The Benefits of Collaborating With Your School Librarian

Some of the best literacy learning can happen through collaboration among colleagues and peers.

This past year, I was reminded of the importance of forging relationships with fellow educators as I engaged in grant-funded work with the media specialist at the school where I am serving. The project, born out of our shared interest in graphic novels and desire to build a library of comics-based media for our students, allowed us to pair up historically based graphic novels with traditional research works.

We discussed ideas in our first year of collaboration and executed this plan in the second year that we worked together.

Finding Like Minds and Vision

The media specialist expressed keen interest in collaboration with the high school English department from the beginning of her work at the school, and initial partnerships were forged around common lesson planning, including work on media and other creative projects (such as National Poetry Month) with library resources. These initial threads of collaboration led to more commonalities in our work as we talked more about grant possibilities and growing the library’s collection of graphic novels.

Sometimes, great projects begin with something as simple as the space to dialogue and explore connections.

In order for strong collaboration to occur, there has to be a fertile ground for the work to take root—namely, professionals who are eager to engage and who believe in the work they do. My colleague and I are both vocal and invested in finding like minds to share in projects. It might be easy at times to operate in silos, but stronger work can be made when collaborations occur.

Finding the Structure

As a collaborative team, we developed the following steps:

• Introduce comics and the possibilities of the medium with a brief overview of comics grammar and practice with creating.
• Invite students to select a specific time period, conduct research, and then compare the research to the information shared in the comics.
• Students present on their chosen time period in American history, focusing on what they learned from comics and research, with an emphasis on panels and pages that they found meaningful.
• Students selected and analyzed graphic novels (as an alternative, this step could come earlier in the lesson process).
• Students create their own comics in response using the process they learned about.

Once we established that we had a common interest and goals, the next step was to locate the class that would work best for what we had in mind. We decided this project should be situated in an American literature course that I taught in spring 2025. This context allowed us to explore the possibilities of using comics to tell stories based on history, as well as inviting students to explore their own stories in the comics medium. We also had the unique ability to tell this group of students in all sincerity that we wrote this grant and picked these books with them in mind.

When it comes to engaging literacy practices, selection is key for connecting with students. Choosing books and approaches is an always-fluid process. Sometimes, popular culture is part of the mystery of what connects a reader with a book. The key is to always listen to students and invite their perspectives. I used comics in my classroom for a few semesters as a way of gauging what might work and developed a background lesson about comics terms and the ways characters develop across stories to introduce the medium.

For phase one, students chose from specific historical time periods and compared their researched information with the information presented in the graphic novel selections. Then, students chose from a wide range of graphic novels to complete a free read response. Because the class focus was American literature, my colleague and I worked from a set of graphic novels that included the colonial period, initial national development, the Civil War period, the early 20th century, and contemporary challenges. For this project, we utilized Saddleback’s Graphic US History. I also recommend exploring the resources available from Campfire Graphic Novels and Macmillan’s First Second With History Comics for title choices.

Students conducted a day of research during our class time using the internet and library resources, and then compared the presentation of this information in the graphic novel after a brief comics introduction. In this introduction, we examined examples of different panels, word balloons, and other elements of comics design.

Creation and (More) Collaboration

After choosing a mentor text to read and briefly explore through a “book-tasting” of different genres to complete phase two, students concluded the project in a third phase by creating a one-page comic after a review of comics grammar and methods with a range of responses, from print to digital, nonfiction and fiction. The emphasis was on using elements of the comics form to share their stories; some students used digital formats like Google Docs, Canva, and Pixton to plan responses and then composed them using print resources.

Some students chose topics like what they had done recently over spring break, while others chose more fiction-based stories. Examples ranged from the personal to the highly imaginative and reality-bending. This range of creating was in keeping with our vision for helping students share stories and explore what comics could allow them to do.

The peer collaboration continues, as the media specialist and I will be teaming up with a group of students for a shared homeroom in the next academic year to deepen possibilities for learning and collaboration. Students had the chance to visit the library, and the media specialist visited the classroom for some lessons, so our interaction was forefront. In all, the project took about four or five months from grant writing to planning and implementation.