Students Become Comic Book Author-Illustrators: Composing With Words and Images in a Fourth-Grade Comics Writers’ Workshop

The authors detail how one fourth-grade teacher implemented a comics writers’ workshop in the weeks that concluded the academic school year. Each phase of the comics writers’ workshop is described. Students interpreted and analyzed the words, images, and design features that compose published comics before constructing and publishing their own multimodal comics text. The authors show that multimodal literacies instruction recognizes the multiple ways in which students can represent and communicate their thinking, and they argue that multimodal literacies instruction should occur throughout the curriculum across the school year.