Graphically Speaking Course at TCHS

Returning from Covid lockdowns, Trenton Central High School launched an initiative to revamp their humanities elective courses to increase student participation, engagement, and literacy skills with new courses like "Monsters in Literature," Hip-Hop & Poetry," "History of Sports," and more. Graphically Speaking was a course created during this initiative that was designed to use curriculum built entirely around comic books, graphic novels, & manga exclusively as the teaching resources. Students read and analyze contemporary and classic stories and create unique work reflecting an array of themes and topics across civics, ELA, history, and social-emotional learning standards, goals, and expectations. Students have not only shown increased academic proficiency and literacy development from the course, even using some work from the course for successful college sample submissions, but have demonstrated increased empathy and generated correlated work that has helped explore their own identities and evolving perceptions of the world around them with an eye to their futures. We continue to strive to incorporate new resources and texts from year-to-year, keeping the course fresh and continually evolving with a deepening class library for group and independent reading, and develop new projects and goals for students to dig into and explore new concepts while reinforcing interdisciplinary state learning standards across multiple subjects and topics.