”
–Ken Bain

This week's Monday Motivator is from Angela Suzanne Insenga. It focuses on using driving questions and classroom dialogue in young adult literature. Insenga speaks to the power of this method, and highlights examples across both books and film.

The Daily Driving Questions assignment (DDQs) in my upper-division Young Adult Literature (YAL) course presents students with a crucial expectation failure, or a moment of cognitive dissonance in which existing ways of knowing do not work as they have in prior situations (Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do). In most English courses, professors ask students to listen, annotate, collaborate, and interpret verbally and/or in writing. Since my YAL course has outcomes that require me to teach students how to teach, I put forward the claim that good learning–the kind that sticks–comes from asking good questions, not from providing answers or staid, fleshed-out interpretations to be regurgitated on tests or essays. The latter sort of practice creates a feedback loop resulting in shallow learning. Deeper inquiry arises from engaging in careful questioning and exploration as we experience material. Deeper and sophisticated inquiry results from consistent practice of excellent questioning and exploration over time.

Learning in English and Language Arts is a social act; we read as part of a varied discourse community (a class) and discuss to create meaning. Practicing questioning encourages students to exercise care in their sentence structure and dig deeper into the subject matter as they share and answer others’ questions. And, finally, developing questions for discussion connects to written argumentation, as a sophisticated, interpretive (hypo)thesis derives from an answer to a complex question.

After providing this rationale, models of former students’ DDQs, and sharing my DDQs to ground class discussion early in the semester, I ask my students to create and bring two open-ended, complex questions to each class, both arising from assigned reading(s). I encourage them to:

Design their questions to foment discussion via specific textual observations and querying (e.g, specific details that orient readers and use of open-ended questioning)
Gear said questions for an audience of peers (e.g., use language and concepts befitting your audience)
Remember that your questions should drive analytical discussion, since everyone will have read the material (e.g., no “quizzy questions”)

Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give (2016) recounts Starr Carter’s struggle to grieve, heal, and grow after she witnesses a police officer shoot and kill her friend Kahlil during a traffic stop. An early example of a DDQ arising from study of Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give, both novel and film, is:

“Why does Starr, who is underage, stay at a party where she knows alcohol is being consumed?”

This question connects to the first scene of the novel in which Starr compares herself to her peers during a party in her neighborhood, Garden Heights. Instead of leading us to discuss how and why Starr feels a chasm opening between herself and the others as she watches others drink, this question led us to discuss Starr’s direct reflections on the party (plot) instead of what these reflections could mean, and it led to a discussion of underage drinking–an important yet nevertheless tangential issue–rather than to characterization of the protagonist’s state of mind in the text. We did discuss, mind you, but the focus was not on the novel.

Here are two more sample DDQs from our study of the novel and film, the first more squarely focused on characterization in the text:

“On page 71, Starr depicts her process of transforming into ‘Williamson Starr,’ [thinking]: ‘Williamson Star doesn’t use slang–if a rapper would say it, she doesn’t say it, even if her white friends do. Slang makes them cool. Slang makes her ‘hood.’ Williamson Starr holds her tongue when people piss her off so nobody will think she’s the ‘angry black girl.’’ How does this description reveal some Black Americans’. . .need to. . . construct a ‘white identity’ to be more palatable to white society?”

This question, anchored in the moments in which Starr reflects on her double bind, asks us to consider the formation of an adolescent self despite great experiential and geographic disparities. Starr is both an adolescent attempting to grow into a multi-faceted adult and a young Black woman navigating the acute challenges of developing a cogent self at home in her “hood” and at school, where she feels the need to “pass.”

Here is a DDQ arising from a student’s viewing of the film adaptation of Thomas’s novel:

“When describing Garden Heights, the camera follows Starr as she is driven to Williamson. During that trip, the camera reveals the dilapidated buildings in Garden Heights, the gangs, and the selling and purchasing of drugs. However, when Starr enters the predominantly white city that Williamson is located, the camera [focuses on] mansions, well-kept buildings, and safety, evidenced by the woman taking a jog and by the lack of police cars patrolling the area. How does the contrast between Garden Heights and this predominantly white city establish the idea that racism involves more than just police brutality?”

