Objectives:

1) Academic Reinforcement: Children reinforce and improve their literacy skills through the arts by engaging in a fun, project-oriented, and creative process.

2) Social and Character Development: Children use the project as a pathway to personal understanding and cultural tolerance, which are illustrated by their own artistic creations and displayed in a variety of formats.

3) Community Building: Children spread positive messages to other children and adults in the community via the distribution of their work to community outlets such as schools, after-school programs, and community centers.

Process:

Step 1: Getting Creative
The Comic Book Project launches with activities designed to foster creativity and teamwork amongst students. Students create two- and four-panel mini-comic books related to superheroes and current events, and they begin to discuss the project's theme.

Step 2: Writing the Comic Book Manuscript
Children brainstorm, plot, sketch, and draft their comic books on an identified theme through the Manuscript Starter. This template encourages children to sketch their comic book panels as they plot the story. Doing so helps children conceptualize the final product, and it allows visual learners, struggling writers, and English language learners to rely on the pictorial aspect of comic books and to make a connection between what they write and what they draw.

Step 3: Creating the Comic Book
The planning of the manuscript leads to the Comic Book Canvas. This template provides children with blank comic book panels for the purpose of designing final comic book creations. Children draw the characters, write the dialogue, and color the backgrounds to produce a complete comic book. They also develop a cover for the comic book and provide a representative title.

Step 4: Displaying the Work
Every child who completes a comic book is featured on the website art gallery. People all over the world appreciate the children’s artistic creations—this is an incredible motivational tool! For district- or city-wide projects, a panel of experts selects children’s work to appear in a printed comic book that is distributed to schools across the nation. The children are listed as the creators, and the participating schools are featured with each selection. Finally, the children's achievements are featured in public art exhibitions and an awards ceremony.

Step 5: Project Analysis
You can read a PDF summary of our initial pilot program at the Harvard Family Research Project. The results were also published in two peer-reviewed journals:

Bitz, M. (2004). The Comic Book Project: Forging Alternative Pathways to Literacy. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 47 (7), 574-588.

Bitz, M. (2004). The Comic Book Project: The Lives of Urban Youth. Art Education, 57 (2), 33-39.

You can read an analysis and synthesis of our national launch titled The Art of Democracy-Democracy as Art: Creative Learning in Afterschool Comic Book Clubs published by the Robert Bowne Foundation. This paper examines the children's processes and products through the lens of John Dewey's Democracy and Education.

A thorough reflection of our first three years can be found in the Handbook of Research on Teaching Literacy Through the Communicative and Visual Arts, Volume II, edited by James Flood Shirley Brice Heath, and Diane Lapp.