archie comics: study by Norton

Sophia asked me for some information about the use of comics; I've copied the abstract for Dr. Norton's study on Archie Books below that I hope is useful,

Doug

UBC professor Bonny Norton has recently completed a study on pre-adolescents and how Archie comic books determine their identities. The classic comic series about smart blonde Betty and voluptuous, vixen Veronica and their constant struggle to win Archie’s heart is, Norton says, an example of the mixed messages young girls are faced with each day. But one thing Norton noticed in her research was that young girls don’t just absorb what they read. They are constantly debating, critiquing, talking and sharing.

"They engage with the comics, they challenge them," Norton explains, adding they are able to dissect these images but they still enjoy buying clothes and make-up. She was also impressed by the level of "healthy skepticism" that the girls had towards the comic books. There were some who felt Betty should act weak to gain Archie’s affections, but the majority of girls surveyed would rather be like Betty but with Veronica’s independence.

Do girls lose this perceptiveness once they reach adulthood? Wolf concluded, in The Beauty Myth, that "women are deeply affected by what their magazines tell them (or what they believe they tell them) because they are all most women have as a window on their own mass sensibility."

"I think we have to give women more credit for being able to be more critical of theses magazines and take [from them] what they want,"

But Norton disagrees. "I think we have to give women more credit for being able to be more critical of theses magazines and take [from them] what they want," she says.

Abstract

Archie comic readers and critical literacy Archie comics, which have been published for over fifty years, remain highly popular among pre-teen children in North America and beyond. Every month, sales of Archie comics exceed one million, and the Archie comic website attracts 13 - 14 million hits. This presentation reports on a study that seeks to better understand the ubiquitous Archie reader, and to determine if insights from Archie readers have educational significance. The theoretical framework of the study is informed by research in critical literacy, which includes insights from research on gender and popular culture. The study was conducted in an elementary school in Vancouver in 1998/1999 with 34 readers of Archie comics, 19 girls and 15 boys. Central questions were drawn from two pilot studies conducted with student teachers and Archie readers in 1997, in which the student teachers dismissed Archie comics as a waste of time, while the children embraced the comics with enthusiasm. A key aspect of the study involved analysis of a story in which Betty, in asserting her independence, loses Archie to her friend and rival, Veronica. The study suggests that the pleasure children derive from popular culture, in general, and Archie comics, in particular, is associated with a sense of ownership over text. It is this sense of ownership that gives children the confidence to engage with popular cultural forms energetically and critically. However, although the study provides much evidence to suggest that the "literate underlife" (Finders, 1997) of the children in the study was vibrant and social, such literacy practices received little recognition or validation by teachers or parents. The study found that the reading of chapter books, for example, was considered a much more productive activity than the reading of comic books. In the presentation I make the case that a child's engagement with what one student called "proper" books is mediated by unequal relations of power between teachers, the guardians of standards and grades, and less powerful students. In such a context, children have little ownership over text, and hence little pleasure in school-authorized literacy practices. As many of the students indicated, a school-authorized text is not supposed to be fun. The study found, in particular, that when children engage in critique of chapter books, their primary concern is to determine what kind of analysis teachers would consider appropriate, and what criticism would guarantee high grades and public praise. In discussions about popular culture, however, the sense of ownership provides for a different set of possibilities. For Archie comic readers, their goal in debating the merits of characters, events, and stories is not to second-guess other interpretations and critiques, but to draw on their own knowledge and experience to reflect, engage, and defend. The study suggests that educators need to better understand rather than dismiss those practices that students find engaging and meaningful, whether in or outside classrooms. Further, the study suggests that we need to better understand why educators are frequently dismissive of popular culture, in general, and Archie comics, more specifically. Why did the student teachers, for example, who themselves loved to read Archie comics as children, dismiss them as "garbage" once they reached adulthood? A number of explanations can be offered. Reading assessments, for one, encourage the use of particular kinds of texts, and teaching performance is frequently assessed with reference to student performance on these tests. Educational publishers, for another, may reap greater rewards when chapter books are ordered by the dozen, particularly when accompanied by teacher guides and homework sets. It may also be the case, however, that as we grow from childhood to adulthood, we lose touch with the central interests of young children, particularly of the popular cultural kind, and our ignorance turns to fear. In order to re-establish control, we retreat to the rituals and practices that are familiar in schooling, sometimes sacrificing a focus on learning and meaning making. I conclude the presentation with the following observations: Luke & Elkins (1998) have raised the question of what it will mean to be a reader and writer in the 21st century. They suggest that what is central is not a "tool kit" of methods, but an enhanced vision of the future of literacy. The written word, while still important, is only one of the many semiotic modes that children encounter in the different domains of their lives. As the New London Group (1996) has noted, the challenge for teachers is to reconceptualize classrooms as semiotic spaces in which children have the opportunity to construct meaning with a wide variety of multimodal texts, including visual, written, spoken, auditory, and performative texts. Further, Luke & Elkins (1998) are also suggesting, I believe, that we need to rethink what it means to be a student, a teacher, or a democratic citizen in the new millennium. The profound insights of feminist poststructuralism, as espoused by writers such as Weedon (1997), offer to both students and teachers different conceptions of identity from those that emerged in my study of Archie comic readers. As Norton (2000, 2001) suggests, the poststructuralist view that identity is multiple, a site of struggle, and subject to change may be highly productive for rethinking relationships between teachers, students, and wider sociocultural practices. With reference to Archie readers, for example, instead of thinking of Archie readers as "good readers" or "bad readers", teachers might explore the conditions under which students read Archie comics, what investments students have in the Archie world, and what identities are available to diverse readers of Archie stories. Within this framework, students would have the opportunity to explore apparently contradictory responses to Archie stories: why they admire the Archie world, but would not want to live in it; why they find Veronica both appealing and disturbing; why they want Betty to be assertive and to attract Archie at the same time. In sum, such theory might provide for the possibility that Archie comics can be enjoyed in the privacy of a bedroom, while simultaneously serving to help reclaim schools as sites of learning rather than sites of ritual. References Finders, M. (1997). Just girls: Hidden literacies and life in junior high. New York: Teachers College Press. Luke, A. & Elkins, J. (1998). Reinventing literacy in "New Times". Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. 42(1), 4-8. New London Group (1996). A pedagogy of social multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60 - 92. Norton, B. (2000). Identity and language learning: Gender, ethnicity and educational change. London: Longman/Pearson Education. Norton, B. (2001). When is a teen magazine not a teen magazine? Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 45(4), 296-299. Weedon, C. (1997). Feminist practice and poststructuralist theory. 2nd Edition. Oxford: Blackwell.