Paneling “Matters” in Elementary Students' Graphic Narratives

Abstract

Abstract During a 10-week classroom-based study, 20 fourth grade students participated in a number of interdependent activities that focused on developing their visual meaning-making skills and competencies. As well as reading, responding in writing to and discussing a selection of picturebooks, graphic novels, and magazines, the students created graphic narratives as the culminating research activity. This article presents a multimodal social semiotics analysis of the paneling in five students' graphic narratives. Excerpts from the students' interviews about their compositions revealed how learning about the what, why, and how of graphic novel conventions affected the intentional designing of students' multimodal texts. Keywords: multimodal textselementaryqualitative researchgraphic novels