Today's Monday Motivator post was written by Jason D. DeHart. Jason taught middle grades English for eight years and has been working at the university level since 2015. He is a passionate advocate for including a wide range of representations in classroom libraries, including authors and characters, but also including types of texts. In this post, DeHart looks at the possibilities for working with developing understanding characters based on closely reading graphic novels.

As playwright William Nicholson said, “We read to know we are not alone.” One of the key advantages of a visual text like a graphic novel is that readers have so many resources to reach to when encountering the text – from the speech that characters share together, to the creation of full background scenes and settings in panels, to the ways that characters are rendered. Readers can literally see representations that they relate to.

Today’s Monday Motivator post pays homage to many of the features of graphic novels, but tunes in with a particular focus to the ways that characters are drawn and interact visually on the page. In order to talk about this feature, I share about a recent graphic novel publication, Slip, written by Marika McCoola and illustrated by Aatmaja Pandya. I also give a nod to an upcoming graphic novel, Forest Hills Bootleg Society, written by Dave Baker and illustrated by Nicole Goux. Some of Baker and Goux’s design work inspired this post.

Slip was published on July 7, 2022 by Algonquin Young Readers and tells the story of a young artist, Jade. When Jade’s best friend attempts to end her life, Jade begins to explore her own experiences and feelings through her art. She also begins to develop a romantic interest in one of her peers, Mary. 

This book does not veer away from the emotions or complexities of young adulthood, and the reader gets to know Jade based on the typical ways that characters are presented – what they say, what they do, what other characters say – but also through expressions, movements, and visual depiction.

Breaking the Web
Teachers who are looking for a deeper dive on character work and who want to expand beyond the web graphic organizer approach can invite students to take notes on both the visual and verbal aspects of Slip, and these notes can also be captured in words and pictures. 

As mentioned at the outset of this post, I was inspired by the work of Dave Baker and Nicole Goux in Forest Hills Bootleg Society. While I won’t share too many details about the book (it is due to be published in September 2022), I was struck by a page entitled “A Brief History of Kelly’s Obsession with Anime.”

Baker and Goux have developed an introduction to a character with this approach that features an image of Kelly with other characters’ heads drawn around them, floating in space and delivering details about Kelly. The character’s narrative is told in a paragraph/prose form that flows down the page and additional word bubbles emerge that contain more information but are not attributed to any particular characters.

With Slip, teachers can use the text to hone in on these visual elements and engage with students in an organic approach to understanding characters based on the mise-en-scene work of graphic novelists like McCoola and Pandya. A sample approach might look like:

Page 1, Panel 1 (a presentation of Jade’s artwork): What do we know about this character immediately before we even see their face? In the next panel on this page, we see Jade from behind, engaged with art-making. Why would the author/artist team render the page this way?

Page 2, Panel 1 (a phone call from Phoebe, off-screen): We still do not see Jade’s face in this panel, but we are observing a conversation. What do we know about Jade and Phoebe from this panel?

Page 2, Panel 4 (Jade’s pencil breaks): Based on the information, we have gathered on this page, what can we infer about why Jade might be accidentally breaking her pencil? What does this suggest about her emotional state? What does she feel in this moment? What does this tell us about her character, overall?

Page 3, Panel 2 (Jade’s physical response): How does the way that the artist rendered Jade in this panel relate to what we already know about her? What does the position of her hands on her head and the way that her eyes appear, including her full expression, tell us about what she is feeling?

Page 4, Splash Panel (Jade’s physical response): We now see Jade from farther away. Why would the artist choose to depict her in the center of the panel without other characters nearby? Her hands are covering her mouth, her eyes are still wide, and she is no longer sitting, but is curled on the floor. The phone is no longer in her hands. What does all of this suggest about her? What do we know about her as a character from the way she is responding?

Additional Texts
By taking a close look at panel content, including the position of characters, their relationship to objects and other characters, including isolation, and the ways that both expressions and words convey emotions, teachers can lead students through a close noticing and trace the way what we know or assume about characters begins to take shape throughout a visual story. This work can then be applied to prose, verse, or additional graphic novel texts.

Teachers can consider using any number of graphic novels to engage in this process. In particular, I recommend the work of Maia Kobabe, Victoria Jamieson, Jerry Craft, and Jarrett J. Krosoczka – all of these authors and artists present intriguing concepts for students to consider, and all have an appealing visual style that invites attention to expressions and movements.

Additional Resources
Stergios Botzakis, http://graphicnovelresources.blogspot.com/ blog.

Teaching Reading Comprehension with Graphic Texts: An Illustrated Adventure by Katie Monnin and Rachel Bowman.

Nick Sousanis, https://spinweaveandcut.com/ blog.

Adventures in Graphica: Using Comics and Graphic Novels to Teach Comprehension, 2-6 by Terry Thompson.

Today’s Monday Motivator is brought to you by Dr. Kristie Smith. Professor Kristie W. Smith, Ph.D. is a long-time middle grades educator and teacher educator. Professor Smith has rich experiences in highly diverse P-12 classroom and district settings, to include serving as a middle and high school teacher of English/language arts, a teacher of English Language Learners in the middle grades, and as a district level middle grades/secondary Literacy Instructional Specialist in the metro Atlanta area.
 
