As if I needed another reason to love Sydney.

Not only is it one of my favorite cities in the world and where I met my wonderful husband, the Opera House is hosting GRAPHIC next month.

Comic books, illustration, animation, music, multimedia and other new ways of telling stories have not only changed the face of our popular culture, they now define it. Graphic novels and comic art are now a leading source of inspiration for films, television, clothing, designers, musicians and artists the world over. GRAPHIC celebrates this brave new world in a weekend of specially commissioned productions – with musical responses to graphic art and stories, workshops, panels, a film program, a games exhibition and an animation competition.

I’ll be in Australia then with my husband Michael and our eleven year old son, Cole. As part of GRAPHIC, we’re excited to see Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, set to a live score.  According to the Opera House website, percussionist Ben Walsh randomly discovered The Arrival in a book store. He fell in love with the story and thought about how he could create music to accompany it.  Three years later, his musical vision will come to life at the Opera House.

I’ve used The Arrival in undergraduate courses on children’s literature and young adult literature.  As a wordless picture book, it serves as a fabulous way to show pre-service teachers how to “read” images.  We begin by discussing how the size of images correlates to reading speed.  A series of small images, for instance, means that they should be read quickly.  With images that take up the full page, however, they should be read with more attention to how lines, colors, and shapes work together to shape the reader’s meaning making processes.

Shaun Tan will be doing a signing after the show, so of course I’m planning on packing my copy of The Arrival in my suitcase.  I’m trying to figure out how to attend some of the other GRAPHIC events, including talks by Kevin Smith and Neil Gaiman, but I’ve already signed up for the 14K City2Surf run that weekend too.  (It goes through Kings Cross, Rushcutters Bay, Double Bay, Rose Bay, Vaucluse, Dover Heights and Bondi Beach, with the 2K long Heartbreak Hill in the middle.  Doesn’t that sound like a lovely way to see the city?  Over 76,000 runners think so!  Michael, a cyclist, begs to differ).

I also teach The Graveyard Book, but Gaiman will be reading from a previously unreleased story called The Truth Is A Cave In The Black Mountains. His read alouds are incredible, and at each stop of his nine city tour in 2008, he read a chapter aloud.  I’ve used these read alouds in class, since they’re a great way to introduce readers to Nobody Owens.  Alas, Tan and Gaiman are scheduled at the same time, and The Arrival wins out for now.  But I’ll end with the trailer for The Graveyard Book anyway.

Image Credit: Shaun Tan, The Arrival

In a few short days, the fall semester will begin.  I’m really excited to teach a graduate course, Curriculum and Instruction 632: Literature and Literacy.  It’s a required course for the Wisconsin K-12 reading license, and we’ll focus on how to foster adolescent literacy development and critical engagement through the use of young adult literature.

Everyone in class will read the follow YA lit:
Alexie, S. (2007). The absolutely true diary of a part-time Indian. New York: Little, Brown.
Collins, S. (2008). The hunger games. New York: Scholastic.
Jaramillo, A. (2008). La linea. New York: Square Fish.
McCormick, P. (2008). Sold. New York: Hyperion.
Peters, J.A. (2006). Luna. New York: Little, Brown.
Selznick, B. (2007). The invention of Hugo Cabret. New York: Scholastic.
Trueman, T. (2001). Stuck in neutral. New York: Harper.
Yang, G.L. (2006). American-born Chinese. New York: First Second.

I taught many of these books this spring in C&I 431: Young Adult Literature for Schools, but I added in three new books: La Linea, Hunger Games, and Hugo Cabret.  I had a really hard time choosing between the fabulous book Red Glass by Lisa Resau and La Linea; in the end, I went with La Linea but I think that it would be fascinating to teach both to a middle or high school class.

I’ve already blogged about my love for the Hunger Games, but I’m equally enamored with The Invention of Hugo Cabret (which is where the image above is taken from). It alternates between being only-images or only-print, and it’s fascinating to think about how to teach such a text. I’ve asked Danielle Kleijwegt, a UW graduate student and artist who is creating her own graphic novel, to talk to our class about deconstructing images, teaching visual literacy, and strategies for using picture books and graphic novels in the classroom.

Throughout the semester, we’ll have a couple other guest speakers, too. Loren Glasbrenner is a teacher at a middle school in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, and he will share his experiences with using literature circles. Also, Kim Stieber-White, a teacher at Evansville Middle School, will talk about her first-hand experience with book challenges and (attempted) censorship with Terry Trueman’s Stuck in Neutral. She also visited C&I 431 class this spring, and my students felt her visit was invaluable. Not only did she share key resources in justifying a book choice – including through the National Council of Teachers of English and the Cooperative Children’s Book Center – she also talked about how the challenge impacted her students and her pedagogy.

In addition to the eight books listed above, students will also participate in literature circles about the Holocaust by reading either the autobiography I Have Lived a Thousand Years or the historical fiction The Book Thief.  We’ll read part of Simone Schweber’s book Making Sense of the Holocaust, and talk about how to approach the Holocaust and other genocides though literature.  Finally, students will give a book talk on a recently published, award-winning book of their choice.

Each week’s young adult literature and required chapters or articles will either focus on a literary theme (such as immigration, sexuality, race and ethnicity, and so on) or a topic (including multiliteracies, new literacies, cultural authenticity, and more).  I really believe that undergraduate and graduate students need hands-on experience in engaging with these texts in innovative ways – and I’ve built in time to participate in literature circles, engage in small group activities, use web 2.0 tools, and much more into the class time.

I’m at the International Reading Association convention in Minneapolis this week.  It’s only Monday, but I’ve already had the opportunity to hear some phenomenal presentations from literacy and language scholars.  It’s so exciting to hear about the research that has shaped the field – and to see the new directions in which it is going.

