Teachers Can Help Develop Students' Faculties In Critical Analysis

By Author: Kevin Chao
Total Articles: 24
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Graphic novels like Maus, Barefoot Gen, and Persepolis, about seminal events in the not sedition past, can mediate these historical realities with their unique visual narrative styles that allow many readers, especially adolescent ones, to imagine and interpret characters' experiences that are far remove from their own daily lives. For example, adolescent readers are able to better understand the horrors o the Holocaust through the complex humanity of the main characters in Maus, partly because of the artist' representation of his father and other Jews as com to book mice. This stylization enabled the artist to create an authentic narrative about an unimaginable genocide because the complex visual metaphors in his graphic novel act as a defamiliarizing device so lat readers can understand this historical event in intimate and offhand ways (Hatfield, 2005; Witek, 589). This phenomenon has important implications or students' engagement with reading graphic novels with complex themes because GHD IV MK4 Kiss reader "ownership over leaning making is clearly one ...
... of the appealing facets f comic book reading" (Norton & Vanderheyden, 004, p. 211).

Teachers can help develop students' faculties in critical analysis by asking students several key questions, such as those that Wallace (2001) raised: "Why as this text been written? What is the topic of this text? Who is this text addressed to?" (Kress, 1985, adapted and cited by Wallace, p. 220). Students' answers might include comic book readers, historians, and the general public, all of which would demonstrate the potential to understand the complex ways in which readers and reading are positioned in the social Nations of meaning production. An understanding f the reasons why texts are written for specific readerships and how they achieve their purposes in conveying particular messages are at the heart of critical literacy.
Within the context of an ESL classroom, critical literacy is an important element in a student's journey toward acquiring the academic literacy necessary Dr Success in school (Cummins, 2001). Graphic nove1s like Barefoot Gen, Palestine, Safe Area Gorazde, and persepolis, which feature complex themes on war and :s atrocities, current political realities, and coming-of-age in a time of revolution, can be part of what Benesch (1993) called "a critical ESL curriculum" (p. 14). Cross-modal critical analysis can then occur; for example, students can compare GHD IV MK4 Rare these graphic novel perspectives on historical realities with other views resented by film documentaries, Wikipedia entries, and textbooks. Teaching Maus in the secondary school classroom can employ a critical multiliteracies approach that can affirm students' identities as thinkers and learners.