Young adult literature as a genre has always centered the authentic experiences, complexities, and worldviews of teens and young adolescents. Recurring themes and motifs, such as coming of age, identity formation, and developing social relationships have been written about through infinite story arcs and characters that shape the genre. In the second decade of the 21st century, readers of contemporary young adult literature not only engage with the complexities of real world expositions, but readers also encounter dimensional characters who represent a range of diverse social perspectives, backgrounds, and identities. 
 
Given the nature of teen years, which Bishop and Harrison (2021) described as “...an exciting time, (when) young adolescents are in the midst of personal change and identity development, growing physically, intellectually, morally, psychologically, and socio-emotionally (and) thinking more deeply about who they are in relation to their race, ethnicity, social class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and other identities” (p. 3), even the most nuanced social scenarios that writers of young adult literature craft within popular storylines seem to have elements of truth and convincing reality. 
 
In recent years, there has been significant growth in the body of young adult literature written by a range of authors representing diverse social identities; there has also been an expanding production of young adult literature featuring major or minor storylines that center some of the social injustices of historic and/or present-day contexts. Thus, in the realm of classroom teaching through young adult literature and teacher education with YA lit, it has been important to consider, not only the reading of diverse texts and topics as “windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors'' (Sims Bishop, 1990), but also the skills that readers of diverse literature might need in the active and thoughtful reading of these texts. 
 
Some of the competencies for reading young adult literature in the contemporary context can be found within the skills of critical literacy. In “Critical Literacy as a Way of Being and Doing,”  a 2019 National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) research and policy column written by Vasquez et al. summarized several key ideas about critical literacy, among which were the following:  

• Critical literacy should be viewed as a lens, frame, or perspective for teaching throughout the day, across the curriculum, and perhaps beyond, rather than as a topic to be covered or unit to be studied. (Vasquez et al., 2019)
• Texts are socially constructed from particular perspectives; they are never neutral.
• The ways we read text are never neutral. (Vasquez et al., 2019)
• From a critical literacy perspective, the world is seen as a socially constructed text that can be read. (Vasquez et al., 2019)
• Critical literacy involves making sense of the sociopolitical systems through which we live our lives and questioning these systems. (Vasquez et al., 2019)

 
These ideas underscore the necessary skills for reading contemporary YA lit, “including print texts and con-texts to understand power, authority, and anti-oppression (criticality)” (Muhmmad, 2020, p. 12). Reading critically can be especially important when reading about topics that challenge social norms and that center marginalized voices, identities, and experiences. There is an opportunity to practice these skills while reading within the YA genre. 
 
There are many examples of young adult literature texts that lend themselves to reading through critical lenses, challenging readers to connect, empathize, and think with analytical depth in a variety of ways. One text that I want to highlight for this post is Brandy Colbert’s The Only Black Girls in Town. It is a first person narrative told through the eyes and experiences of Alberta, a rising seventh grader who lives in the tourist town of Ewing Beach, California. Alberta, like other young adolescents, is preoccupied with moving into the next grade, with the lives, likes, and attention of her friends, and with convincing her dads, Kadeem and Elliott, that she is ready for the thirteen and up surfing group. 
 
In chapters three and four of The Only Black Girls in Town, “Skinfolk” and “Pure Black,” a new black family moves to Ewing Beach, which has been historically undiverse. The new family, which consists of a mom and daughter, takes over a local tourist-attracting bed and breakfast. Alberta meets Edie Harris, who is also twelve years old, going into seventh grade, identity seeking, and looking for a friend, which she finds in Alberta. While the story of The Only Black Girls in Town is about the usual social rites of passage in adolescence—up and down friendships, changing family dynamics, fitting in, and shades of a loss of innocence—there are also lines of story about history and about the nuance and dynamics of intra- and intercultural identities and relationships. One of the bonding stories in Alberta and Edie’s friendship is around the discovery of a set of historic journals stored in the attic of the bed and breakfast that the Harris family owns. As Alberta and Edie set out to read the journals, they begin a journey through the history of the bed and breakfast and through a somber chapter of American history of the not-so-long-ago past. 
 
Colbert is masterful in the way that she layers the complexities of history, harmful social constructs, and complicated multiple identities within the real and regular lives of Ewing Beach residents. There is a prominent story that the reader encounters on the surface of the text about adolescent angst and the universal push and pull between childhood and the developing teenage identity, but beneath the surface and between the main storylines, there are many stories embedded in character-to-character relationships, in unpacking social histories, and in the histories of place that act as characters in the plot. 
 
The application of the tools and lenses of critical literacy might take shape in the classroom in a variety of ways. In my classroom for pre-service teacher candidates, when teaching my Young Adult Literature course, I often design reading and response-to-reading experiences using a simple sequence that draws loosely upon aspects of basic literary analysis, Reader Response Theory, and tenets of reader’s workshop that are easily replicable in the K-12 classroom. I find the pedagogical reliance upon a recurring learning cycle allows my students to become familiar with our classroom learning routines, freeing them to focus on their critical reading of texts, co-synthesis through readers’ dialogue, and upon the design of their own instructional ideas. It is also important to me as a teacher educator to model practices that can be adapted and applied for my students’ middle grades/secondary classrooms. 
 