I gave my talk today, entitled “Teaching Visual Literacy Using Hypertextual Books.”  (For a PDF of the handout, click here).  I highlighted four changes in children’s literature, and talked with the audience about how we “read” multiple modes of representation.  These changes include (1) Words that express meaning through typesetting, (2) Interactive narration, (3) Images that carry and expand meaning, and (4) Multiple perspectives in a single story.  My advisor, Dawnene Hassett, has worked extensively to identify the interactive and multimodal elements of children’s literature and to situate these changes in sociocultural theory and new literacies.

The presentation today highlighted the children’s books themselves, noted the relevant learning theories that support their use in the classroom, and showcased research in K-3 classrooms to that effect.  At the end, I wondered aloud what the future directions of such interactive stories will be.  With touch-sensitive platforms like interactive whiteboards becoming a staple in many classrooms, what does that mean for such literature?  Maybe it will look like the stories on Starfall.com – or like Inanimate Alice.  Or maybe we’re still trying to figure out how the medium is the message… and what that means for interactive, multimodal stories in the classroom.

This is a wonderful talk by David Carson, author/designer of The End of Print, The Book of Probes, and Trek.  With ample humor, he offers his take on his work in graphic design, the role of visual images and print, and images found in media and public places.

It reminded me of our road trip to Upper Peninsula during the summer of 2007.  I was in the process of training for the Marine Corps Marathon, and since I love trail running, I thought it would be a good idea to sign up for the inaugural 25K Tahqua Trail Run.  One August day, we gamely packed up our car, and spent eight hours driving from our home in Madison to Paradise, Michigan.

Despite the fact that it was the peak of summer, it was only 34 degrees when the race started.  The run itself was absolutely gorgeous, if technically challenging (it gets a bit hard to hopscotch over tree roots and climb steep hills after you’ve been running for hours!)  And through a sheer fluke, I ended up winning my age category (lest you think I’m actually good at this, let me note that there were only two other women in my age bracket).

The run finished here, at the Upper Tahquamenon Falls (the second largest waterfall east of the Mississippi):

But anyway, back to found images.  My husband and I are both avid photographers, and we love capturing images of what we encounter on our travels.  So, inspired by David Carson’s talk, here’s what we discovered in the U.P.

We decided that the hip hop horses would be friends with the rhymenocerous and the hiphopopotamus.

Love it.  CoolFlick, that is.  It combines the search power of Flickr with the stunning 3D experience of Cooliris.  To experience Cooliris yourself, I would recommend checking out the Wall Street Journal’s 2008 Year in Pictures.  Now imagine that, linked to the millions of photos uploaded from around the world onto Flickr.

It’s fascinating how social media is facilitating the exchange of visual images… I can’t help but wonder if users are prompted to engage in perspective taking and critical thinking as they share images with an audience (known and unknown, local and distal).

But back to CoolFlick.  One of the drawbacks, as ReadWriteWeb points out, there’s no advanced search – and thus, no way to discern if photos are licensed under Creative Commons.  Ever conscious of copyright issues, I typically find photos for my blog or PowerPoints at stock.xchng or use my own photography.

The photo used in this post, for instance, was taken in Oaxaca, Mexico, last June.  My son Cole and I spent two weeks there at a wonderful language school… and we were inadvertently there on the two year anniversary of protests that turned violent.  I tried to see it through his 8 year old eyes: striking teachers camped for weeks in the Zocalo, banners with the images of Lenin and Marx, and ever-present graffiti.  The images may only stay up for a day or two, before fresh white paint covered them up.

In Oaxaca, the graffiti provided a way for me to (try to) explain complex issues to my son.  Banksy-style images functioned as political expression and public art.  Is it any wonder that in times of political upheaval (even now, here in the States, with our new president) people turn to visual means to express themselves?  Tools like CoolFlick are a way to share their work – and to reach across time, space, and difference.

In April, Todd Lilly and I will be giving a talk at the Expanding Literacy Studies conference entitled, “Remixing Rhetoric: What’s Old about New Literacies?”  I created a Wordle, using the abstract of our proposal.  Todd joked that perhaps we should do some installation art or a performance piece instead of a traditional, PowerPoint-driven talk.  Check it out:

And Damiana Gibbons and I recently put in a proposal for the United Kingdom Literacy Association’s annual conference.  We’re talking about a concept that we’ve developed called “dynamic noise” about how youth use digital media to push back against the cultural ideologies that often work to marginalize or silence their voices.  Here’s the Wordle of it:

Cool, huh?


Thanks to Damiana Gibbons and Ben Devane for pointing me to the fantastic online graphic novels at Zeros to Heroes.  Here’s how their website describes their mission:

Zeros 2 Heroes Media, the “People’s Publisher”, is a Vancouver-based social media company best known for creating Zeros2Heroes.com, a thriving social network that connects thousands of creators, producers and fans of comics in a collaborative and creative environment.

Leading a movement to revolutionize how comics are created and how they reach a mainstream audience, Zeros 2 Heroes members are given the latest web 2.0 tools to showcase their own work or rate, debate and approve the content of others.

Part of the Zeros 2 Heroes mandate is to give its members a voice in shaping the ideas of entertainment studios. Zeros 2 Heroes members recently teamed with Rainmaker Entertainment to redevelop ReBoot, the classic animated episodic television series, into a trilogy of feature-length films.

How cool is that? I’m teaching a young adult lit course this spring, and I was already planning on integrating graphic novels into the curriculum. Now, I’m excited that I can show my undergraduates tools that they (and their future students!) can use to explore narration and visual art through reading and producing graphic novels.  Check out ones like The West Was Lost, Abigail’s War, and many more.