The complexity of the reading experience: Thoughts and reflections of a group of YA readers of comics

  The Damaged Books Room (Fantagraphics). Jonas Seaman

 

We are very grateful to Lucia for this entry on her research with comics, young people and reading. It will surely be of interest to many of our readers. As the most recent conferences and exhibitions show, the aesthetics and potential of comics are increasingly recognized.
In fact, an exhibition has just opened at the Hunterian Museum at the University of Glasgow:
http://www.gla.ac.uk/hunterian/visit/exhibitions/exhibitionprogramme/comicinvention/#/whatisacomic?

EA and LG

Lucia Cedeira Serantes is an Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (Queens College, CUNY). She is currently working on expanding her thesis chapter on reading and materiality. Her next research projects will explore non-readers’ relationship to reading: trying to shed some light on the ways in which notions and practices around reading are communicated and perpetuated and why and in what ways youth modify or reject these ideas about “reading” as part of their identity development.

 

As many other PhD students before me, after a year into the program I felt the urge to move away from the very topic that brought me to the program. That move provoked a mixture of anxiety and excitement but I quickly found a new path, thanks to much reading and the patience and guidance of my supervisors. My interest in the reading experience, and comics readers in particular, grew from different projects I engaged in, with some ending up making it into the academic world (Cedeira Serantes, 2013) and others making up much of that invisible and laborious work that researchers do. So why comics and reading? Basically I thought that there were more to comics readers than what I was seeing represented in the Media Studies (with their focus on fans) and Education and Library and Information Science (LIS) literature (with their focus on reluctant and/or visual readers).

Historically comics have been a very popular reading material for youth in spite of the attacks and poor consideration received from adults and educational and cultural institutions. Most of the research efforts have focused on analyzing texts—especially lately in terms of regarding comics as good literature—along with a consideration of comics as a text and product in the fan experience. I wanted to move the focus from fan communities and comics as texts to readers. My research focus was comics readers and how they constructed and understood their reading experience of comics as a reading material and what this revealed about reader identities and social contexts of reading. This focus exposes my academic influences, who deserve a direct acknowledgement: Radway (1991) who sparked my interesting for neglected readers; Mackey (2011) and Ross, McKechnie & Rothbauer (2006) who solidified the project; and Gemma Lluch and Fuller & Rehberg Sedo (2013) who keep expanding my horizons.

In the spirit of full disclosure, my own personal history as a reader of comics made me rather open-minded and attentive to the possibility of a multiplicity of experiences. I am originally from Spain and as a child I read 13, Rue del Percebe by Francisco Ibañez, Astérix by Goscinny and Uderzo, and El Capitán Trueno by Mora and Ambrós. As a teenager my taste moved towards superheroes and the X-Men group became one of my favourites. In university, my engagement with comics faded away and the only contact I had was through the magazine El Vibora until my MLIS studies when Maus by Art Spiegelman rekindled my love for comics. My reading history mixes genres, nationalities, and formats and it was an (anecdotal) example of the differences that can potentially affect the development of comics readership.

To keep the readers’ voices at the center of my work, I adopted an approach informed by hermeneutical phenomenology that made immediate the richness and multifaceted nature of the reading experience (Cohen, Kahen and Steeves 2000; Kvale and Brinkmann 2009). I interviewed seventeen participants, from sixteen to twenty-five years of age, nine female and eight male, who also represented different reading experiences: beginning readers, occasional but committed readers, and expert readers. I recruited participants and collected data in three different sites: public libraries, comics stores and at a university with a large undergraduate population.

The ideas, processes, and conclusions that emerged from these interviews presented comics reading as a sophisticated practice with unique characteristics and this group of diverse readers as committed, conscientious, and reflexive. It also emphasized the situated nature of the reading experience that requires the researcher to explore both how the experience is shaped but also shapes the reader-self and how it is embedded in an influential social context. Allow me to elaborate. The richness of the data I worked with was such that I was constantly grappling with the temptation to simplify their shared experiences: to separate what my readers were experiencing as a whole into defined compartments that, as a researcher, would afford me an easier analysis and presentation. I managed to fight this temptation through a visual representation that, while not a model, brought together what I ended up naming the four dimensions of the reading experience: 1) the construction of the reader-self; 2) the significant role of the materiality of comics; 3) the institutional contexts of comics reading and; 4) the unique temporal aspects of comics reading in contemporary society.

 

Lucia Cedeira Serantes

 

I recognize that the visual representation is not an epitome of clarity and I often need to explain it, but as a tool, it helped me to keep the four dimensions together and keep in mind the experiential complexity that my readers were sharing. The first dimension (the reader-self) attempts to explore the identity of the reader, that is constructed both solitarily and socially, especially in connection with the comics community; gender and positive and negative reading experiences are other key factors in the evolution of the reader-self. The materiality question (the second dimension) was raised by my participants and they helped to investigate how the change of media/format can potentially alter our relationship to reading and to the reading material; they especially focused on the affordances of print comics in comparison (not against) digital comics. The third dimension revealed the importance that surrounding structures and institutions (the comics industry, libraries, and educational institutions) have in the comics reading experience and how they become sites where comics reading is introduced, encouraged, or denigrated, directly or indirectly. Finally, the fourth dimension refers to time and how these readers construct comics as complex narratives that smoothly adapt to the temporal requirements connected to a current state of time scarcity, acceleration, speed, and instantaneity; however, readers also appreciated the quality of comics to allow for moments of contemplation (Cedeira Serantes, forthcoming May 2016).

The knowledge emerging from these participants’ experiences and understandings significantly enhances and seriously challenges commonplace understandings of the reading practices of a historically neglected group of readers. Previous posts by Erin Spring or Carolina González clearly reflect the opportunity for reading research that looks at the meaning emerging from reading practices and experiences as well as “newly discovered” formats such comics. The thoughts and reflections that these YA readers shared advance and extend the knowledge about the complexities of YA reading practices and support the necessity and timeliness of introducing comics in libraries and other cultural and educational institutions.

References:

Cedeira Serantes, L. 2013. Misfits, loners, immature students, reluctant readers: Librarianship participates in the construction of teen comics readers. In Transforming young adult services: A reader for our age, edited by Anthony Bernier, 115-135. New York: Neal-Schuman.

Cedeira Serantes, L. forthcoming May 2016. When comics set the pace: The experience of time and the reading of comics. In Plotting the Reading Experience: Theory, Practice, Politics, edited by Lynne Mckechnie, Paulette Rothbauer, Knut Oterholm, and Kjell Ivar Skjerdingstad. Waterloo, Ontario Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

Cohen, M. Z., David L. Kahn, and Richard H. Steeves. 2000. Hermeneutic Phenomenological Research: A Practical Guide for Nurse Researchers. Thousand Oaks, Calif.; London; New Delhi: Sage.

Fuller, D., and DeNel Rehberg Sedo. 2013. Reading beyond the Book: The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture. New York: Routledge.

Kvale, S., and S. Brinkmann. 2009. InterViews: Learning the Craft of Qualitative Research Interviewing. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Mackey, M. 2011. Narrative Pleasures in Young Adult Novels, Films, and Video Games. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

Radway, J. A. 1991. Reading the Romance : Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Ross, C. S., McKechnie, L., and P. M. Rothbauer. 2006. Reading Matters: What the Research Reveals about Reading, Libraries, and Community. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited

Sexuality, young people and reading

From the film The Fault in our Stars based on the novel by John Green

One of the most notorious social and cultural changes in the last 25 years can be observed in relation to young people’s sexuality. The media, the internet and social networks have had a great impact in this sense, facilitating access on the one hand to information about all types of themes and perspectives related to sexuality and on the other, to all types of pornography and sexual violence. Research in Mexico, as in other countries, has revealed that adolescent fecundity has increased alongside the number of sexually active teenagers. Despite an increase in information in general about reproductive health and awareness of effective methods of contraception, this does not seem have made a mark on the statistics of adolescent pregnancies or on the percentages of sexually transmitted diseases. It has also been observed that young people are one of the population groups most affected by sexual violence and, in general, the most vulnerable adolescents are those from sectors with the least education and the greatest poverty levels.[i]

In our study we did not intend to investigate adolescent sexuality but it was inevitable that the topic would arise given that our participants were between 14 and 15 years old and therefore found themselves in a crucial stage of life in terms of the exploration of and construction of opinions, representations, perspectives and decisions about relationships, sex and sexual orientation. The most common comments made by these students were about the need of obtaining information, especially about homosexuality, but also about bullying, assault and sexual violence within relationships.

These preoccupations stemmed partly from the reading we did: in Justicia Divina there is an explicit sexual scene as well as references to one of the ghosts as homosexual; in The Girl in Red, the theme of female sexual exploitation  permeates the picturebook and there a threat of violence underlies it from beginning to end and Memorias de Idhún highlights the desire and love of mortal enemies Kirtash and Jack for Victoria which leads them to accepting she loves both of them (further on in the saga she has a sexual relationship with each of them).

However, even before giving them these books, references to sexuality emerged almost immediately when we talked about their reading outside school. One participant mentioned, quite frankly, that sexual relations was a topic of interest: ‘just now I’ve read a book that is about adolescents, what has happened to them, how to look after ourselves and all that […] in a sexual relationship, how to protect ourselves, and that’s it.”

At first we thought that perhaps in order to gauge our reaction, two of the participants started to tell us in detail about erotic novels. Later on, as we came to know them a bit better, it seemed to us that in both cases their choice and their desire to talk about these topics had to do with situations in which they found some resemblance with incidents or problems that were affecting them a the time. One girl told us:

[…] I like to read, I just read a book called “Julieta and her toyboys”, it is about sex or that, it talks about how she plays with them because she had, she was very in love with a person, a guy, and he treated her badly, and then she wanted to do the same, she wanted to treat men badly and she is very pretty and has a good body, she played with all of them and did bad stuff like leaving them like… it just sounds vulgar…  like turned on […]

The other participant described a book by the Marquis de Sade and later in the project returned several times to the topic of abuse and violence; for example, in his River of Reading he included a book called The Art of Being Young and he explained it was about

[…] how to have a loving relationship without violence, in which it implies that one person does not need to be the subject of violence from their partner, that there should be mutual love and that a person should not be forced to have sexual relations if both don’t want to, because that would be sexual abuse.

Among the rest of the participants there were several allusions to the topic of sexual violence, some more explicit than others, and especially in relation to The Girl in Red, where the first ending leaves the fate of the girl in the wolf’s hands and to the reader’s imagination.

The allusions to homosexuality were less explicit but it became evident that some participants were anxious about their sexual orientation. Even though there now exists more tolerance in Mexico towards the LGBT population, there still exist many conservative cultural and religious sectors characterized by their intolerance and homophobia. Once again, these comments arose in the first session:

There was a bookshop […] I went in and found many books and they all seemed very cool but there was one that caught my attention […] I decided to buy it and I liked it, I began to read, read, read and I got really into everything that was there, like how a young girls can fall in love with someone of their same sex.

It is important to note that these type of comments can raise serious questions for all of those professionals who work with young people, even if it is simply a reading workshop. What should we say about these books? How should we respond? We can listen and be supportive but we cannot and must not take on the role of psychologist or therapist if we are not trained to do so. According to most research ethics procedures, when researchers identify a study participant as perhaps being affected by a particular situation, especially a young person in school, this concern must be referred to the relevant school authorities. Although we had no clear evidence, we felt that reporting our concern was more important than confidentiality regarding the readers’ responses; as it turned out, the person in charge of the students was already aware of these issues.

 

In the survey carried out in 1992, among the most read books were Born Innocent, Go Ask Alice and What is Happening to my Body? In 1996, the most popular book was Juventud en Éxtasis [Youth in ecstasy] by Carlos Cuauhtémoc Sánchez, who at the time was among the best-selling authors in Mexico. In an article that explores the construction of sexualities and relationships in this “self-help” novel, Daniel Nehring (2009) argues that the popularity of this novel highlights the cultural transformations in terms of sexual relationships in Mexico in the last decades, especially in terms of the tensions between tradition (religious and patriarchal) and modernity.

Some of the books by Cuauhtémoc Sánchez appeared in the 2014 survey but they found a rival in Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James (the film had not yet been released). One afternoon when we arrived at the school, the Head Teacher told us that she had confiscated this book from one of the students. One of the workshop participants told me she was also reading it and defended her classmate:

[…] the Head Teacher was angry because she said those books were not for our age. But well I think it depends how you take it, right, because if you are a morbid person or that sort, well obviously you are going to take it that way but I take it as a distraction, like getting to know about experiences from books, and well I’m reading it, and I don’t bring it to school because yes, they took it away from her […] So I saw it as an injustice because even the Head Teacher herself said that those sort of books it depends how you take it because it’s an erotic book […] that is, yes there are ages for reading some books but for example my mother, I tell her what it’s about and she tells me: well take it this way or that way, right, so she helps me digest it a bit better.

This defence is heartening in the sense that it reveals a mature position on the girl’s part, in which she is aware of the different reasons and ways in which one can approach this type of reading, of the importance of being able to “know about experiences” through books without placing herself in risky situations and of the advantage of being able to talk about these issues with an open-minded person who can guide her, in this case, her mother.

While Lydia Kokkola (2013) argues that in most young adult literature there is an underlying conservative perspective and controlling desire on the part of the adults (who remain anxious  about the manifestation of desire in young people), Kimberley Reynolds (2007) notes that there are also “radical” young adult books that not only represent changes in society but also contribute to forming new attitudes and expectations for, and among, the young people. She argues that these books can actually help readers adjust to these cultural and social changes. Hence, in the books written with teenagers in mind, in the 1970s, the informative and didactic messages about sex and sexualities predominated but more recently, despite criticism and censorship, YA novels have begun to approach the topics of desire, pleasure and sexual relationships among adolescents (heterosexual, bisexual or homosexual) with increasing naturalness, without falling into “moral panics” and even with humour. An example would be The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, another of the books most frequently mentioned in the 2014 survey in Mexico, in which a candid, loving and respectful sexual relationship develops between two young people.

The reading of this type of “radical” YA novels, together with an adequate and prepared mediation can provide a safe space for the exploration and the expression of doubts and feelings as opposed to maintaining a silence around dangerous and abusive situations. Perhaps it can also help young people to see themselves as sexual beings, with all that this implies.

"How to have a loving relationship without violence?"

From one participant’s “River of Reading”

---

[i] General references: National Survey of Health and Nutrition 2012; Campero Cuenca1, L. et al (2013) Salud sexual y reproductiva de los adolescentes en México: evidencias y propuestas, Gaceta Médica de México 149:299-307; National Survey of the Demographic Dynamics 2014 (INEGI); Stern, C. (ed) (2008) Adolescentes en México. Investigación, experiencias y estrategias para mejorar su salud sexual y reproductiva. El Colegio de México.

 

Young adult fantasy literature… in the classroom? (2nd part)

 

“Fanart” of the most characteristic symbols of Memorias de Idhún: the three mythic creatures: the unicorn, the dragon and the shek as well as the hexagon that represents the three suns and three moons of this fictional world. Fuente: http://lincelots.deviantart.com/art/Idhun-268499134

In the first part of this article I presented some arguments in favor of using YA fantasy literature in the school as well as some possibilities to introduce it in classroom practice. Yet, the educational potential of fantasy books does not only lie in the text itself but it goes far beyond the pages of the book as we shall see below.

When teenagers like a story and they feel identified with it, they do not want the experience to end when they finish the book, instead, what they want to do is to share their impressions, chat about what they liked or did not like, or form groups in which they can make the story their own. In other words, they try to include a social component into the solitary act of reading. With this intention, fan communities appear: groups of people who share hobbies or a liking for a certain cultural object and who find in the Internet an ideal space to develop this interest. A simple search across the web shows that YA fantasy series are especially prolific at creating this type of fans communities, with Harry Potter, Twilight or Memorias de Idhún being prime examples.

A peculiarity of these groups is that they encourage and promote the creation of contents and creative material related to the source text, and this is the reason they are often called “participatory cultures” (Jenkins, 2009). Some examples of the materials they create are the so-called “fanfics” (short for “fan fiction”), fan-written literary texts which enhance or complement the story on which they are based; “fan arts”, any type of artistic or visual material, including drawings, videos or craftwork, or “cosplays”, costumes which represent an specific fictional character and which are normally created and sewn from scratch by the fans themselves. 

What is especially interesting about this fact is that we have evidence (Borah, 2002, pp. 347-348; Evans, 2006, cited in Reynolds, 2007) that a great part of the members of these participatory cultures are teenagers or young people. It means that the same students - often those who are unmotivated in our classrooms- are able not only to form online groups which they themselves manage but also to cooperate in the development of literary texts, videos and other artistic materials.

Moreover, one needs to take into account that, once they are finished, most of these creations are later shared online so that they can be commented on or evaluated by the other members of the community. Lluch and Acosta (2012) describe these interactions among members as a form of “positive feedback in the act of sharing which strengthens the good behavior among the forum users and which encourages them to keep reading, analyzing, learning and reflecting” (p. 49 ABM transl). Thanks to this receptive and cooperative atmosphere, the teenagers exert themselves in their work in order to receive positive comments and feedback from their peers and they often show an involvement and a passion in these tasks that we often miss in their classwork.

For instance, in the following image (retrieved from a personal account of DeviantArt, the popular virtual community of art makers), one can see that the author created a high quality picture based on a scene of Memorias de Idhún in which he/she combined techniques from traditional drawing with digital illustration and image processing. By accessing the portal where the illustration is hosted (please see the description under the image) one can also observe the messages of support and criticism I referred to in the last paragraph.

 

“Fanart” showing one of the scenes of the first book of Memorias de Idhún in which Victoria heals her friend Jack’s wounds with her magic. Source: http://sparkly-monster.deviantart.com/art/MDI-Jack-y-Victoria-493098540

The same quality work can be appreciated in many “fanfics” too, in which their authors (it is important to remember that many of them are teenagers) are very careful to note both the language used and the level of fidelity to the story they are based on, something which requires a very close reading of the original text. If anyone is interested in “fanfics”, I recommend the virtual community “wattpad” or the official forum of Lauga Gallego in the case of Memorias de Idhún, which fulfill the task of repositories of these amateur literary works. As to videos, the platform Youtube is without a doubt the best tool to use in the search of fan-made book-trailers.

Summarizing, teenagers are able to create quality art work, sometimes alone and sometimes in cooperation and, furthermore, they are able to appreciate the work carried out by others by making value judgements. It is worth highlighting that they do all of it selflessly in their free time, fuelled only by their motivation towards stories and characters which connect to what concerns them and what they are interested in.

 

Fan-made Booktrailer of the first book of Memorias de Idhún. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pM0m7b4dIM

 

The point I’m trying to make is that, although it is true that YA fantasy literature is a rich and motivating material in itself, all those participatory processes which derive from it and that I have detailed above are no less interesting from an educational point of view.

Teachers and educators tend to think that it is complicated to find innovative and interesting activities which motivate students. However, I think we should simply identify what they like doing and make them aware that their hobbies are also opportunities to learn. In our case, by paying attention to the activities youngsters carry out in the on-line communities, we can find many different ideas that may be integrated perfectly into classroom practice. Participating in forums or creating transmedia contents about the stories they like should not be in a conflict with literature learning. On the contrary, I consider these new practices to be a new way of understanding and creating knowledge and, therefore, they would be a useful tool to lend that twist to education I referred to at the beginning of this article.

For example, the required reading of a book might turn out to be something worth doing if it is a book which students like or about which they have heard from people their age, even if it is as thick as Memorias de Idhún; the boring process of writing a composition might become a self-improvement challenge (as it is already promoted from the platform NaNoWriMo (*) or the traditional summary of a text may be more fun to do when used as the script of a booktrailer recorded in class and subsequently uploaded to an on-line platform.

In conclusion, and in contrast to what it has traditionally thought, YA fantasy literature is a didactic material as valid as any other. Its rich stories and the flexibility of the genre make it a useful tool not only for teaching literature but also for any other subject area. Moreover, because of the high level of motivation that these books rouse in young readers, they become involved in collaborative processes of artistic creation which in themselves have great educational potential and, if allowed, these processes can work as innovative class elements that connect with 21^st century youngsters’ tastes and interests.

Alberto Bolaños Montealegre

Notes

(*) The online platform NaNoWriMo is described on its webpage as “a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to creative writing” in which “On November 1, participants begin working towards the goal of writing a 50,000-word novel by 11:59 PM on November 30.” Despite the possible difficulty of the challenge, the fact is that this initiative has had a warm reception on the Internet. In fact, there are already some interesting novels published as a consequence of this project, like “Fangirl” by Rainbow Rowell or “Cinder” by Marissa Meyer in the field of juvenile literature.

References

- Jenkins, H. (2009) Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21^st century. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London: The MIT Press. Available from: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/confronting-challenges-participatory-culture (Last accessed 9^th January 2016)

- Borah, R. S. (2002) “Apprentice Wizards Welcome: Fan communities and the Culture of Harry Potter”. In: Whited, L. A. (ed.) The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter: Perspectives on a Literary Phenomenon. Columbia; London: University of Missouri Press.

- Lluch, G. y Acosta, M. (2012) “Conversaciones sobre lecturas en la web 2.0: El caso de Laura Gallego (Análisis de conversaciones virtuales entre adolescentes)”. En: Lecturas para el nuevo siglo: formación receptora y lector hipertextual. La Laguna: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de La Laguna.

- Reynolds, K. (2007) Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

 

Young adult fantasy literature… in the classroom? (1st part)

 

   Promotional artwork of the videogame Final Fantasy Tactics A2 developed by Square-Enix.

For this entry we are pleased to welcome a two-part contribution from Alberto Bolaños Montealegre. Alberto is a former student of the MEd in Children’s Literature and Literacies at the University of Glasgow and his entry is based on his Master’s dissertation for this Programme. Given his thoughtful research on YA fantasy books and the potential they have in the classroom, as well as his particular enthusiasm for Laura Gallego’s series, Memorias de Idhún, we felt sure that his ideas would be of interest and benefit for many of our readers and especially those who work with young people and reading.

Alberto Bolaños Montealegre specializes in second-language teaching and most of his career has developed in this field. However, his childhood interest in fantasy literature led him to explore YA fantasy books in the classroom in his masters’ dissertation. Currently, he works as a primary English teacher for the Department of Education of the Government of Castile-La Mancha (Spain).

In the entry of this blog entitled “Back to school and back to the same old issues with reading?” (Arizpe, E. and Guerrero, L., September 4, 2015) Evelyn and Laura emphasized how important it is to give a twist to literary education in school. It is true that the teaching of the classics is a fundamental part of the area of literature but it is also important to remember the interests and the tastes of 21^st century youngsters. In my opinion, our task as educators and mediators of children’s and teenagers’ books is to find texts that can connect with our students; reflect their concerns and trap them in such a way that reading becomes the door to other texts.

That was precisely the idea that motivated me to write my Master’s thesis “The Educational Potential of Young Adult Fantasy Literature: The case of Memorias de Idhún by Laura Gallego García”. In this dissertation I tried to approach the fantasy genre, a literary genre which is usually ignored in schools, from a classroom practice perspective through the case of the trilogy Memorias de Idhún [Memories of Idhún], a saga which perfectly exemplifies the characteristics of both “fantasy” and “YA literature”. In this entry I am going to summarize the main conclusions of my work.

It is a fact that fantasy literature has never managed to find its place in school curricula. Educators and academics alike have frequently shared certain reticence toward this type of books by considering them “not-serious” or “low-quality” literature. Yet, fantasy literature and, particularly, its juvenile branch, have certain characteristics that make them a very useful educational resource, a situation which contrasts with the mistrust shared by the educational community. I will now build my analysis of YA fantasy from an educational point of view by trying to answer these two questions: Why should we include YA fantasy books in schools? Is it possible to include them into the classroom practice in a way that is coherent with curriculum planning?

Firstly, a simple but powerful reason to include these books in the class is that teenagers like this type of readings and we have research that confirms it: Smith (2012, pp. 20-21) comments that more than a half of the 25 most read books by the American teenagers in 2011 belonged to the categories of either fantasy or science fiction. Research carried out in Spain in 2013 points in the same direction (Federación de Gremios de Editores de España, 2013).

A second reason is how easy it is for fantasy stories not only to deal with tough and complex topics which concern teenagers (such as identity or parental absence) but also to situate them in a place far from our environment, a fantasy place, where it is easier to talk about these topics. In Colleen-Cruz and Pollock’s words (2014): “when children [I think it can also be applied to teenagers] read about a fantastical world, far removed from their real lives, it is much safer to think about issues of loss, betrayal, and change” (p. 185). In describing their own classroom practice, Colleen-Cruz and Pollock (2004) tell us how reading fantasy books led their students to develop interesting discussions about the nature of evil or death. Therefore, it is worth taking into account the potential of these books to create scenarios for debate in class, to address issues and the anxieties of our students or even to work with philosophical ideas or concepts.

In terms of how to include YA fantasy in the classroom practice, it is important to point out that fantasy is an especially heterogeneous, flexible and diverse genre and, for this reason, these texts offer a plethora of possibilities in the classroom. For example, in the area of language and literature, apart from the traditional teaching for literary analysis, these stories might be a useful resource to make connections to folklore and the oral tradition, given how deeply fantasy is rooted in them. Beyond literary education, YA fantasy books also offer many possibilities in other curricular areas such as geography and cartography (1) or audiovisual education (2), to name but a few (3).

All in all, YA fantasy books can perfectly fulfill the role of a didactic tool. Most of  students like it, they identify with the narratives and, moreover, these texts provide good material for working with different curricular aspects in a different and attractive way. However, the educational potential of YA fantasy books does not only lie in the stories they tell. In the second part of this article (next blog entry), I will look in more depth into some of the educational possibilities that these books offer beyond the book itself.

Notes

(1) See Sundmark (2014), an original classroom project proposal in which creative writing is developed together with cartographic concepts using maps of fantasy books.

(2) We can use these books, for instance, to treat concepts such as “transmediation” or to work competences related to “multimodal literacy” given that many of them end up having adaptations in other media such as cinema, graphic novels or videogames. See Soler Pardo, B. and Martín Marchante, B. (2014) for a classroom project proposal using both fantasy literature and cinema.

(3) YA fantasy can be integrated in the classroom in thousand different ways. If anyone is interested in checking out some different examples (among many others) of how to do it, I encourage to look up my Master’s thesis in my profile for the network “Academia.edu”.

References

- Arizpe, E. and Guerrero, L. (2015) “Back to school and back to the same old issues with reading?” Reading Changes: Adolescents, Young Adult Literature and Literacy Practices in Mexico. Available from: http://readingchanges.blogspot.com.es/2015/09/back-to-school-and-back-to-same-old.html (Last accessed 9th January 2016)

- Colleen-Cruz and Pollock (2004) “Stepping into the Wardrobe: A Fantasy Genre Study”. Language Arts, 81(3), pp. 184-195.

- Federación de Gremios de Editores de España (2013) Hábitos de Lectura y Compra de Libros en España. Alcalá de Henares: FGEE. Available from: http://www.editoresmadrid.org/media/43692/h%C3%A1bitos%20lectura%20a%C3%B1o%202012.pdf (Last accessed 9^th January 2016)

- Soler Pardo, B. y Martín Marchante, B. (2014) “White as Snow, Red as Blood, Black as Ebony…: Employing film adaptations of the Brothers Grimm Snow White as a Didactic Tool for Learning EFL”. In: Reyes-Torres, R. et al. (eds.) Thinking through Children’s Literature in the Classroom. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

- Smith, D. (2012) Bringing Fantasy and Science Fiction into the Classroom. The ALAN Review, 39(2), pp. 19-24.

- Sundmark, B. (2014) “‘Dragons Be Here’: Teaching Children’s literature and creative writing with the help of maps”. In: Reyes-Torres, R. et al. (eds.) Thinking through Children’s Literature in the Classroom. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

 

Reading surveys: Is the glass half empty or half full?

 

The anxieties about reading in general and about young people reading in particular manifest themselves in the amount of recent national surveys and studies on the theme and have intensified at the same time as –and probably as a result of- the so called “boom” in young adult literature as well as new technologies that encourage multimodal reading. As Roberto Igarza writes about the evolution of reading and writing practices: ‘The interest in enquiring about this growing complexity invites us to continue to renovate known forms of measuring reading and writing. Never before has measuring reader behaviour been so plural, open and challenging’ (2015: 15 EA translation). Literature and literacy practices have always been subject to cultural, social and economic processes of transformation; what is new is the accelerated rhythm of these processes and the rapidity of change. From one moment to the next they dazzle us and then urge us to keep up, whether we are parents, teachers, mediators or researchers. Fortunately, digital technologies also allow us to gather and analyse data with new methods and populations, to publish and exchange information in ways that facilitate access to a wealth of data and information as never before.

In the recent holidays, I took a few days to read the results of some of the surveys and other publications in Spanish that appeared towards the end of 2015. This text does not intend to be a complete synthesis nor a comparison between countries – that would require an analysis far beyond the possibilities of a blog entry. Rather, this is a reflection about what seem to me to be the coincidences, changes and some of the most significant results in terms of reading and young people’s practices, based mainly on documents from Mexico, Chile and Spain. I also refer to a few other documents that may be useful for readers of this blog (see references).

The surveys on reading tend to include similar topics, for example, questions persist about the quantity of books and of time invested in reading but they now include more and more questions about reading on screen and the survey by IBBY Mexico/A leer and Banamex is the first dedicated to this theme. There is also evidently a new interest in the reading of images generally (on paper or on screen) and in the activities related to computing and the internet, particularly those initiated by young people themselves.

As in all empirical, quantitative research, the responses can be interpreted in either a more negative or a more positive light, as in the case of the proverbial half-empty or half-full glass of water. For example, according to the numbers reported by the ENL (National Reading Survey), in Mexico an average of 5.3 books are read per person per year, which positions that country in second place in Latin America (only just below Chile, with its 5.4 average) but if we consider that the average in Spain is 10.3 (not to mention Finland, with 47), there is little to celebrate; also considering the fact that 60% of the surveyed Mexican population did not buy a single book in the past year and that 45% has not been to a library for more than a year. There are also big differences in the quantity of books (not including textbooks) in the home (in Mexico 40.1, in Spain 201). The access to libraries and bookshops is unequal and books are increasingly expensive and not everything can be downloaded cheaply (or illegally).

In terms of the numbers that interest us most, in general they do seem positive (as we noted in the entry for 1^st May 2015): young people do read. The ENL identified four reading profiles, one of which reported an interest in all types of reading and is mostly comprised by young people (between 12 and 21 years old) called “Diversified reader with a preference for books and comics”. The IBBY-Mexico survey supports this finding and also reported that young people read due to personal initiative more than due to obligation; that they frequent libraries and that 7 out of 10 invested in printed books in the year before the survey. Both surveys indicated more time invested in reading and writing due to text messages and other digital practices; a greater capacity for choice and a wide repertoire of visual and media texts.

These results are similar to those that have been reported from Chile and Spain, where the younger population reads the most and combines reading with a variety of social and digital practices. From the perspective of the “half-empty” glass, however, we must note that the majority of the contents consulted and written are brief and ephemeral and that the reading is done very quickly and therefore there may be less comprehension and reflection.

Some coincidences seem obvious, such as the reasons for not reading (lack of time, apathy or boredom) and the reasons for reading (pleasure, entertainment, for information and for study) or the ways in which schools seems to ignore current practices. In this sense, nothing much has changed in the last 25 years. However, what has changed and is evident in the survey data is the impact of the global publishing market and massive communications media. We can see this, for example, in the proliferation of young adult books. However, the coincidence of book titles mentioned is worrying (in Mexico, 20 books represented nearly 20% of the total of responses) given they indicate little variety, perhaps due to lack of knowledge or access or due to fashion and publicity (for example, the influence of films of the book) and the persistent didactic/sentimental traits.

In terms of reading on screen, on one hand, the increase reflected in the surveys carried the benefits of access to information, participation and even book reading, but on the other hand, the access to digital media continues to depend on a certain level of economic resources and schooling and also on geographic context (it is much higher in urban areas). The regional and international average of access to internet also continues to be very unequal. It is worrying that the economic and social breach continues to determine reading levels. No matter how much young people can access with their mobile phones, the technology at home and a school (private or public) is not the same.

But, as Marco Antonio Coloma writes about Chilean reading surveys ‘… numbers are not enough. It is also necessary to advance in qualitative dimensions, un sociological and anthropological approaches to the phenomenon of reading, that will tell us from other perspectives how readers have changed (…) and how their form of reading has been altered’ (Coloma 2015: 109 EA translation). The surveys bring us closer to the contemporary young reader but the numbers must be interpreted carefully and the next challenge is to share and put this information at the service of young people themselves and think ‘how reading and writing practices can be enriched and expanded in their plural and multiple forms, in the supports and modes in which they are produced today…’ (Dussell 2015: 142 EA translation). With the help of authors, illustrators, editors, teachers, reading promoters, librarians and researchers we can imagine what we want responses to future surveys to look like so as to ensure that the glass is full for everyone.

References

Coloma, M. A. (nd) Medir la lectura: ¿para qué sirven las cifras? Actas del II Seminario Internacional ¿Qué leer? ¿Cómo leer? Lecturas de Juventud. Ministerio de Educación, República de Chile.

Dussel, I. (2015) Una mirada a los resultados de la ENL 2015 desde la acción de la escuela y la cultura digital. En Encuesta Nacional de Lectura pp 134-142.

Eliessetch, K. (nd) Los jóvenes según las encuestas. Actas del II Seminario Internacional ¿Qué leer? ¿Cómo leer? Lecturas de Juventud. Ministerio de Educación, República de Chile.

 (ENL) Encuesta nacional de lectura y escritura 2015-2018. Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, Dirección General de Publicaciones, México D.F.

(FGEE) Federación de Gremios de Editores de España (2012). Hábitos de lectura y compra de libros en España 2012. Madrid: Federación de Gremios de Editores de España.

IBBY México/A leer and BANAMEX. (2015) Primera Encuesta Nacional sobre Consumo de Medios Digitales y Lectura.

Igarza, R. (2015) El desafío de poner en perspectiva el comportamiento de los lectores en México.  In Encuesta Nacional de Lectura pp 4-15.

Picton, I. (2014) The Impact of Ebooks on the Reading Motivation and Reading Skills of Children and Young People: A rapid literature review, London: National Literacy Trust.

Primer Estudio de Comportamiento Lector (2011). Consejo Nacional de la Cultura y las Artes, Centro de Microdatos, Facultad de Economía y Negocios de la Universidad de Chile.

 

 

Reading political reality through images of the supernatural

Image from Justicia Divina by Francisco Haghenbeck, Universidad Iberoamericana, 2013

 

This blog entry is a contribution from Carolina González, a doctoral student at the Universidad Iberoamericana (Mexico City) who is working on graphic novels and who worked as a research assistant on the Reading Changes project. At the moment, she is a visiting doctoral student at the University of Glasgow and has recently presented a paper on the politics and historical memory in the Comics Forum at the Leeds' Comic Art Festival 2015 in England.

The students who participated in the project Reading Changes had the opportunity to read the graphic novel Justicia divina by Francisco Haghenbeck (Universidad Iberoamericana, 2013) which tells the story of a young man who investigates and resolves -like John Constantine, the hero of the comic book Hellblazer-  the problems caused by supernatural characters, such as ghosts and vampires, around Mexico (see blog entry from 13^th October 2014). In this entry, we refer to the way in which the reading of this text resulted in readers responses both about the reading of images but also about the political reality of Mexico.

From the moment we introduced the book, it engaged the students through its images. “It catches my attention because of its illustrations, it’s like we were attracted to reading it. Like it says to us: come, read me, try to figure me out or something like that" -one of the participants remarked. Their first impressions of Justicia divina focused on the enigmatic and mysterious qualities of the images, and because of their increasing curiosity, young readers began to speculate about the possible meaning of the images and to launch hypotheses about their relationship with the story:

Josué: It’s like about a mystery and that stuff […] because it shows a detective, you know, his look shows he is like searching for something, no?

Raul: It could be justice…

Luisa: It looks like it’s about ghosts, no?

Ricardo: Maybe it’s about people who don’t rest in peace, no? Something like that.

As we went through the book, we noted some of the ways in which they changed their approach to the text. Although some of them read comics, none of them had had access to graphic novels like this one, where the image takes on a central role. Accustomed to books where the written word prevails, the students had to develop a different reading strategy in which they had to examine the meaning of both words and images.

Reading Justicia divina also transformed their previous ideas about comics, as another participant mentioned:

I didn’t usually read comics, but I think this book changed my whole idea about them, the way I think about comics, and well, yes, I really really liked it. More than anything, I was attracted by the language in which he spoke and all they explained, because in a funny way it makes the reader understand many things.

The students performed a special kind of reading where they were not limited to examining the words apart from the images; they understood the particular use of language in the graphic novel. They saw the synergy between the visual image and the written word and succeeded in establishing the connections of meaning generated by this relationship. As they entered the graphic novel they were enveloped in the mysterious but agile atmosphere of the detective fiction. As one of participants said: “It was very interesting and I was completely captured”.

It is important to emphasize that from the beginning, the young readers focused on the connotative qualities of the images and they tried to figure their possible meanings. Even in the first approach, the students went beyond the literal and the descriptive and established connections and create allusions to films, books and other cultural references, for example: “It really reminds a movie I saw, Angels and Demons, I think it's called. And he is looking for ghosts at old houses; he is looking for the Chupacabras and so, as Mexico used to be and all of that”. Or: “It reminds me a film called, I think, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice [ ... ] A book called Circle of Blood.

The referential links established by the readers allowed them to place Justicia divina in a cultural context but even more revealing was the interpretation process through the association of the book with their lives and the Mexican political reality. One of the comments of the participants was particularly illuminating in this sense: “It is more fantasy than reality. Reality gets into fantasy. In Justicia divina fantasy gets into reality”. Although, this graphic novel could be described, on one level, as a story of horror; through irony, the author critiques the current political reality of Mexico. It should be noted that the students arrived at these notions by themselves. They were able to pick up on the subtleties of language and understand the satirical meaning of the complex political situation, charged with black humour, which is described in the book.

When they realized that the characters, such as the ghosts, that are conventionally used to cause fear, were used to provoke humour, the readers reacted to that fear in a different way and connected it to their social reality:

Andrea: “At the beginning, you think that the monsters like La Llorona [the Banshee or Wailing Woman] and those are going to be frightening but instead of being frightening, they make you laugh”.

Fernanda: “The things that worry us now are different, and we are not worried any longer if we come across La Llorona, ah, we would just say hello, wouldn’t we?  But if we find bad people, that’s something awful”.

Through reading Justicia divina, the students also established a link between the types of fear and their everyday life, as Ernesto said:

Because nowadays people have new fears, now they have new fears. They are no longer afraid of ghosts, El Coco [the Bogeyman], La Llorona. They are more scared of assaults, drug trafficking, the police […] because of the corruption in the country. That’s why they are so afraid; they have their own fears apart from those they once had. Now is different, ghost stories no longer attract them.

While the author uses elements from the horror and detective genres, such as the presence of the mysterious and the supernatural, these are redefined by being placed in a plausible and contemporary context through a fictional mechanism in which new nightmares are combined with the past fears but provided with a realism that makes them even more terrifying. This narrative strategy was recognized by the readers who revealed their political conscience and their level of knowledge about the social conditions of their country and reacted with humor: “In this book, the part that made ​​me laugh was when the Coco attacks the mafia’s guy”.

When we delved deeper into notions about fear and asked them what a ghost has to do today to be scary, the students answered:

Claudia: Many things ... I can’t say what, because, well, the things that are happening in the country are more frightening than…

Sandra: They should become ghosts drug traffickers.

Louise: That would be good, to see La Llorona as a drug trafficker!

Although Haghenbeck uses descriptions of the life, the geography and the people of Mexico, especially of Mexico City, to insert all sorts of apparitions in the graphic novel, the author creates a clear image of the present that the young readers were able to notice and even to satirize.

The supernatural events narrated in Justicia divina introduced the readers to a game in which the boundaries between reality and fiction are disrupted but in which they found a space to change their expectations about reading a graphic novel and to express themselves as conscious subjects of their political and social reality. Despite the disturbing reality that is represented in this graphic novel, they agreed: “It’s cool because it’s the context we live in”.

[This blog will return in 2016. Best wishes for the holiday season to all our readers!]