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GRAPHIC NOVELS
For the College Classroom


PRIMITIVE ARCHER MAGAZINE
Hunting Through
Medieval Literature

 
INTERDISCIPLINARY HUMANITIES
Peter Pan

CONTRIBUTOR
Graphic Novel Reporter

HORSE & RIDER MAGAZINE
A Whisper and a Prayer

CONFERENCE PAPER
The Masculine Mind
of Shakespeare's Women

COURSE CURRICULUM ARTICLE
Christine de Pizan

CONFERENCE PAPER
Nature to the Rescue in the
Hero(ine)'s Journey

CONFERENCE PAPER
Hostages in the Rose Garden

SEMINAR TOPIC
Murder Will Out

ABOUT Comics in the College Classroom

Why comics?

I teach intensive writing, or what was once called remediation, and those classes are filled with students who are uncomfortable with texts. They don’t want to read them and they don’t want to write them because they haven’t been successful with the written word. So when my students arrive for the first day of class with a graphic novel in hand, I know they think my class is going to be easy. And that is my goal. If students believe intensive reading and writing is going to be fairly painless, they will relax long enough to think critically about what is going on in the novel’s panels. Instead of parroting back written text, they’ll have to interpret the panels, and join the conversation taking placing within the panels of the graphic novel. What's more students expand their college-level vocabulary by finding visual definitions for words, and surprisingly, visual vocabulary seems to "stick," showing up properly used in student essays.

Creating their own graphic novels helps solve one of the biggest problems I see in beginning college writers—their tendency to say the same thing over and over and over again. It drives instructor's crazy. Building a graphic essay is a lesson in concision, using the minimum amount of words to get to the point quickly instead of wandering around for pages on some roundabout quest to seemingly annoy the instructor. Instead of pasting the same panels together, one next to another, students become textually precise and let their pictures do most of the talking.

For college level reading, assignment suggestions and more, click on >Graphic Novels for the College Classroom

ABOUT Doré Ripley

I have always loved historical fiction or books with an archaeological twist, sporting titles like Unsolved Mysteries of the Past or Historical Whodunits. So when I ran across the true life mystery surrounding the origins of Shakespeare's celebrated Globe theater it seemed a natural fit for a novel that explores how a woman could work within the masculine theater and society that produced Shakespeare.  I'm currently shopping The Player's Apprentice.

The climate where I grew up—the foggy hilltop corridor between the Pacific Coast and San Francisco Bay—created a need for sunny weekend trips. Some of the dreamy destinations an easy road trip from South City are the redwood trees and beaches of Santa Cruz, the rugged Sierra Nevada mountains, and Sonoma County's wine country.  In my twenties, I thought I'd give country living a try and spent seventeen years in Mendocino County, but returned to the Bay Area when my husband and I found a home that provided the best of both worlds on the morning side of Mt. Diablo.

After leaving the corporate world, I began a "career" as a returning student and started dabbling in the academic genre--a genre filled with nominalizations and long sentences requiring frequent dips into the Oxford English dictionary. But what I really wanted from graduate school was something my parents couldn't give me—a reading list, a reading list that led to William Shakespeare.   I eventually earned a Master's Degree in English and still write conference papers, delivering papers on subjects ranging from fairy tales to Renaissance literature. I enjoy writing for a wide variety of audiences including popular magazines, scholarly journals, and textbooks.

As a lecturer at California State University, East Bay and adjunct professor at Diablo Valley College, I teach critical reading and writing to a culturally diverse mix of college freshmen placed in a variety of thematic clusters that focus on literature and nonfiction texts.  If you're interested in some reading lists for the classroom and other general interests, including graphic novels and Shakespeare and his times, visit my MySpace page at www.myspace.com/read_think_write.

I enjoy writing, reading, riding, and travel, and currently live in Clayton, California, with my husband, Geoffrey, our two horses, two dogs, and five barn cats that are too spoiled to do their job.