Comic Book Reader: An Autoethnographic Examination of Person and Pedagogy

This paper presentation draws on the author\u27s role as a literacy educator and personal identity as a reader to explore the nexus of literacy instruction, autoethnography, and visual storytelling. In particular, the author focuses on comic books and graphic novels (a range of texts that can be subsumed under the term “graphica”), and their function in both personal literacy development and in pedagogical work. This autoethnography features notes captured in the form of five comic book images constructed by the author to inform their teaching practice, and the role of autoethnography as a narrative process with cultural reflection stems from Chang\u27s (2008) implementation of term, as well as prior work uniting notions of self with cultural texts (Averett, 2009; McClung, 2018). This work has served as the foundation for further pedagogy and reflection using graphica and other visual texts to engage a range of students during the COVID-19 pandemic in online instruction, and further draws on the author’s prior research with multimodal texts (Kress, 2005) and visual ways of storytelling (Horn & Giacobbe, 2007)