Panel from "Heat Wave," by Juliette Boutant and Thomas Mathieu. Translated by Edward Gauvin, published in February 2020 issue of Words Without Borders as part of a series entitled "Crocodiles Are Everywhere."
Students in Washington College’s Children’s and Young Adult Literature class are there because they enjoy reading, they want to write, or they want to teach about literature for younger readers. This year’s class contains seventeen students from a variety of majors, but mostly studying English, elementary education, or secondary English education; more than half intend to teach. These students recently applied what they had been learning about reading literature with pictures to analyze the international graphic works recommended in the WWB Campus blog post “Global Graphic Lit to Fire Up Your Students This Winter,” which caught my eye just as I was about to introduce illustrated texts to the class.
"Have you ever had the feeling that even if you wanted to you'd never blend in?" This is the question that launches the graphic fiction story "Gay Giant," just published in the 11th annual Queer issue of the magazine Words Without Borders.
Mexican American scholar and author Gloria Anzaldua. By K. Kendall. CC by 2.0 license.
At our June 1st #LunchGlobally session, during the first wave of protests against police racism, our group spontaneously brainstormed a list of books, films, and organizations to help students make sense of the issues. Because we were reading Marco Avilés' powerful essay “I Am Not Your Cholo," many (but not all) of these resources depicted Latinx experiences -- an important and sometimes under-discussed element in the discussion of biased law enforcement.
