How do we get teachers to become forward thinking?
It’s not normal that I get really frustrated with colleagues, although it is true that sometimes I would like us to make faster progress than simply ‘ticking along’. But today I got really frustrated with a conversation I was having about the power of graphic novels with a colleague from a different school.
They told me that Graphic Novels would be exactly the thing that they would discourage their own daughter from reading. This also meant that they wouldn’t recommend them to any of the students in their class. I really wish some professionals would stop comparing all young people to their own children and start treating young people as individuals and not clones.
I quizzed the teacher on some of the Classical Comics Graphic
Novels such as Macbeth,
Frankenstein,
Great Expectations
and a Christmas
Carol. But the answer was quite categorically, ‘no, it’s not a proper book’.
I explained that it has exactly the same text in it as the
original and that there was a plane English version (with the same word count)
and a quick test version for really reluctant readers – where the story becomes
the most important thing. The answer remained the same, ‘no, it’s not a proper book’.
Then I did something that I rarely do, seeing that the conversation was going nowhere and being pressed for time, I gave up. This is not something I am proud of, but as I was completing some admin tasks this afternoon, I couldn’t stop thinking about the short sightedness of the conversation. I know that Graphic Novels are not the answer to all of our literacy worries. But I see them as another tool in the teacher’s toolbox to help drive forward the literacy agenda. We obviously may have a long way to go! Maybe I’ll stick a copy of the new ACE Literacy Outcomes Cover Paper in the internal mail?


















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