Graphic Novels and the Quest for Empathy

Editors’ note: This year at Her Voice, our framing question is about our humanity at this moment: What does it mean to be a human right now? How can we hold on to our humanity as teachers and students? And really, as Caitlin Rathe asked, “How can [we] be better human[s]?” One of those answers emerges in our work with students on the writing process–to engage in this process is at its core a reminder of one’s own (messy, disruptive, ongoing) humanity. In today’s post, though, teacher Meghan MacClellan offers us an adjacent answer: a reminder of how the reading process develops empathy, that essential quality to being a good human. In reassessing her own understanding of graphic novels, Meghan recognized yet another pathway into supporting students on their own journeys to being even better humans. Her piece also raises additional questions for future posts about how we might use texts like graphic novels to help students better resist the temptations of AI.

Let me start with two confessions. 

Confession #1: I am a judgmental book snob. I love a good jaunt with a classic novel of ~intellectual merit~ and challenging prose. My vote for high school summer reading additions includes texts from Jane Austen to Jane Eyre. I believe strongly that there is benefit in the struggle of reading challenging texts. It builds character… and vocabulary and analytical skills and critical thinking... 

Confession #2: This past year, one of my more judgmental reading opinions was changed. And thank goodness for that.

(Sneaky surprise confession #3: Dear reader, I hope that I am able to change your mind too.)

The final unit of the freshman English I curriculum this past year was the much anticipated Book Club project, a unit where they each selected a graphic memoir and were partnered up with other students who picked the same book to conduct their own novel study and discussions. Within each group, they composed a list of guidelines, set their own reading schedule, and had daily check-ins and discussions. Truly, these book clubs functioned much more successfully than other “grown up” book clubs I had been a part of–for the most part, they all actually read the book! The students cracked open a variety of graphic memoirs, and for many, this was the first time they had ever read a graphic novel. (Hopefully for none this was the first memoir they have read, as their summer reading was a memoir.) The lineup was: Maus by Art Spiegelman, Almost American Girl by Robin Ha, They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, We Are Not Strangers by Josh Tuininga, and When Stars Are Scattered by Omar Mohamed.

After a year of traditional novels and memoirs, this was a book of a different color (well, many different colors really). We had spent the several months prior honing the skills of text annotation, reading comprehension, literary analysis, and more, all heavily text dependent and featuring more “traditional” texts, from The Secret Life of Bees to Shakespeare. Graphic novels, though, introduce a whole new set of analytical opportunities. The learning curve in the transition from traditional texts to graphic novels can be pretty steep: tracking the order of panels and dialogue can be confusing; inferring details from visuals instead of words can be confusing; learning how to “cite” the illustrations can be, you guessed it, confusing!

So why would we release the students into the wilds of independent(ish) graphic memoir book clubs? Is it simply because we had only a few short weeks’ worth of class time available to this project and graphic novels are shorter than the classic 888 pager, Little Women?

Nope.

Or rather, is it because the students were burnt out on reading by this time of the year and this was the only thing we can get them to actually pick up and complete?

Also, no.

I must admit, I was skeptical at the beginning of the year when a colleague suggested a graphic novel book club. I had read one singular graphic novel before in my whole life (and it was the previous year, a few weeks before teaching Persepolis in English II…). I thought this project would not present enough of a challenge to our students and might even be a little silly or childish. I braced myself for superheroes and onomatopoeia. When I attended the National Council of Teachers of English conference this fall, I dutifully signed up for a session about graphic novels titled “I Can See It Now: Incorporating Graphic Novels into Humanizing Pedagogies” and prepared to take notes and be bored. 

Instead, what I learned pretty immediately flipped the switch on my opinion about graphic novels.

In conjunction with written text, graphic novels, by nature, incorporate visual rhetoric into every panel; these pages are doubly and triply rich in author choices. Even though much of the information input they receive on a daily basis is in the form of images and videos, for a freshman, it can be challenging to consciously infer information from this onslaught of visual details. But, one of the proposed benefits of these novels may not actually be the unpacking and deduction of every single tiny detail. To put it simply, the graphic novel equation is: Words+Images = Story. The words are more conceptual, while the images are much more sensory. And herein lies the trick–when the two are used together, a reader can much more readily employ empathy. 

