Dr. Michael Bitz has been using creative media to help schools instill literacy, reading, and education for nearly a decade now. As the founder of comicbookproject.org, and later the Center for Educational Pathways, he has also subsequently written the recently released book Manga High, the story of a high-school comic-book club in New York City. Through the process of creating their own manga, this clubs’ members learned extensively about Japanese culture, which the book explores.
That kind of experience—and reaction to the learning process—has been common in the many school and library programs started through the Comic Book Project. Bitz uses his various endeavors to encourage learning in different way, and kids are responding eagerly. “I came to the Comic Book Project truly through an education bent,” Bitz says, “and I’m looking at this media and any other media for educational value. One of the other things that the Center for Educational Pathways does is a musical exchange, which is a completely different project [from the Comic Book Project], setting up school-based record labels. I’m really trying to find creative pathways to traditional literacy and learning.”
Here, Dr. Bitz discusses how comics have been creating those teaching pathways for students across the country.
When did you first have the idea to start the Comic Book Project?
Comic Book Project started in 2001. The idea was forming in my mind before that. I had been working in a research program called Learning Through the Arts, and the idea was to try to understand the academic and social impact of involvement in the arts on youth, particularly urban youth. And one of the things that research project had identified was if the arts were going to have an impact on academic learning, then it had to be a very explicit connection. In other words, it’s not going to be the kid just paints a picture and then suddenly they’re a painter or in a symphony. There are certain ways the arts can bolster academic learning, but they have to be tangible connections. I started really trying to test the different ideas out there and trying to put this research into practice. It seemed that through kids making comics that that would be a really great way for them to be engaged in art-making while also honing their writing skills. And by making comics, they were honing their reading skills and becoming better at narratives and the mechanics of writing.
It really started with one middle-school program in New York City. I didn’t really have a vision for going anywhere beyond that [back then], but it really found a niche in the afterschool community in New York City and expanded from there.
I [later] started the Center for Educational Pathways as an organization to support the Comic Book Project, to get grants and funding and things like that, but without a track record, the organization took a longer time to grow then the Comic Book Project did. The project became hosted at Teachers College at Columbia University—in 2004, I think it was—and then it became independent, back to the Center for Educational Pathways, just this last summer, in 2008. So that’s been the bouncy ride of the Comic Book Project. But it forges on and new schools and new programs and libraries and youth centers are getting onboard every year. So it’s been a good thing.
Are people responsive to using comics as a teaching method? Or is there still an attitude that comics don’t belong in schools?
People are responsive. The project has always been voluntary. It’s never been where a school district buys in and then teachers are forced to participate. I would never want to be in that situation, and I would never want to put teachers in that situation. It’s always been the kind of thing where teachers get onboard if it’s something that fits into their ideas and curriculum and so on. So I haven’t met too much resistance in terms of teacher response. Of course, not every school is creating comics or reading comics in school, so I might not be on the radar of a lot of educators, but it’s been a pretty good response overall.
How does it work in the afterschool community?
Well, that’s where it started. It started in New York in the afterschool program. I think primarily because it meets a need in afterschool education, which is that kids are supposed to be learning but they’re not required to be there after school. Afterschool is kind of a signup situation. So afterschool programs have had to be pretty creative in how they recruit kids. They’re not just playing basketball and offering recreational opportunities. Not that those are bad things to do after school. But there’s supposed to be some math- and literacy-building after school, so they’ve had to find creative ways of doing that. So Comic Book Project met that need, and I think it’s a testament to the strength of afterschool programs, particularly in New York City and through nonprofit organizations both citywide ones like Afterschool Corporation and some more local ones like neighborhood coalitions. They’ve very supportive of the Comic Book Project. The first place it went to outside of New York City was to Cleveland, where it became an in-school project, with art teachers partnering with English teachers. They wrote the comic story manuscripts in English class and then they designed the art in art class. That happened through the support of the Cleveland Foundation. So it became this interdisciplinary project and was really a great experience for a lot of kids and a lot of teachers. We continued that project for five years, and the teachers themselves have taken it on now.
So those two models, the afterschool model from New York and the in-school model from Cleveland, just became ways for teachers and educators around the country to adapt the concept of kids creating comics to their own needs. Last week, I was in Seattle, where we launched a comic-book project for Native American youth in partnership with the University of Washington, so we’re going in all kinds of different directions. In Imperial County in California, they’re doing a districtwide project to help their English language-learning population—they’re right across the border from Mexicali. They have 80 percent nonnative speakers, so they’re having kids make comics as a tool for literacy.
The Comic Book Project has been this model that can be adapted and molded to a lot of different school districts and afterschool programs.
How many program do you have going on currently?
Currently, it’s a little bit hard to say. We estimate about 500 schools or libraries or afterschool programs this year. It’s varied year to year depending on grants. Obviously, this year, budget concerns are the big issue for a lot of schools. Even with the stimulus money that a lot of schools are getting, they’re really cutting back on supplemental education, so those all have an impact on the Comic Book Project.
