Comic books reside uniquely within American culture. Historians have contended comics are more than just sequential artwork mixed with engaging stories, but rather, a framework by which the generations make sense of who they are. These stories are a reflection of cultural conscience; a lens through which we can view the world and a mirror through…

Teachers frequently reach for leveled readers to help facilitate their guided reading groups; however, there can be limits in using these leveled readers. One such limit relates to enjoyment and engagement. An answer to this is using TOON books during guided reading time. TOON books are graphic novel leveled readers and were created in response to…

Parts of this contributing article for educators was taken from a presentation given on December 1, 2022, by Dr. Patrice J. Pinder in collaboration with the University of the West Indies' (UWI) Mona Faculty of Science and Technology who hosted a UNESCO sponsored Disaster Heritage Webinar, i.e., Disaster heritage -- Jamaica National Commission for…

A lot is happening at the drawing table. Children are busy inventing stories, reassembling their thoughts, gleaning knowledge and making decisions. This article digs deep to see what is going on the children's art-making through drawing and reading comics. In an after-school drawing club the author reveals how children are transformed through…

The article critiques schools' current reification and overreliance on teaching slavery as a history of exceptional individuals and unbroken progress toward freedom. The authors explore how the counterstorying of narratives of formerly enslaved individuals in both preservice and inservice education coursework complicates and engages the histories…

Language-oriented literacy standards offer mostly linguistic accounts of text complexity. In response, the present article demonstrates that multimodal and visual narratives offer additional ways to understand and discuss text complexity. This descriptive analysis of one fourth-grader's comic provides an account of the multimodal patterns and…

To constitute awareness of climate change, hearing the solutions of students in their words and seeing visual products by creating experiences in schools is vital. This case study was limited to sequential implementations of climate change in the natural sciences teaching process in 5th grade. After an education process on using Pixton, 12…

Asynchronous multimedia learning is a common form of delivering training in the workforce industry, and organizations rely on a completion status to measure that training. However, measuring retention and knowledge transfer of new material rarely occurs during asynchronous learning. Grounded in the Visual Language Theory (VLT) and a delivery…

No single story can represent fully and comprehensively a complex historical movement such as the Civil Rights fight for freedom and social justice. Learning about this movement through multi-perspective biographical young adult graphic novels cultivates in students a nuanced understanding of this historical struggle, making it more concrete and…

Comics Academy is an after-school S.T.E.A.M. club in which students learn the history of comics, comic book formatting, the basics of drawing and perspective and, most important, how to collaborate to bring their stories to life through comics.

In this article, the authors investigated the effect of comic storytelling (centred upon students' experiences in their everyday life) in enhancing students' understanding, motivation and engagement in primary mathematics. These lessons connected "out-of-school" and "in-school" mathematics, involved students telling and writing…

Exploring the realm of literacy involves understanding how graphic novels shape students' reading and writing journeys. Through scholarly research, the authors delve into the significant impact of graphic novels on education while highlighting their appeal to students through visual features and engaging storytelling. Included is a discussion of…

Social narratives, or story-based interventions, are defined as stories that describe social situations, appropriate social behaviors to display, and when to display the specified behaviors. Social narratives are a commonly implemented and empirically evaluated procedure used to improve social behavior and decrease the probability of aberrant…

Purpose: People with aphasia (PWA) use different kinds of gesture spontaneously when they communicate. Although there is evidence that the nature of the communicative task influences the linguistic performance of PWA, so far little is known about the influence of the communicative task on the production of gestures by PWA. We aimed to investigate…

To broaden the appeal of social studies and English content, the authors share how they use multimedia storytelling to increase student engagement, differentiate instruction, and consider multiple viewpoints.