Students explore their internal conflicts through graphic novels

Before I go on, some background about the English I curriculum. All year, we discuss and study a unifying course question: Why read someone else’s story? (Being able to answer this question justifies every English class ever, right?) During each text, we reflect on who makes up your community and the impact that can have. We journal about what our own stories are, and the events and people that shape those stories. We talk a LOT about empathy, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as the ability to imagine and understand the thoughts, perspective, and emotions of another person. In 2006, then Senator Obama offered a more direct, practical understanding of empathy in a now viral Northwestern University commencement address: 

“There's a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit–the ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes; to see the world through those who are different from us–the child who's hungry, the laid-off steelworker, the immigrant woman cleaning your dorm room. As you go on in life, cultivating this quality of empathy will become harder, not easier. There's no community service requirement in the real world; no one forcing you to care. You'll be free to live in neighborhoods with people who are exactly like yourself, and send your kids to the same schools, and narrow your concerns to what's going on in your own little circle. Not only that–we live in a culture that discourages empathy. A culture that too often tells us our principal goal in life is to be rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained. A culture where those in power too often encourage these selfish impulses.”

This was nearly twenty years ago, and studies indicate that that aforementioned deficit has only increased, while “otherness” and looking out for only your nuclear community has increased.

Having empathy is partially a developmental factor. In this study, taken from the National Institutes of Health, several psychiatrists studied empathic abilities in adolescents versus adults. Adolescents consistently show much lower empathetic brain activity than adults. Having empathy is not only dependent on this developmental step however; we can participate in cultivating the practice and response. 

So, how might  graphic memoirs help to build and strengthen authentic empathy?

In order to have empathy for another person, you must first acknowledge that they exist. 

There is a sensory permanency in visual narratives that makes it harder to erase identities that are different than your own. It is so easy, when reading a traditional novel, to imagine that the characters look like you. After all, that is the face that you see the most! In a graphic novel, it is almost impossible to erase the visual identities of the characters using your imagination- they are right in front of your eyes. Their race, gender, weight, sexuality, class, hair, clothes, “coolness,” etc., are all on the page and hard to deny. You can’t simply imagine a character that is more comfortable for you. These character details are explicitly a part of the text, canon. 

More student work!

Again, to have true empathy for somebody, you must first acknowledge they exist AND also that they exist in their own, fully unique, authentic way. Empathy is not empathy if you only seek to understand the feelings and experiences of characters who look like you, or who you have white-washed, pretty-fied, or cool-ified in your mind. Imagining every character in a novel as one of the immaculately manicured, perfectly clear-skinned, bedazzled Upper East Side teens of Gossip Girl fame doesn’t exactly cultivate empathy for real, flawed, complex human beings. Seeing diverse representation in these illustrations cultivates that real empathy and consequently builds a space where learning, reasoning, questioning, and thinking can be done with empathy as an understood undercurrent to it all.

This understanding is not only limited to really seeing the characters either. Before we started reading, my students and I discussed why many fantasy novels are so, so long. Good ole George RR Martin really does have to use that many words. Why? Because most people have never, not even once in their life, seen a dragon. Fantasy writers rely on words for world building, and when the world being built is far outside of the realm of the real world, they have to use many many words. The more details they write, the more able their audience is to imagine something they have never seen before. World building is not exclusively a fantasy genre specific task. Just think of Moby Dick. The descriptions of whales are so detailed because, at the time of publication, most people had never seen a gigantic ocean creature and, believe it or not, were not able to simply google a picture for scale. 

For freshman girls, many who are growing up in the suburbs, a refugee camp may not be something they have ever seen before. They have no visual reference for what gas chambers in Auschwitz looked like, or even more simply what people look and dress like in different times and different countries. The illustrations in these novels allow the author to share their real experiences in shorthand. Readers can see exactly the conditions of the story without having to read 100+ pages about whaling or the Parisian sewer systems. More than one student reported that she had no idea that Japanese Americans were incarcerated during WWII or that there are still places on Earth where people have to live in tents. I share this not to expose or embarrass these students, but to report that some really lovely and fruitful conversations came out of being exposed to things that they otherwise had no reason to know about in their lives. The girls earnestly reflected on just how fortunate they are, and how reading these books made them want to learn more about hardships that others have endured so that they can help. In our school that does require service hours and whose motto is literally ‘I will serve,’ knowing what others are experiencing, being able to empathize, and cultivating activism seem like pretty worthy goals. How would you be able to authentically serve others if you have no inkling of their needs? 

Graphic novel book club

So, while more often than not, I would still turn to a traditional novel over a graphic novel, it is hard to deny the benefits that can come from the latter. These books are simply a different category of learning than trying to decipher the sentence structure and puns of Shakespeare, or follow the long passages of Jane Eyre. But that does not mean that these benefits are of lesser importance. Grammar AND empathy are both skills that need developing–especially when growing the whole human person. It is a beautiful (and necessary!) gift to be able to understand another human being’s experience and hear their perspective, and, in graphic novels, we have a colorful and illustrated tool to cultivate that ability. And frankly, if you are not able to empathize, reading Shakespeare and Brontë gets a whole lot harder.

Meghan MacLellan is currently enjoying a Spooky Season Book Club read, Practical Magic, and hoping the pumpkins in her garden grow in time for Halloween!