Teaching one panel at a time

“It honestly felt like I was being mugged,” illustrator Ryan Alexander-Tanner explained as he served up a batch of afternoon pancakes in his Greenpoint apartment.

He was referring to last year’s election campaign, when he and Weather Underground founder Bill Ayers were practically assaulted by a Fox News correspondent at the height of the controversy surrounding Ayers’ connection with Barack Obama. For the past several months, Tanner has been collaborating with Ayers on a graphic novel adaptation of his book “To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher.”

Tanner completed the manuscript the night before I visited him, and when I arrived, he had just woken up. While it is in comic form, the adaptation is by no means just a simplified, illustrated version. Published by Teacher’s College Press in 1993, Ayers’ book expounds his theories on the educational system, which are grounded in his own experiences as a teacher, activist, and community leader. “What we wanted to do with this book was to use the comic form to convey Bill’s ideas and philosophies,” Tanner said. “We wanted to show them visually as they are practiced in the classroom.”

When Teachers College Press approached Ayers regarding a possible reprint of his book a couple of years ago, Ayers—a diehard comics fan—insisted that any reprint be in comic form. Tanner, who had met Ayers through a friend years before, was the perfect fit for the job of reformulating the book graphically. In addition to working as a graphic artist, Tanner himself has had experience teaching.
From his work with elementary and middle school students in after-school programs in Portland, Oregon, he has developed a deep respect for Ayers’ theories.

“Teaching is an inherently political act, and it inevitably involves issues of social justice. Using images to convey the reality of teaching makes those issues all the more vivid,” Tanner said. “It elevates their sense of urgency.”

Based upon Ayers’ early years as a teacher, “To Teach” is largely anecdotal, and his ideas lend themselves to being communicated graphically. “One of Bill’s frustrations with the status quo classroom is the tendency to put students into brackets, under labels like ‘problem’ or ‘ADD,’ instead of treating them as whole, multidimensional beings.” The book conveys a visual sense of the challenges of modern teaching, and of the teacher’s struggle to balance a higher administrative agenda with the reality of the classroom. The shortcomings of status quo education models are visually manifested in the frustrated faces of children­—the victims of the system Ayers is working to change.