Teachers have really been embracing comics and graphic novels as a powerful and effective tool in the classroom over the last 5-10 years but there is still a debate that goes on in those circles as to whether comics are just a lazy way out of “real” reading.

Award-winning cartoonist Jeff Smith, who created the mega-popular and wonderful Bone series, was a guest last week for a discussion on whether graphic novels belong in the classroom. Also speaking in defense of comics was Larry Swartz, co-author of Learning to Read with Graphic Power and educator at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Rounding out the panel was children’s book author Mahtab Narsimhan (The Tiffin). The discussion was hosted and moderated by Cheryl Jackson for the TVO Parents Book Club Meeting. TVO is an Ontario-based non-profit TV station and organization dedicated to education. (Kinda like PBS here in the States, I guess.)

Here’s the entire discussion:

One point that I wish was addressed was the comment that there are only a few words in comics. Yes, in comparison to prose, it’s not pages of blocks of text. But try breezing through Chris Claremont’s notoriously wordy Uncanny X-Men. But more seriously I love how Jeff Smith touched on the challenges and imagination needed to read comics, with the mind having to imagine how the story progresses from one panel to the next. It isn’t necessarily easier than reading prose, it’s just different. Mahtab Narsimhan’s example of Asterix is designed to be read fast and easy. Not so with something like The Sandman or Asterios Polyp or From Hell or any other number of examples. Narsimhan has completely missed out on the levels of communication and interpretive skills at play with comics, such as symbolism and non-verbal communications. These elements are relayed visually without accompanying text hammering each and every point with redundancy, and expressing it in a way personal and unique to the artist and their style, all while simultaneously playing off the accompanying text’s own information. Fortunately the trend is that educators are understanding this more and more.

(via The Beat)