Interesting editorial in The New York Times this morning:

COMIC BOOKS IN THE CLASSROOM

Generations of children grew up reading comic books on the sly, hiding out from parents and teachers who saw them as a waste of time and a hazard to young minds. Comics are now gaining a new respectability at school. That is thanks to an increasingly popular and creative program, often aimed at struggling readers, that encourages children to plot, write and draw comic books, in many cases using themes from their own lives.

The Comic Book Project was started in 2001 by Michael Bitz at an elementary school in Queens. Mr. Bitz now serves as the director of the project, which is run out of Teachers College at Columbia University. Since its creation, the program, which is mainly conducted after school, has spread to more than 850 urban and rural schools across the country. It has gotten a big push from the current craze among adolescents for comic book clubs and for manga, a wildly popular variety of comic originating in Japan.

The point is not to drop a comic book on a child’s desk and say: “read this.” Rather, the workshops give groups of students the opportunity to collaborate on often complex stories and characters that they then revise, publish and share with others in their communities.
Teachers are finding it easier to teach writing, grammar and punctuation with material that students are fully invested in. And it turns out that comic books have other built-in advantages.

The pairing of visual and written plotlines that they rely on appear to be especially helpful to struggling readers. No one is suggesting that comic books should substitute for traditional books or for standard reading and composition lessons. Teachers who would once have dismissed comics out of hand are learning to exploit a genre that clearly has a powerful hold on young minds. They are using what works.