NATEK in Karaganda.

School is finally out, and it is time to begin summer vacation! My first stop on my grand summer odyssey was Karaganda, where I presented a paper at the annual meeting of the National Association of Teachers of English of Kazakhstan. The weekend was a huge success. Karaganda was a beautiful city, and the university where they held the conference had amazing facilties. Also, it was a real treat to meet so many creative and dedicated local teachers, and I found all of the presentations given, by both the local teachers, and the seven other PCV's in attendance to be very useful and interesting. Furthermore, the other PCV's were almost all Kaz-20's, and not only was it great to finally meet them, but I was very impressed with their work at the conference.

The conference had several personal/professional successes as well. First, I presented a paper which was well recieved by both the local teachers and the other volunteers, and was also published in the NATEK magazine. Granted, I do not know if any of the local teachers are actually going to start using comic books in their lessons, but I do think that they will begin considering using materials like magazines, movies, and music as a supplemant to the typical texts and worksheets. Also, though it was at first hard to get around the city because I speak so little Russian, my Kazakh was a big hit with the teachers other teachers. Finally, the most important success was that I with the help and permission of my collegue Temirbolat agai, who works at Korkyt-Ata University in Kyzylorda and was the second NATEK president, was able to convince the association to make Kyzylorda the location of the conference next year!

Anyway, now I am in Almaty and getting ready to head to Europe for a couple of weeks, the true beginning of demalys, or vacation. That said, I am psyched that the last bit of "work" that I had to do before a camp in July and the start of school in September went so well. I'll do my best to keep you posted on events during the rest of the summer, and I apologize for the recent dirth of posts.

The Paper I gave at the conference is posted below.

Up in the Sky: Comic Books in the Classroom

Everyone knows that students learn differently. In fact, thanks to educators, psychologists, and researchers, we even know that students usually fall into one of three categories: visual learners, auditory learners, or kinesthetic learners. However, despite the fact that much is known about how students learn, many local students still continue to fail. This is not because the teachers or bad, the students are lazy, or the lessons do not include activities that cater to the various learning styles. It is because, despite the being methodologically sound, many lessons are boring and uninspiring. For students to learn effectively, they must be taught in a way that actively engages their interest so that they pay attention. Teachers must go beyond the basic texts and materials and begin using new and unconventional materials to develop creative lessons that make students actually enjoy learning. A prime example of such unconventional classroom materials is the comic book. The comic book’s style and structure as well as its subject matter and themes make it a useful tool for creating fun and interesting lessons that develop students’ skills.

Every story has a beginning, middle, and end. Beyond that, however, the style and structure is largely up to the author or the conventions of the media. The style and structure of a comic book is very different from the style of other books and texts normally used in the English lesson. While a typical novel uses descriptive language and dialogue to tell the story, comic books or “graphic novels,” use pictures and word balloons to move the narrative forward. A novel uses words such as meanwhile, during, or then to show the movement of characters in time and space, but in a comic book, the same effect is achieved through the arrangement of the pictures in a specific way. Thus, reading a comic book often feels like watching movie. It is this relationship between literature and art, and the comic book’s cinematic feel in a time when students are much more likely to watch television than read a book that make comic books such a useful classroom tool. Not only is the bright multi-chromatic imagery in a Superman or X-Men comic book much more interesting to look at than plain monochromatic text, but the comic book’s collaborative relationship between pictures and words, and the way that it is organized into several different pictures or panels offers numerous potential uses in creative classroom activities that help improve students’ reading, writing, and speaking skills.

While it is not the most creative thing you can do with a comic book in terms of style or structure, just reading it together as a class can be very fun and effective. Teachers can assign parts to different students so that reading becomes like a play. By both seeing and hearing the different characters, students are be better able to keep them all separate and understand what is happening in the story. Furthermore, even if a student has a small vocabulary and does not understand all of the words, he or she can still follow the plot of a comic book through the sequence of images and understand the narrative. In turn, when the student understand what they have read, they are much more likely to volunteer to answer questions about the text or take part in discussion, and this improves their speaking ability and confidence. It also quickly improves a student’s vocabulary because he or she can see the new word in relation to a picture and easily extrapolate the meaning. Reading a comic book is very useful for a student’s understanding of complex narrative concepts, such as the flashback, as well. A flashback is a scene set in an earlier time than the main narrative, and it is a difficult idea to understand, especially when all students have to work with is a written text. Students, however, quickly understand the concept of the flashback when they see a comic book artist’s representation of the same character in different ways to show the difference in time or place.
The style and structure of the comic book offers many other creative activities too. For example, the teacher could mix up the panels and have their students put them back in the correct order. This activity is great for helping beginning students understand the story better, and more advanced students can see how they might create a new story through arranging the pictures in a different way. The teacher can also make copies of a comic book page, but take all of the text out, and have the students replace the text with their own words. This helps a student practice their writing in a structured way, but with the opportunity for much more creativity and expression than writing sentences. The teacher could even have the more advanced students rewrite the comic book as a normal text short story, or even write and illustrate their own comic book story.

