Comics may help readers

NEW YORK — Some parents and teachers regard comics, with their sentences jammed into bubbles and their low word-to-picture ratio, as part of the problem when it comes to low reading scores and the much-lamented decline in reading for pleasure. But a growing cadre of educators is looking to comics as part of the solution.

In Maryland, the State Education Department is expanding a new comics-based literacy curriculum, after a small pilot program yielded promising results. In New York City, a group of educators applied to open a new small high school that would be based around a comics theme and named after the creators of Superman; their application was rejected but they plan to try again next year. And the Comic Book Project, a program run out of Teachers College at Columbia University that has children create their own comic strips as an "alternative pathway to literacy," is catching on. Six years after it started in one Queens elementary school, it has expanded to 860 schools across the country.

"It's very much a teacher-led kind of movement in that teachers are looking for ways to engage their children, and they're finding some of that in comic books," said Michael Bitz, who founded the Comic Book Project as a graduate student and is its director. "For kids who may be struggling and for kids who may be new to the English language, that visual sequence is a very powerful tool."

The recent interest in comics as a literacy tool comes as graphic novels have cemented their status as sophisticated works of literature, and as teachers nationwide are struggling to boost reading scores. Proponents of comics in the classroom say that they can lure struggling readers who may be intimidated by pages crammed with text. They also say that comics, with their visual cues and panel-by-panel sequencing, are uniquely situated to reinforce key elements of literacy, like story structure and tone.

Still, skeptics fret that in the wrong hands, comics could become simply a vehicle for watering down lessons.

"If you're going to use comics in the classroom at all, which I have serious doubts about, it should be only as a motivational tool," said Diane Ravitch, an education professor at New York University. "What teachers have to recognize is that this is only a first step."

Lisa Von Drasek, the children's librarian at the Bank Street College of Education, said that "not a semester goes by that not a parent or a teacher expresses a concern about a comic-format book that their child has taken out or is using for their reading time." Usually, she said, the critics come around. "What we say is, 'Whatever works."'