If academia type writing was used in advertising, literature and everyday communication, chances are we wouldn’t buy as many products, we wouldn’t have great novels, poetry or comic strips and we would probably be living on a "Star Trek" world like Vulcan. Only thinking logically and limited to few of the pleasures it can offer. But we don’t. We live on Earth where we enjoy many forms of communication. Art, literature and sound/music. Of these we limit ourselves to teaching only by using a small portion of these groups. As teachers it is our job to program our students minds with as much knowledge as humanly possible. Yet we tie our selves to teach using limited resources from these 3 groups.  Textbooks are solely written in academia language with a few still pictures, many posted in unrelated areas  just to fill space, rather than keeping the picture in the related text. Still this only using a small portion of just 2 groups. Computers have up the ante to include all 3 groups providing both still and video, and sound, but still limits literature to the academia format.
      We live in a world of visual acuity, cellphones, internet, magazines, billboards, and commercials all presenting imagery and other forms of communication into our lives.

 “There is broad consensus among scholars that our culture is more visual than ever before. High school and college students, among other groups, inevitably need to access images for their daily lives. However, teaching the language used by these images continues to be largely ignored as an issue in academia. Despite finding ourselves immersed in a veritable audiovisual abyss, the learning of this grammar is conspicuously absent and undervalued as an area of knowledge…(Rodríguez. 2009)”!    

If we use so many ways to communicate in our daily lives, why do we limit the way we teach to only academia written format? There is a general perception that other forms of literature are too complex and/or can even be detrimental to the process of learning. This creates reluctance by teachers, course designers and examiners in introducing other written formats into the classroom. (Savvidou. 2004)  Even in the modern age with computers, (E)textbooks are still limited to presenting knowledge using this academia type language.

Both struggling and ESL students find it difficult “reading textbooks because they are sometimes written above their reading levels with challenging vocabulary, topics are covered at a surface level, and the style of writing is unfamiliar to them (MING 2012, Ballinger and Deeney 2006; Jenkins2010; Wallace, Clark, and Cherry 2006) because this format is not used in their daily lives, only in school.

We are taught to teach using aspects of the child’s community, yet we limit this to just vocabulary words, Taco instead of sandwich or we teach academia in their native language.  We dismiss the fact that children read and speak in other ways. We can observe students reading during free reads reading literature, comics, and novels but we only see this as a way of increasing their vocabulary comprehension. We don’t realize that the reason their reading these formats is because of their ability and preference of style. Students reading graphic novels like Dog man or MAUS may be struggling readers but there’s more to what their reading than just words. Graphic novels may be a “way in” for helping struggling students who are having difficulty through the traditional academia printed text. There are a variety of different and complex skills that occur in graphic novels and the interpretation between text and image has far more lasting positive contributions than are though. (American Library Association 2008)

My research to help struggling student in 8th grade science attempted to introduce alternative formats of readins to the class. Unfortunately, the closure of schools due to the Covid 19 pandemic 2020 limited my research to 2 books and a few students, including the unexpected donation of these books to the students who were unable to return them and complete the assignments. Nevertheless, the limited results did show both positive and negative responses to using these alternative formats within the science classroom.
It appears students did learn and retain more about the subject of chemical reactions, reading the graphic novel “The Cartoon Guide to Chemistry” by  Larry Gonick and “What’s Chemistry all About” by Alex Frith. Students admitted to learning more but has issues with other areas. One issue is because the books are written more for high school or college aged readers, resulting in much of the vocabulary used, students were unfamiliar with, making for harder reading. Unfortunately, these were the only alternative text that I could locate that could locate. Since alternative readings like graphic novels are a new field in schools its hard to find grade appropriate text in subjects like science. This make using such resources difficult within various grades. This is unfortunate because research has shown that alternate readings like graphic novels has such a huge impact upon readers comprehension that it is a shame that teachers do not have such valuable resources available for working with students.  

In the meantime, I plan to continue to search for a more grade appropriate for graphic novels in science to use next semester, because all the evidence shows it’s a grate tool and to finish my research. If I cannot find anything, I will add it to my list of books I plan to someday write or finish.