Again, the writer anchors the question in the text–with details from the visual plane of the film–in an effort to drive detailed and informed discussion of the assumptions we may hold about the causes of radical inequalities and their effects on Black adolescents, Starr in particular.

In both examples, the writer calls attention to the text and develops an analytical question related to the reading. Note how each question draws attention to plot but uses that information to build a question that asks “how” and “why,” not simply “what.”

Other questions from our study of Thomas pinpointed textual features and asked us to discuss the logic of narrative structure:

“Angie Thomas’s book is divided into five parts: ‘When it happens,’ ‘Five weeks after it,’ ‘Eight weeks after it,’ ‘Ten weeks after it,’ and ‘Thirteen weeks after it - the decision.’ What fascinates me the most about the titles for each part is the way Thomas refers to the shooting of Khalil. Why does Thomas refer to this tragic event using the ambiguous term ‘it’? How does the employment of this term help readers become aware of the diverse and racialized experiences they bring to Thomas’s text?”

And some questions broadened out, asking us to put the novel’s events into larger cultural context, both as a way to discuss realism in YAL and as a way to discuss the integral role YAL can play in discussing current events that affect teenagers:

“The issue of racially motivated police brutality is extremely sensitive, and Starr’s account of Khalil’s murder and the following events mirrors reality. In recent years, there have been far too many instances to count, but the tragic rise of police brutality cases is undeniable, and the lack of justice has continued. Considering these genuine cases, is the police's handling of [Officer] One-Fifteen accurate? [Why or why not?]”

Students completing this assignment may struggle to take risks, to ask complex questions. This results in lower-order “safe” questions, which are okay – at first. But I am not content for a student to remain at the level of comprehension. To sustain the DDQ expectation failure during the semester and increase performance in both composing and answering, then, I put student questions to work in varying ways:

Students receive and use “question stems” for collaborative practice, especially early in the semester.
Students Peer Review each other’s questions prior to discussion and/or submission, providing suggestions based on the assignment’s goals, especially early in the semester as we practice open-ended discussion questions and become acclimated to listening and answering.
Students participate in Socratic Seminars that use the inner/outer circle structure. Student groups discuss answers to one DDQ of my choice while they are in the inner circle, and the outer circle annotates or thinks about their own answers to the question in play. Conversely, the outer circle can identify an excellent question from small group discussion of the DDQs they brought to class and pose it to the inner circle.
Students participate in Question Swaps, wherein they answer each other’s questions verbally or in writing.
Students craft two new questions arising from one DDQ and or discussion.
Students practice revising questions–form and content–for other stakeholders (e.g., gearing a question posed at the collegiate level for an eighth-grade class).

The assignment has worked its magic in my classroom on three levels:

Students own class time. They ask and answer their questions during at least one half of one class period per week, modeling for each other different forms of questioning: global and local; lower and higher order; synthesis between secondary and primary reading; and the like. And their questions, when asked in class, serve as suggestions for others who may still be asking lower-order questions connected to plot or meaning of words.
Students synthesize English and Language Arts practices with learning models from their education courses. In particular, they learn about and reinforce their understanding and application of Bloom’s taxonomy, the epistemological paradigm often used in secondary standards as well as in university course learning outcomes. Through sustained practice, they can also create discussion-based activities in their larger pedagogy projects for the class that align with this paradigm (or another, should they so choose one).
Students and I enter into a semester-long meta-dialogue. We discuss developing high-level questions for thinking (writing and rhetoric focus) and answering high-level questions asked in class (textual content and analysis of it). Via practice of writing, answering, and engaging my detailed commentary on each pair of questions each student submits, they access writing skills to design content questions that allow for investigation of the art objects they will teach.

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Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday's
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Compiling Artifacts with Graphic Memoirs by Emily Wender

Deploying Inquiry Based Learning Practice in the Young Adult Literature Classroom by Angela Suzanne Insenga

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