Who Could've Seen? (The Power of Images in YA Literature)

I was initially astounded by the number of novels I purchased for this class, and set in immediately to tackle as many pages as possible as early on as possible.  American Born Chinese frightened me, to be honest.  The word "graphic" conjures negative images in my mind.  It was not an easy book to locate in the Barnes & Noble where I chose to attempt to procure it and several other titles on our list, and I was not digging the section in which I found myself - with the assistance of a store clerk - scanning the shelves for a yellow cover. Fortunately, we were able to find it and I took it home and opened it immediately.

I read American Born Chinese weeks ago now, and I read it voraciously. Who knew?  It was sheer delight, cover to cover.  I am not prone to comic books, nor even comic strips in the newspaper.  I perhaps think of children's stories - children's, and not adolescents - when I think of pictorial illustrations, and apparently, for some (narrow-minded) reason, rejected that.  (This is adamantly past tense: I rejected that.  No longer).

I aspire to be a teacher, and I aspire to be an open-minded teacher.  It was in fact the word(s) I chose to write on my paper in class last week, when asked what one word I might use to describe the type of teacher I want to be.  OPEN MINDED.  But I rejected the very thought of a "graphic" novel.

Reading American Born Chinese changed that for me, and reading Jeffrey Wilhelm put that change into perspective - and the combination made me feel inclined to forgive my earlier narrow-mindedness.  Wilhelm so romantically describes the role of the teacher as a constant learner.  The best teachers must consistently do research, of so many varieties: of their students' interests, of new works that will appeal to the various students they teach each year, of new methods for meeting students' divergent interests, of new educational theories and approaches, and always of themselves - of their own gains and persistent limitations in creativity and communication. 

Wilhelm discusses the use of the visual in his "Reading is Seeing" chapter and adds to the use of graphic novels such as American Born Chinese the use of student-created visuals to guide, enhance and deepen student engagement with literature.  The results he describes, mostly in the three initially unengaged students he chronicles in that chapter, both warm the heart and encourage the desire for success in any would-be or current teacher. 

To achieve that success, the open-minded teacher - the one I envision myself as; the one I will strive to be - must question herself relentlessly.  She must question her beliefs as to how she learned to love to read, and what books she loved.  She decided, after all, to become a teacher of literature, so it is likely that her love was sparked and supported early on by an innate ability.  We all have innate abilities, but what about those students for whom that ability is athletics or mathematics or music, or anything but reading?  Those students may learn in very different ways, may appreciate very different books, and may struggle with very different aspects of the process of reading.  As Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher discovered in their study on the use of graphic novels in an urban high school, the power of books that they had originally shunned as valueless ("comic books at best and a waste of time at worst") was exponential.  Their students grew immensely in their literary skills as a result of reading these novels that their teachers were open-minded enough to seek out, realizing that students enjoy a different popular culture than they themselves do, and that to enter that culture - to the extent that they identify traits of it that may appeal to their students' sensibilities - was the sort of open-mindedness that they needed to adopt in order to meet truly teach their students, and thus to succeed at their jobs.