My students need copies of 23 of the most critically-acclaimed and challenging graphic novels of all time, from Frank Miller's "Batman: Year One" to Alan Moore's "Watchmen".
$594 goal
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month
This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because
it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.
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Nestled in an inner-city area of New York, my school is the kind of place where the students have to walk through metal detectors to get inside.
We have a full-time nursery in the building to handle the rocketing number of teen pregnancies, and the average reading level of my students is about four years behind where it should be.
When I walked into my classroom as a first-year teacher, hired Sunday before the school year started, I found only chalkboards, some broken computers, and a pile of test-prep books.
I lacked even bookshelves [which I have since purchased myself]. Any books in my classroom are of my own personal stock--a sad state of affairs for an 11th grade English classroom. How can my students read independently without resources? How can I expect them to achieve significant gains without providing texts?
And yet, despite all of these difficulties, my kids were running around talking about Japanese manga called "Death Note" and gushing about The Dark Knight. Once they flipped out over my Joker impersonation, I decided that it was time to take the enthusiasm and run with it. We need to combat the literary epidemic here using texts that the students are already interested in: comic books and graphic novels.
A growing academic focus on graphic novels and comic books has defeated three myths about comic books--1. that they are kids' stuff, 2. that they are only for boys and 3. that they aren't serious literature. Comics have proven to be particularly effective with urban classrooms and struggling readers [as Nancy Frey writes in her article "Using Graphic Novels, Anime, and the Internet in an Urban High School."]
Graphic novels and comic books are not simply a pathway to attracting interest, soaked as they are with violence and action. They also embody a different language of narrative, using visual cues to achieve even more complex storytelling techniques. As such, they increase graphic literacy as well as narrative understanding.
I want my students to feel empowered in literacy, to build confidence through completing a book in front of them, and move on to more and more challenging materials.
You can help us out with a starter library--one shelf of stimulating material that will last us forever.
This edition of the project focuses on action-based comics as well as a couple of autobiographical texts--Persepolis and Maus. I know these genres to be my students' favorites, and they are incredibly excited at the prospect of having these books in the classroom.
So help us out! We're dying to get reading.
Nearly all students from low‑income households
Data about students' economic need comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, via our partners at MDR Education. Learn more
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