This project is part of the Black History Month celebration because it supports a Black teacher or a school where the majority of the students are Black.
My Students
I work with all students in the district, but the high school has been without a certified librarian for nearly a decade; now that our community schools have reinstated the teacher-librarian position, the collections need to be updated to best serve the needs of students in our school.
We are a minority-majority Title I school with high rates of poverty, transiency, and housing insecurity.
Our students have expressed a desire for the library to house books with characters from urban and diverse backgrounds. They want to see themselves in the literature they read.
My Project
My secondary students have fallen in love with graphic novels. Almost every time I'm in the library, they ask me when I'm going to get them more! I am hoping to overhaul our magazines sections at the middle and high school and replace them with graphic novels.
Graphic novels have long been stigmatized and somehow perceived as being of less literary merit than traditional literature; but this is a fallacy.
On the contrary, "What researchers are finding is that [they] can engage and challenge ... in both visually and linguistically complex ways. The combination of text and illustration require an entirely different level of focus and concentration. In some ways [they] are more challenging than straight novels" (Shurtliff, 2019).
To summarize: kids should read what they want to read; graphic novels are great not only for those who are interested in them, but also for struggling and reluctant readers (National Library of New Zealand, 2017); and there is a great deal of depth to them, of which students are able to decode, respond to, and improve their literacy on a holistic level.
"While a quick look at ... cartoonish characters might indicate these novels cover breezy topics, it's far from the reality. Pilkey's Dog Man books continue a running storyline about a shared custody arrangement. In ... Guts, Telgemeier dives into mental health issues, describing the experience of a panic attack with words and pictures—an experience kids struggle with more often these days" (Hall, 2019).
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