Graphic Novels–The Hidden Treasures of Teaching:Humanity, Worldview, Understanding, and Connection inEugene Yelchin’s I Wish I Didn’t Have to Tell You

Meet the Contributor: Susan James

Dr. Susan Densmore-James is a professor of literacy at the University of West Florida (UWF) and the Founder and Director of the Emerald Coast National Writing Project at UWF.  Before her professorship, she was a reading specialist for secondary students, where she was “gifted” the name of “The Book Dealer”.  She now teaches pre-service teachers at UWF and works with middle and Young Adult (YA) authors. Her true joy is in connecting young readers with life-changing books.

Graphic Novels–The Hidden Treasures of Teaching:Humanity, Worldview, Understanding, and Connection inEugene Yelchin’s I Wish I Didn’t Have to Tell You by Susan James -- The Book Dealer

The Admission

It has taken me an entire career to give graphic novels their due. I deeply apologize for not doing so sooner, as quite honestly, these gems are among the most powerful of all teaching tools and represent one of the biggest omissions from my curriculum during my first 15 years of teaching. I have since made up for this in spades. 

My first experience with a graphic novel was in my master’s program in 2005 when I was assigned to read Maus (1992) by Art Spiegelman. I distinctly remember my annoyance at completing the required assignment, struggling to juggle both the text and the artwork. I was an English minor, but goodness sakes–not a comic book lover.  I completed the assignment and moved on without much thought, even though I am an avid reader of historical works and firmly believe in stories providing us a moral compass for how we live our lives. I feel ashamed by this reaction to Spiegelman’s groundbreaking work of art (which I have read over and over again since) and continue to share the error of my ways in order to help educators and parents avoid making my same mistakes.

The Epiphany

The gravity of my mistake hit in 2009 when I began teaching struggling high school readers. These readers had lost all confidence in themselves, and I spent a great deal of time planning how to teach them to be active readers. I had to discover ways to explicitly teach metacognitive skills in reading and had a particularly difficult time teaching inferencing, a skill that many of my students were far from mastering. I can recall my desperation when I used picture books like Tight Times by Hazen (1983) to prompt juniors and seniors to consider the illustrations without reading the text. My instruction was scaffolding on steroids.  First, I encouraged the teens to deeply examine facial expressions, body language, and minute details to consider what was not explicitly stated in the text. As a community, we discussed their predictions based on only images and drew conclusions. The illustrations supported students in making these connections more concrete.

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 I then had the biggest epiphany of all:  these students lacked background knowledge. Tough Times is a book based on a family struggling due to a nation’s economic downturn, which many had not discussed or read about before.  Most had spent years dodging reading due to their lack of success with it. I knew I needed to give them a sense of success, and I also knew that as they were exposed to a wider array of topics, their interest in new content would be piqued.  This is when I was reminded of graphic novels and started to see their power for students.

 As we slowly made progress, I knew the next challenge would be how to move from actual illustrations to just words.  Again, I had to explicitly teach how words, just like the illustrations we discussed at length, can imply information not explicitly stated in text. 

Graphic novels offered my secondary students a powerful tool: first, and probably most importantly, these books gave my reluctant readers the opportunity to feel successful (many for the first time ever).  They were more willing to determine the meaning of words, as they learned vocabulary in authentic contexts (actually reading).  Watching them engage in discussion provided evidence of higher-order thinking through deep analysis.  Honestly, this approach was the wind beneath their wings. Suddenly, students were wanting to learn more about economics throughout the nation's history, and they were eager to utilize their new skills with other books on various interesting topics.
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Luckily, graphic novels have rightfully been given a prominent place in literacy instruction (and not just in my classroom).  Truly, they are a teaching tool treasure that so many teachers have been given. These nuggets of wisdom were the magic in my classroom that inspired my students to see reading as a communal activity that allowed for meaningful conversations.  These books changed everything for my students.

The Power of Using Graphic Novels with Pre-Service Teachers

This experience with young adults was the driving force behind furthering my education as a researcher and professor of literacy in a School of Education. As many of our readers know, many teacher education programs are waning at universities across the nation.  Just over the past few years, what used to be a robust cadre of students in our School of Education programs has become what feels like a crime scene of dwindling enrollment.  Whereas once I taught a full section of English Education students, now I am combining social studies education with my English pre-service teachers into one very small class.

 It has been a unique experience, and my first thought was how I would entice two groups of students to read and discuss books that would be beneficial to students in today’s world and assist them in providing instruction that centers around literacy and their specific disciplines. 

The first day, I had students sit in their respective groups, gave them chart paper, and had them define their two disciplines. Once finished, I had them tape their definitions to the front of the room.  We then methodically circled all the words the two disciplines had in common.  The result?  English and social sciences connect based on four words:  Humanity, Worldview, Understanding, and Connection.  This is a insightful and powerful epihany from young pre-service teachers. ​

The Experiment

I have had many conversations with my academic colleagues across Florida, and we have shared various strategies for navigating the tough terrain of engaging with books in the classroom.  As a secondary educator for seventeen years, I always was a proponent of involving parents and guardians in the education of their young people, even creating a letter I shared with each parent, inviting them into the decision process and giving students and parents choice in reading. It was always a way to build a larger community and ensure students were reading books that were right for their family.

