Top Maryland School Official Wants to Uses Comics to Encourage Reading

To be honest, I am of two minds about this story:

Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick, an Archie fan in her youth, tried out comics in third-grade classrooms in eight elementary schools across the state last year. The experiment was so well-received that she will announce today that she wants to expand the use of graphic novels and comic strips to middle schools.

We never said this program would supplant ... our regular basic reading program," Grasmick said, "but it could provide a huge motivation for some of our students."

Teachers have long seen comic books peeking out from a backpack or the corner of a desk or tucked between the pages of a textbook. Bringing them into the light, Grasmick hopes, will grab the imagination of boys and give teachers another way of enticing reluctant readers into good literature.

The state has worked with Disney Publishing Worldwide and Diamond Comic Distributors to put together kits for 200 classrooms in the state. Maryland teachers looked through dozens of comic books and picked those that were not violent and did not contain inappropriate language.

While I applaud the idea of getting creative to get kids reading, I am not sure that this is the best track to take. Most comics rely on the pictures to tell the story and the text is a partner at best and secondary at worst. But the story does point out something that may set this apart a little:

"I wouldn't want to replace books with comic books, but why is it either or?" said Susan Sonnenschein, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County who studied the use of comics in the eight schools.

For the pilot project, Disney took the state's standards for reading in third grade and created comics-based lesson plans that incorporated skills already being taught, such as how to understand plot and character.

If the comics are used to advance and augment skills that are supposed to be taught, I am probably okay with that. But if the comics are being used as a lower cost way to supplant traditional texts, then we have crossed the line.