ENJOYING THE NOVEL BUT HAVING A HARD TIME

Teachers’ Experience of Reading Graphic Novels for Adults

Abstract

This article discusses teachers’ experience of reading a graphic novel for adults. Graphic novels have been increasingly integrated in education systems recently, hence the importance of analyzing the experience of the teachers responsible for mediating those texts for their students. The participants were 48 teachers, most of them for language arts, studying for a graduate degree in Israeli colleges. The research question was: What characterizes the teachers’ acquaintance with graphic novels and their response to the genre? The data were collected from a questionnaire completed after reading opening pages of a graphic novel, which included both closed and open-ended questions. The quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, and the qualitative data using thematic analysis. The participants attested to shallow familiarity with the genre. While enjoying the encounter with it, many confessed to a difficulty reading due to cognitive overload caused by an excess of verbal, visual, graphic and spatial elements and the difficulty integrating them. The findings thus suggest a need for teachers to study the language of graphic novels and gain experience reading them before they feel comfortable teaching them in class.