A Visual Shakespeare

This week, I began teaching Othello to my Honors English class, and I was reminded of the much different approach that I took with my other classes, which includes all struggling readers. Today, I attacked print literacy with my Honors students. They are strong readers, so their issue with Shakespeare is the language. They have enough knowledge of contextual clues and elements of print literacy to attack one line at a time, and while they do not understand all of his language, they certainly can get a good deal of meaning out of the text on their own. For example, this quote came up today in a "Tossing Lines" activity that I was presenting to the students:

Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty,
But seeming so, for my peculiar end:
For when my outward action doth demonstrate
The native act and figure of my heart
In compliment extern, 'tis not long after
But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
For daws to peck at: I am not what I am.

In this quote by Iago, my students recognize that "doth" may replace "does" in their minds and that "extern" could just be "external" without the last syllable. They understand the saying "wear your heart upon your sleeve" and many other words/phrases in this quote. They have incredible print literacy, as well as coping skills for when they are trying to grasp at straws and not fully understanding the text.

So I move on to my students who do not have strong print literacy skills. They are struggling readers in both comprehension and vocabulary, and this makes all reading in my class a struggle, especially Shakespeare. So in this class, I tried to tap into their visual literacy to help them comprehend and find success. Graphic novels have become mainstream in both the classroom and the library, and I was presented with three levels of Romeo and Juliet at a Newberry Library Conference by a fantastic University of Illinois literature professor. I have included a link here to the amazon.com "look inside this book" section of the original text version of this book.

Romeo and Juliet The Graphic Novel

We began with the "Quick Text" which was the easiest of the reading levels, and by the end, we worked a little bit with the "Original Text" version of the graphic novel. What I realized quickly was that this was a form of visual literacy that the students had not experienced, and I had to teach them how to read a graphic novel. The were visually illiterate in many aspects of the novel. Their first question was, "What order do we read the boxes in?" In a graphic novel, the layout of slides is rarely the same on each page, so I had to teach students how their eyes should move on the pages. Also, I have to review what each speaking bubble meant. If you look at the link, you will find that the characters have different types of speaking bubbles. Some display emotion, others simple conversation. Some of my students did not know that if a conversation bubble is attaching by smaller bubbles, that this is internal thought being spoken aloud to oneself. Since Shakespeare loves to have his characters talk to themselves, many times in long monologues or interspersed with other dialogue, this was important for them to understand.

What was great about using a graphic novel, is that all of the visual literacy that I had to teach the students was worth it. They are such visual learners already, that they really grasped the concept and ran with it. They could understand that a "SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIING!" across the page was the sound of a sword fight, better than they would have ever understood it in a typically laid out play.

In an article by Gretchen Schwartz she states that "The graphic novel, increasingly popular with students and educators, offers teachers the opportunity to explore the “rhetoric” of the visual-print world and the opportunity for students to become media literate." This was exactly my experience. The students had a close relationship with visual literacy during this unit, and it helped them to become more print literate. Since then, a few of them have tapped into their knowledge and began reading more graphic novels. In this case "The balance of power between word and images which, after the invention of the printing press, shifted in favor of the word, seems now to be shifting in favor of the image" (Varnum & Gibbons). The technological bombardment that has existed for the majority of these students' lives makes them so much more visually literate, than print literate, especially with the most struggling learners.

Schwartz, Gretchen. "Teaching Visual Literacy Through Graphic Novels." ALA | Home - American Library Association. Jan. 2008. Web. 16 Feb. 2011. .

Varnum, R., & Gibbons, C. T. (Eds.). (2001). The language of comics. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi.