Classroom Comics: A Five-part Narrative Recounting a Teacher Action Research Study Using Comics to Teach Academic Vocabulary in the Middle Grades

A series of five, serially produced, self-published comic books presents the genesis, execution, and subsequent analysis and discussion of a teacher action-research study using the multimodal affordance of comics in a formal, qualitative research study designed to teach highly-valued, state-tested academic vocabulary words to 8th grade middle school students in an urban K-8 setting, where 96 percent of the population was eligible for free and reduced-price lunch, and 80 percent of the school population were children of color. Building upon a socio-cultural view of literacy the author/researcher employs the narrative affordance of the comics medium ironically -- to demonstrate the autobiographical, self-reflexive, action research method, to illustrate the efficacy of comics in teaching and learning, and polemically to suggest the rational harnessing and employment of children’s out-of-school, multimodal technoliteracies in the modern, middle school classroom