Glenbard staff members attend Glenbard Parent Series programs, too. Here are a couple of their takeaways from the April 21 program Do You Speak Visual: How Visual Literacy is Essential for School Work and Life with Nick Sousanis.
Glenbard South instructional tech specialist Stephanie Wallace said, "Nick Sousanis gave a compelling and thought provoking talk on the history of comics (and/or graphic novels), our perception of them as a society and their possible role in student literacy. Our students consume visual media in huge quantities. As teachers, we need to help them decode and analyze what they see. We also should encourage and guide them to create their own images to visualize understanding, organize thoughts and concepts and tell their own stories. This was a really rich experience!"
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| South instructional tech specialist Stephanie Wallace (left) and South art instructor Tatiana Heise |
Glenbard South art instructor Tatiana Heise said, "Dr. Sousanis brought to life the idea that we all desire to speak our truths, to find a way to genuinely express our story and to help encourage and lead others to do the same. I walked away with a much deeper understanding of how we all break up space within our day and how the comic format is a powerful application and hotbed for rich learning opportunities and processing. Text is not isolated from image; image is not isolated from text. They are a conversation that informs its equal and respective parts. It is within this natural application that we can understand the relationship of our thoughts and experiences in not only a linear and sequential way, as we are trained to do in traditional narrative texts, but also in a way that encourages relational processing - one that gives us opportunities and the responsibility to make connections - to fill in gaps, and to view information that came before, after, peripherally, as well in the moment of time we are currently experiencing."
St. Pet's 8th grade student, John Kenny, comments "I've learned that even though
comic books and graphic novels are normally stereotyped against, they can be
just as valuable as text-only books."
His mother, Polly Kenny said "I appreciated that Dr. Sousanis
showed us powerful "cartoons" that we have valued throughout history (such as
political cartoons). And he explained how cartoons and graphic novels as a
medium (in addition to all-text books) can expand our ways of sensing and
"knowing" a topic. Younger students and adults alike can benefit from this mix
of visuals and text, how they interplay with one another, and how cartoons can
cross time periods and bring together topics on one single page in a way that
text media alone cannot. I can see his work helping people understand how
cartoons and graphic novels can add value both in the learning process and as a
way for students to process and express the things they are learning and
trying to master!"