GCTE Presentation: Graphic Novels, Picture Books and YA Lit

Hello, again.  It’s been a while, but some of the stress that I’ve been experiencing has been lifted off my shoulders this weekend; so, I am temporarily escaping my black hole.  I presented at the GCTE (Georgia Council of Teachers of English) conference at Jekyll Island this past Friday and it went fabulously.  I found the conference to be an extraordinarily enjoyable experience for it being my first time.  I was surprised at how few student and first-year teachers were in attendance, and was also surprised by the fact that so many first-year teachers that I DID see there were over thirty and coming into teaching as a second career.  I’m already excited about the GCTE conference next February, where I hope to present again. 

The second really big thing that happened to me this weekend was that a few people from Houston County came to hear me present.  They seemed really interested and I can’t wait to see where this leads and if I will be getting a job in their school district.  So, that’s exciting.  But, enough about me.  If you are reading this you are probably wanting to hear about the resources I have to share.  And, I do have stuff to share.

I suppose it would be appropriate to start off with my own presentation.  As a refresher, my presentation focused on how to integrate Young Adult Literature into a secondary English Language Arts classroom.  While I say secondary, I believe that some of the lessons that I created would also be appropriate for a seventh or eighth grade classroom, depending on the standards that exist in your state or district and the class goals that you have, individually, set for your students. 

My presentation started out with a PowerPoint that provided a rationale for why Young Adult Literature should be considered for use in a secondary English Language Arts curriculum and how it defies many of the perceptions and misconceptions that many English teachers have about the genre.  Why YA Lit?

My mentor teacher, who presented with me, outlined some YA novels that you could pair with a canonical text in a thematic unit to scaffold student comprehension and understanding of the probably more difficult and less accessible classic text.  My best advice is to use a book, written by Sarah K. Herz and Donald R. Gallo, entitled From Hinton to Hamlet to get ideas for which YA titles would be the best matches for canonical texts.  They include pairings for a wide selection of canonical texts including The Scarlet Letter, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Odyssey, The Grapes of Wrath, Romeo and Juliet, Of Mice and Men, Lord of the Flies, Julius Caesar, and many more canonical titles.  The book also provides information about how you can pair texts up according to the situational and character archetypes they feature.

We concluded the presentation with a brief mention to three lessons that I came up with for incorporating YA Lit into an ELA classroom.  One involves using Graphic Novels to Teach Dialogue (as well as narrative voice and figurative language), and includes a good resource list for those interested in exploring graphic novels.  Another lesson that I created involves using Picture Book to Teach Inferencing.  Included, also, is a list of picture books appropriate for use in a secondary English classroom.  I really enjoyed creating these lessons and feel that they will be useful for helping teachers to see the value and possible use of graphic novels and picture books.  My hope is that English teachers will begin to see these works as resources for scaffolded teaching that reaches engages student interest, instead of harboring misconceptions about and ignoring these works as remedial, immature and not worthy of academic attention.

The last lesson that I included in our presentation packet, is more of a loose outline, or skeleton, if you will, of a unit that may be implemented after a semester or year of student exposure to and reading of YA Lit titles and authors.  The unit idea seeks to bridge YA Lit with Research and Writing in a creative way.

I will try to put up more resources that I obtained at GCTE in the next week, or weeks, to come.  Until then, back to student teaching I go. 

Presenting at GCTE in February

I think I’m really going to do it.  I had initially planned to present something along the lines of reading comprehension strategies for low-level 7-12 students, but, as a lowly student teacher, I don’t feel experienced enough yet.  Instead, I’m going to tackle something with a little less pressure attached to it: Young Adult Literature.  I don’t think it’s a big surprise, considering how ambivalent I tend to be toward “The Canon.”

What I plan to do is introduce why Young Adult Literature is important in the middle school and high school classroom, how it can be included within an English curriculum at these levels and how to keep up with and access YA Lit novels using journals and the Internet.

I just returned from the library with some nice print resources that I’m going to draw from in preparation for my presentation and accompanying paper.  These are definitely great resources for the English teacher curious about YA lit and how to incorporate it into the classroom. 

Herz, Sarah K. and Donald R. Gallo. From Hinton to Hamlet: Building Bridges between Young Adult Literature and the Classics.  Second Edition. (2005)

Monseau, Virginia R. and Gary M. Salvner, Eds. Reading their World: The Young Adult Novel in the Classroom.  (1992)

A great online resource is The Assembly on Literature for Adolescents, an organization who publishes a Young Adult Literature journal called the ALAN Review.  The ALAN Review publishes articles about the genre or YA Literature as well as book reviews of newly published YA novels.