In her 2019 TED Talk, “What Reading Slowly Taught Me about Writing,” Jacqueline Woodson talks about slowing down when we read to appreciate stories. She says, “Sometimes we read to understand the future. Sometimes we read to understand the past. We read to get lost, to forget the hard times we’re living in, and we read to remember those who came before us, who lived through something harder.” When I teach educators about integrating primary sources and graphic novels into their teaching, I come back to this message and the need to slow down and engage with individual stories.
When I began reading graphic novels myself, I would read quickly, as I had been conditioned to do, moving fast around the page from text box to speech bubble, focusing only…
