When Young Writers Draw Their Voices: Creating Hybrid Comic Memoirs with The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
When Young Writers Draw Their Voices: Creating Hybrid Comic Memoirs with The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
This chapter attempts to illuminate the value of comics by focusing on one ninth-grade student's response to Sherman Alexie's hybrid text, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. The potential appeal of the text to young adults prompted coauthor and high school English teacher Rebecca Rupert, or Becky, as her students called her, to select Alexie's text for use in her classroom. After reading True Diary, she invited students to write coming-of-age memoirs consisting of three prose vignettes accompanied by three comics that elaborated on them. It is argued that while using True Diary and the hybrid comics medium in the classroom, Becky's students were able to gain voice, signify vulnerability, and convey nuanced understandings of distressing and emotionally charged topics in their lives-elements that were not conveyed in other course work or even in the prose vignette memoirs.
Keywords: comics, graphic novels, children's literature, Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
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