How does the program work? Once it’s been implemented in the schools, how do the students work?
The idea is what they call a trainer model, which is we really want to put the tools into the hands of teachers themselves rather than having a comic-book artist come in and teach kids how to create comics, which would be fine except it’s hard to sustain. So what we want to do is try to give teachers the tools and knowledge and power to help kids create comics in these classrooms so the project kicks off with the professional development of teachers. It usually happens in the fall. Teachers attend a workshop or we have a workshop at the school. What we do at the workshop is we really focus on the activity as the core of the art project as opposed to art skills or writing skills. We really want to get teachers to help their students think creatively and use the project as a forum for storytelling and narrative and creative development, so teachers walk away from that feeling confident that they can implement this project in their classrooms.
From there it plays out in individual classrooms. They’ll start with some creative activities focused on very simple drawing skills working with simple lines and simple shapes. They’re not figure drawing, they’re not designing comic-book panels or anything like that at the beginning. They do simple writing activities focused on dialogue, writing with word balloons or captions. So it’s getting every child into the mindset that they can be a part of this process and be successful at it. And from there to working with panels, first with two panels and then maybe four panels. And then the process goes into writing a comic-book manuscript, a story, basically a written draft with sketching along the way. A lot of kids will do that collaboratively; they’ll work on the comics as a group and then they’ll use that outline, that manuscript, as the plan for creating the actual comic book in pencil. They will design the panels, they’ll write the dialogue, they’ll do all those things that would really be part of any writing process, but it’s infused with this art-making along the way. And then typically they’ll color the comics. More and more schools are using technology to color the comics. They’ll hand-draw the comics and then scan them into Photoshop for colorizing. And a lot of them are writing their text in Photoshop as well. So it’s evolved, certainly, along the way, but it’s still the basic process of giving teachers the model and tools, starting with some simple activities and building up the process. It usually takes the course of a year, unless the kids are working on it every day or every other day, which is not typical. It’s more often in a club setting that meets once or twice a week, even if it’s an in-school project.
Do schools pay for their involvement? Are they able to use grant money for this or other funding?
It varies. Sometimes we’ll get a grant that will cover a city. For example, I was talking about how the Cleveland Foundation supported the project, so the school didn’t pay anything. Sometimes a school will get a grant. For example, in Imperial County in California, their project is funded by the U.S. Dept. of Education. So then they will secure the Comic Book Project as part of what they do. And in schools that are not covered by a grant, they can purchase the materials either through Dark Horse or the Center for Educational Pathways. Because we are a nonprofit organization, we use that to support programs that cannot afford it that are not covered by a grant. Every year, there’s a call for schools to submit an application. If they’re Title 1 schools and are in underserved areas, they can often get the project for free.
How does your partnership with Dark Horse work?
After the project began, it started to grow. We realized that Columbia University did not have the capacity to store materials or to ship materials and Dark Horse became a distribution partner. They have stored and they have printed the project materials as well as the student publications that culminate at the end of the process. There are citywide or districtwide projects, and sometimes the kids’ work is published in a printed comic book. And Dark Horse has done that at cost, so it’s a social contribution on their part, and it’s really amazing for them to do that. So they’ve been a distribution partner for the project and really helped it grow.
Do all the kids get a printed copy at the end so they have something to hold on to?
Yeah, that’s the idea. We put the work on the Web in the student galleries at comicbookproject.org. Not every school can have a publication. I will work with individual schools to help them figure out how to make their own school publication, because it really is a great thing for kids to see their work in print and see themselves as celebrated authors. It really is a powerful literacy practice, so I’ve been encouraging schools to partner with a local print shop or a local business. Even in yearbooks, they sell ad space or in kids’ music programs, they sell space for advertising, so some schools are starting to do that now and finding ways of supporting their comic-book project without having to get grants to support it. That’s been good for a lot of schools.
Why do you think comics are effective teaching tools?
In the process of writing a comic book, the students are thinking about character, about plot development, about the arc of the story, the beginning, the middle, and the end, with a conflict resolution. They’re thinking about the core mechanics of writing, spelling, grammar, punctuation. You know, the thought of an afterschool comics club would be completely ridiculous. But thinking about commas in the context of an afterschool comics club suddenly makes a lot of sense, because kids want their comics to be right. They want the punctuation to be right. They want the spelling to be right, because it extends from them. So I really do think this process of creating comics is a real pathway to literacy and language and literature. The medium itself obviously has been thought of as a bridge to reading for decades, starting in the ’40s with classic comics, although there have been a lot of bumps in the road along the way. The movement of comics in education has been growing through the support of librarians, but educators are also looking to the concept of kids’ creating comics. There a lot of power in kids’ creating all-original works. There’s a huge motivational factor in this.
