In our current globalised learning landscape communication is increasingly multimedia, and visual in particular. In an attempt to embrace the ‘multiple literacies’ through which contemporary school children express themselves and interact with each other, curriculum designers and teachers employ a range of media texts usually associated with students’ lives outside the classroom.One obvious example of such a text is comics; in countries such as France and Japan their use in school is wide-spread, and despite their more marginal status in the Anglo-American context, they are increasingly being championed in the U.S. and U.K. The rise of the graphic novel and a publishing industry of adaptations of classic literary texts have meant that what was once popular in primary school classrooms is now being employed within the secondary school context as well. The claims being made for the usefulness of these texts is overwhelmingly linked to notions of literacy.

This paper aims to question and explore the currently held belief, manifested in both practice and policy, that comics and graphic novels are useful tools for enhancing the literacy skills of less able pupils. Claims about the transfer of literacy skills from one text or context to another are complicated when literacy is considered as social practice dependent on the institutional and cultural spaces within which it takes place. The research is presented within the framework of the New Literacy Studies and its focus on ‘practices’ and ‘events’ (Heath, Street, Barton and Hamilton) but, more specifically, uses the framework developed by researchers working on the Literacies for Learning in Further Education project conducted recently in the United Kingdom (Ivaniĉ, Edwards, Barton et al.). This framework allows a more detailed exploration of ‘events’ by unpacking the fine-grained aspects that compose a literacy practice. Notions of ‘domain’ and ‘border practice’ (Gee) are also refined into concepts such as ‘bordering work’ and ‘resonance’ which allow for a more nuanced exploration of the pedagogic possibilities in employing traditional non-curricular texts and practices within curricular spaces. By considering in detail two Reading Group sessions (one early on in the year, one later) it aims to identify, trace and analyse the aspects of the emerging new practice of this Group.  In particular, it focuses on notions of identity (comic geek), process (non-linearity) and mode (multimodality) in considering whether or not, and indeed how, one can meaningfully employ the text (comics) and practices arising from the Group’s activities in delivering the official curriculum.

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