Additionally, over time, students are able to apply a familiar reading and response-to-reading cycle across genres, across complex text sets, and within different social reading configurations. Across this work, guiding questions or prompts can be useful. For example, the bullet points to follow put forth possible guiding questions/prompts and sample notes for the reading of The Only Black Girls in Town with attention to skills of critical literacy. 

• Tracking the Depiction of Social Constructs and Sociopolitical Systems
  • As you read, track your thinking about some of the social constructs or details of existing sociopolitical systems that create the exposition and characterize the settings of this text. 
  • Consider which constructs have the most impact on character lives, motivations, perspectives, and interactions. 
  • Track how these constructs or systems may help some characters and possibly harm others. 
  • Track your thinking about the writer’s craft in realistically depicting these systems and constructs. 

 
Within The Only Black Girls in Town, readers might consider the construct of race and track how it shapes the lives of Alberta and Edie across their adolescent experiences in the Ewing Beach community. Alongside this, readers might track the sociopolitical influences that caused Constance to move to Ewing Beach and to “pass” in racial identity as a white woman in the 1950’s -1960’s era. 

• Mapping Power and Privilege
  • Map power and privilege dynamics as they are written within the text. 
  • Notice which characters seem to hold power and to exercise privilege. 
  • Notice the circumstances that surround power and privilege scenarios, paying attention to characters’ intersectional identities and how power and privilege may be fluid. Jot notes about how these depictions of power and privilege shape character interactions and drive the plot. 
  • Where applicable, make connections to the depiction of social constructs that you notice. 
  • Track your thinking about the writer’s craft in realistically depicting the dynamics of power and privilege.

 
Within The Only Black Girls in Town, readers might map the power and privilege dynamics between Alberta and Nicollette, paying attention to the fluidity of power and privilege across these characters’ intersectional identities. 

• Interrogating Reader’s and Writer’s Biases and Perspectives
  • As a reader, what perspectives and biases do you bring to your reading and understanding of this text? 
  • What perspectives and biases do you perceive to be written into this text? 
  • Track your “windows,” “mirrors,” and “sliding glass doors.” 

 
Within The Only Black Girls in Town, readers might track how plot details around Alberta or journal entry details from Constance’s life present “windows,” “mirrors,” or “sliding glass doors,” when considered alongside their own identities, experiences, and perspectives. 
 
All of these prompts create foundational pieces for a nonlinear sequence of annotated reading,  written or visual representation of readers’ thinking,  reader-to-reader dialogue, and synthesis and reflection done independently or collaboratively. 
 
Other middle grades and YA lit text selections to consider for similar cycles of annotated reading, representation, and reader-to-reader dialogue while centering analysis in skills of critical literacy might include some of the following that my students have engaged with: 

• Black Brother, Black Brother by Jewell Parker Rhodes
• Free Lunch by Rex Ogle
• New Kid by Jerry Craft
• Fish in a Tree by Lynda Mullaly Hunt
• King and the Dragonflies by Kacen Callender

For additional resources, NCTE provides teacher friendly materials for critical literacy education, to include its 2019 Resolution on English Education for Critical Literacy in Policy and Media, a full research and policy article, Critical Literacy as a Way of Being and Doing, which was also published in 2019 along with the accompanying practitioner-friendly summary (Key Aspects of Critical Literacy). Further, organizations such as Learning for Justice articulate “Critical Practices for Anti-Bias Education” strategies for instruction, while organizations such as We Need Diverse Books publish texts and curate resources that might be of interest to readers of YA and middle grades literature. 
 
As we continue to read and teach into the 21st century, the skills of critical literacy will continue to evolve and to create important reading lenses for engaging with YA literature. 

References
Bishop, P., Harrison, L. M., & Association For Middle Level Education. (2021). The successful 
middle school: this we believe. Association For Middle Level Education.

Muhammad, G. (2020). Cultivating genius: An equity framework for culturally and historically 
responsive literacy. Scholastic Inc.

Sims-Bishop, R. (1990). Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors. Perspectives: Choosing 
and Using Books for the Classroom, 6(3).

Vasquez, V., Janks, H., & Comber, B. (2019). Critical literacy as a way of being and doing. 
Language Arts, 96(5), 300–311. https://library.ncte.org/journals/LA/issues/v96-5/30093
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Literature Cited
Callendar, K. (2020). King and the dragonflies. Scholastic Press.
Colbert, B. (2020). The only black girls in town. Little, Brown And Company.
Craft, J. (2019). New Kid. Harper, An Imprint of Harpercollins Publishers.
Ogle, R. (2021). Free Lunch. Norton Young Readers.
Mullaly, L. (2017). Fish in a tree. Puffin Books.
Rhodes, J.P. (2020). Black brother, black brother. Little, Brown And Company.