The Teaching History Her Way Podcast · CherylAnne Amendola

Teaching With Comics with Tim Smyth

·31 min·2 clips

A Star Wars essay on Stormtroopers turns into an argument about Nazism, thesis, and counterargument.

1. Teaching History Her Way Podcast focuses on Teaching with Comics with Tim Smyth, a classroom-centered conversation about comics as literacy tools. 2. Sherrilyn Amendola hosts, and Tim Smyth appears as a high school social studies educator, reading specialist, and author of Teaching with Comics and Graphic Novels. 3. The episode asks what comics can do for history teaching, reading instruction, and student engagement in a classroom. 4. Smyth says Miles Morales, described as half Puerto Rican and half Black Spider-Man, pushed him to bring comics into class after students got excited. 5. He says people kept telling him to write a book, and a PBS article after a Twitter outreach led him to publish his teaching ideas. 6. Smyth says the book opened doors to keynote talks, publisher partnerships with Scholastic, Macmillan, and PBS, and an Eisner Award nomination. 7. He argues that teachers need to share their voices so they can help shape the conversation about education. 8. Smyth says the profession is losing education majors and that he talks to college students about what he loves in teaching. 9. He describes comic reading as deep reading because students track visual and textual evidence in each panel. 10. He uses Nat Turner by Kyle Baker, a wordless graphic novel, to let students interpret pages without a single correct answer. 11. Smyth says honors and AP students are often afraid of being wrong until comics show them that multiple interpretations can be correct with evidence. 12. He uses sticky notes instead of large packets for March by Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell, so students mark questions, connections, and reactions. 13. He says students talk naturally while annotating, and he reads the same March graphic novels many times and still notices new details. 14. For essay writing, Smyth uses Jason Aaron’s Star Wars comic and has students write a six-paragraph MLA essay on Stormtroopers. 15. He says students must use only the comic as a primary source, which pushes them to build a thesis from visual and textual evidence. 16. Smyth also links that early-year lesson to later history units on Hitler, totalitarianism, propaganda, and the First Order. 17. He says the interview format is practical and classroom-specific, with repeated examples, direct advice, and a lot of named texts. 18. Smyth’s delivery is energetic and talkative, with frequent examples from his own students, his son, and his classroom routines. 19. Teachers looking for comic-based reading and writing strategies will get the most from this episode. 20. Listeners wanting a general history survey without classroom methods may skip it.

As heard by us

Comics become a practical classroom tool, with one especially usable annotation routine.

Teaching comics in class is the episode's main point, and it lands best when the talk gets practical. Sherrilyn Amendola and Tim Smythe move from family reading to classroom use, then settle on a simple sticky-note routine that swaps packets for active reading and noticing.

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Why you'd press play

When comics feel optional, this shows how to make them part of the lesson.

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