My students need graphic novels to study modern heroes in literature.
$1,365 goal
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Hooray! This project is fully funded
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I work in an inner city school in Worcester, MA in a school that has a unique relationship with the surrounding community. A public middle and high school, it was created about 20 years ago by the Worcester Public Schools and Clark University to provide high quality education to kids in a small specific section of Worcester's Main South neighborhood.
Our heterogeneously grouped classes allow for all students to be exposed to and engage with a diverse range of ideas, texts and peers.
Our students grow into bright readers and thinkers with thoughts and opinions that often leave me impressed. Unfortunately, many of our students have to overcome significant hurdles to get to that point: 67 percent of our students do not speak English as a first language, while another 27 percent are still considered English language learners. Before the Worcester Public Schools initiated a district-wide free lunch last year, nearly 80 percent of our students qualified.
With these metrics in mind, I've started using graphic novels as an entry point into literary ideas like archetype and theme. The student response has been so positive that I'd like to expand the breadth of these teaching tools.
My Project
Two years ago I decided to start off my 9th grade honors English class with a unit on what stories represent and why we tell them. We began the year learning about what constitutes myths, legends and folklore and then brought that to what I think is a natural contemporary parallel: superheroes. In fact, it was so successful that I'm teaching an entire class on this to juniors and seniors this year.
My 9th graders devoured their graphic novel of study, choosing between reading books about traditional superheros like Batman or Superman, but also some lesser known ones such as Icon, a 90's era black superhero written by a black author for a black comic book publishing company.
Other students who wanted to branch out of the traditional superhero genre read Persepolis, a first person account of a young girl growing up during the Iranian revolution; I Kill Giants, a beautiful book about a young girl who fantasizes that she's a giant slayer; or Magneto: Testament, about a young version of the X-Men "supervillian" that takes place as he is sent to Auschwitz. This year, I'd like to expand their reading options to include the new Ms. Marvel series, in which a teenage Pakistani-American Muslim girl living in Jersey City picks up the Ms. Marvel moniker. The junior/senior English class will study V for Vendetta, an X-Men title, and Marvel's Civil War, among others, framing all in the context of modern American (and English) society.
Each of these texts provide avenues into something deeper than just good guys in costumes versus one-dimensional bad guys. These books will be paired with texts like Beowulf, Plato's Republic and essays by famous authors and leaders like MLK Jr., Joseph Campbell and Henry David Thoreau. I'm so excited for these units of study!
More than half of 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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