Unlike the works of William Shakespeare or Jack London, which were written for older, more experienced readers, comic books are usually written with the teenage or young adult reader in mind, and this youth oriented focus is especially evident and important in regards to subject matter. Whereas Shakespeare and London dealt with the subjects like court intrigue or life in the frozen north, comic books deal with subjects closer to the issues and concerns that young people typically face. Indeed, while many comic book characters are superhuman, these characters are still more relatable and human to young students today than Hamlet or Romeo. Comic books also often discuss current events that have immediate relevance to young people. All authors base their works on the times they live, whether it is a realistic legal thriller or a sci-fi action adventure. Thus, many novels eventually feel rather dated. Comic books on the contrary, are published once a month so the stories and characters are always up to date. For example, recent comic stories have dealt with the subject of the Iraq War, Civil Liberties, and the greed of corporate businessmen.

The fact that comic books deal with subject matters that are so interesting to young people makes them extremely helpful during English lessons. Most students freely admit that they do not care if something is rotten in the state of Denmark, but they eagerly read stories about a young man who lives with his aunt, argues with his girlfriend, and who loses his superpowers every time he gets the flu. Furthermore, students are much more inclined to take part in discussion if the class is talking about a situation or problem that they know something about. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain is a great novel, but modern students, especially students from foreign countries cannot really understand it or empathize with it. It is hard enough for younger American readers to connect to the story of a young man traveling up the Mississippi River to help his slave friend get to freedom, and they know American geography and history. Students learning English in Kazakhstan and other foreign countries however, have no reference to either the location or importance of the Mississippi River or the history of slavery in America. Thus, any discussion on the topic would be extremely difficult because the students do not have any background in the subject matter, and they have little interest in doing research about something so different from their personal experience. However, students will enthusiastically participate in a discussion about a group of young super powered men and women facing head on the destruction of reality in a great “Crisis.” After all, young people everywhere are now facing a less dramatic but equally destructive economic crisis.
This enthusiasm is the key, and why the creation of creative lessons is so important. Enthusiastic, interested students want to participate and will try to speak, even if their English is not very good. On the other hand, students who are not interested do not participate, and even if their English is already good, it will not improve and might even get worse.

As mentioned previously, comic books can be used to develop English students basic skills of reading, writing, and speaking. While those are of fundamental importance, another important skill that teachers cannot forget to develop is critical thinking. Critical thinking is “thinking about thinking.” It is the idea that it is not enough to have an opinion about an idea or an event, one must think about why or how they came to have that opinion. One of the best ways to develop students’ critical thinking is to engage them in a discussion about a serious but interesting theme like whether there is fate or free will, or why bad things happen to good people. Students enjoy these discussions because they are about universal issues, and teachers can use them to force students to critique their basic assumptions, and make think critically in order to defend their position.

Despite their appearance and target audience, comic books deal with some pretty serious themes. For example, Batman deals with the question of justice vs. vengeance and vigilantism, and the X-Men deals racism and intolerance. Comic books are great at presenting these themes in ways that are both subtle and obvious, and thus incredibly effective. For instance, a person might pick up an X-Men comic book and not see at first that the X-Men are an example of a minority population threatened with oppression and genocide by a racist majority. He or she might just see the wings and the optic blasts. However, once a person realizes the fact that X-Men is as much about mutual respect between different groups as it is about superpowers, it is so obvious that one wonders how they did not see it before. This was used to great effect during a comic book course I taught this past year. My students and I were reading the X-Men and began to discuss racism and nationalism. A first some of my students held some pretty prejudiced positions about some other nationalities. However, once they saw that they were acting just like humans acted towards the X-Men, several of them began to use critical thinking and logic, and began to reconsider what they said.

As one can see, comic books are not just for children anymore. Despite their reputation as a childish form of artistic and literary expression, comic books are in truth very sophisticated and useful in getting students to learn. The style and structure, subject matter, and themes of comic books offer numerous possibilities for creative, expressive activities and discussions that help improve students’ language and critical thinking skills. The best part, however, is that students are so excited to be working with comic books that they hardly know they are learning, making the lesson that much more effective for them, and that much more fun for everyone.