Several of my social science students came armed with graphic novels, which I had given as an option.  All the English Education students brought in traditional narrative fiction.  The graphic novels were the hit.  

One young man brought in the book by author Eugene Yelchin. This book literally took our collective breath away.  As Troy shared several parts to the book, we learned about the story of the young Yevgeny living in Leningrad in the 1980s.  It is the only book out of the 14 books brought to class by my students that every single student bought for their personal collection. I have always used “anchor text” that every student would read to ground us in common conversations, but by allowing the students to share their choice books, I Wish I Didn’t Have to Tell You became that anchor naturally by student choice.  For this semester, I did the same.  I invited the English Education and social science students to visit a library and bring in one middle grades or YA book they wanted to read and share with the class.  We focused our Essential Questions on our core words (humanity, worldview, understanding, and connection), and that is when the magic began.  ​

Eugene Yelchin

The Magic

Yelchin’s graphic novel tells the truth behind life as a young adult living in Leningrad in the ‘80s. This young man named Yevgeny tries to realize his dream of being an artist while having to operate in an underground art scene to safely create and share the art that he loves. His fears range from the constant surveillance of the KGB to his worry about being forced to fight in Afghanistan.  He feels the push/pull stress from his best friend who begs him to leave to safety and his mother and grandmother who have accepted their fate as Russians.  

During this time, he falls in love with an American activist named Libby, and their relationship is at first awkward (like all young love), but it blooms into a love that could possibly even mean survival for Yevgeny.  Over the course of the book, Yevgeny’s journey gives him a true, uncensored insight into the operations of his government, and as he knows he will be drafted into the war, he ends up working in Siberia in the theatre before being institutionalized.  The art and prose work to expose the bleak absurdities of life in Cold War Russia, but it’s the deeply human moments that keep the reader reading and also keeps the reader hoping.

When I asked students to reflect on why this book was “the one” (as they called it) for them this semester, the conversations continued for many class periods.  I frantically scribbled down as many of their thoughts about our experiment. Students commented on how Yelchin’s work was an “artistic masterpiece that was dark, but at the same time it was filled with the humor that the mother and grandmother brought to the story, and the love and joy of the relationship between Libby and Yevgeny.”

Troy, the young man who brought us the book, said he loved how it allows him to see that Yevgeny is no different than the students in the class.  “He has hopes and dreams and finds love.  But it also teaches us the dangers of living without freedoms.”  My students spoke about the generational divide between Yevgeny and his mother and grandmother. Two exchange students, one from Germany and one from South Korea, brought in books that were being read by youth in their countries (one being the amazing graphic memoir entitled Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls), and suddenly, the magic of them “dealing books” to one another was a sight to behold.

On the last day of class, we had Booksgiving (a lovely idea I learned from rockstar English Educator Brooke Eisenbach from Lesley University).  I collected books from my book closet from years of attending the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) to gift to the students.  There were tears as we said goodbye, but trust me, these students are very much still part of my life, as they constantly send me book titles to read.  

As they were making their final selections, one of the English Education students from the class read her comment from the course review survey.  She thanked the social studies student for sharing I Wish I Didn’t Have to Tell You This that I will forever remember.  “This book started it all for us.  We all found a book we loved and could discuss. Without reading the stories of others, we have a set belief about how other people are based on seeing images and viewing media that might not be true. This book was that jumping off point for us to read about histories of others around the globe. We were able to compare how another country has been governed and think about what we want for our own country. The art assisted in making these connections even more heart wrenching and impactful. Dr. James, do you realize this ties back to what we said about our disciplines on day one?  It is all about humanity, having a worldview, understanding each other, and through this understanding, connecting. It is more important than ever that we are reading these stories. Especially from cultures we do not know much about.  It is the only way we will understand and connect.”

I have never ended a fifteen-week-course feeling my work had been fully done. This semester, I felt closer to that reality. But was it really me who worked this magic?  I have to say the class was successfully led by an amazing group of pre-service teachers who realized the power of graphic novels to make their world a little bigger, to humanize cultures different from their own, to create their own, new understandings about the world, and to connect as a true community of readers. 

References
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Hazen, B. S., & Hyman, T. S. (1983). Tight times. New York, NY: Puffin Books.

Hills, T. (2024). Feeding ghosts: A graphic memoir. New York: Farar, Straus, Giroux. 

Spiegelman, A. (1996). The complete maus: A survivor's tale. Pantheon.

Yelchin, E. (2025). I wish I didn’t have to tell you this. Somerville, Massachusetts: Candlewick