Graphic Inquiry: Using Comics to Balance Rigor and Engagement in Inquiry Lessons
September 4, 2026
Graphic Inquiry
Using Comics to Balance Rigor and Engagement in Inquiry Lessons
Written by Stephane Manuel
At TrueFiktion, we tell the untold histories of marginalized groups through short comics with embedded inquiries. We’ve published 20 books, several co-designed with school districts, universities, and historical organizations, and school districts across the country use our materials.
In our conversations with teachers, many cite the same struggle—it is increasingly hard to engage students in reading, literacy, and critical thinking. Selecting a topic and primary sources may not be enough for teachers to teach unfamiliar historical topics well. Even with compelling questions, supporting questions, and activities, it can still be hard to teach and support inquiry with fidelity because of the topic's difficulty.
Teachers report constantly having to trade off rigor and engagement. Beneath the questions about what topics are fit to teach, there are questions about what high-quality learning tools look like. What should the design standards for curricular tools be?
“Teachers report constantly having to trade off rigor and engagement.”
I use the word “design” specifically in the context of designing new things, because a rubric doesn’t actually tell you how to design something from scratch. It is not necessarily the recipe for success.
In 2023, we were working on Cecile’s Brother: The NAACP and the Anti-Lynching Movement, a comic and inquiry on the anti-lynching movement and the multimillion-dollar lynching photo industry built on racial terror. I personally analyzed about 100 photos of lynchings in the U.S. and interviewed experts across the country.
Some photos are better than others as primary sources. Depending on the compelling question, supporting question, and action you want students to take, the photos can serve different purposes. Selecting a good photo source to practice C3 standard D2.His.9.9-12 (Analyzing the relationship between historical sources and the secondary interpretations drawn from them) is really hard, especially across the hundred I reviewed.
We settled on the image of Rubin Stacy because it's one of the few photos that has an original and a version repurposed by the NAACP. As we compiled the research, I could have created an inquiry that worked, but without building another tool to teach it, I couldn't have achieved the depth and rigor I felt the topics required because I was missing a scaffolding tool between the questions and sources.
“Even if we could decide which topics to teach, even if we chose the most difficult ones, it would still require resources and techniques we don't currently have.”
This made me realize that even if we could decide which topics to teach, even if we chose the most difficult ones, it would still require resources and techniques we don't currently have. What we struggled with most is that primary sources weren't designed for us to teach inquiry; they were designed to exist in the moment.
To get the most out of primary sources, we need secondary sources that serve as the connective tissue to mediate an inquiry experience. Designing new resources helps bridge the gap between rigor and engagement, especially for untold and difficult history. We are often stuck on what topics we can teach, but we never get to designing truly innovative and useful social studies resources and the required scaffolding to make them work.
Graphic Inquiry
The graphic historical inquiry is built on the Inquiry Design Model and intentionally integrates graphic narrative to drive the inquiry. Over the years, our simultaneous creation of comics and inquiries has led us to many interesting ideas.
Psychologist James J. Gibson introduced the concept of affordances, arguing that objects' intrinsic properties influence how we interact with them. These affordances let us present and interact with information in different ways. When we bring this idea into inquiry design, a graphic narrative offers different affordances for rigor and engagement. A graphic historical inquiry is a comic book or graphic narrative specifically designed to teach an inquiry unit. The comic book narrative itself functions as a case study, one in which students engage with a compelling question from multiple perspectives.
The graphic narrative provides a cohesive way of contextualizing primary and secondary sources within a moment in history, through the eyes of someone who lived it. This design drives cohesion across the multiple ideas that make up an inquiry unit, and it brings primary and secondary sources to life.
For example, in 2024, we worked with the Syracuse City School District to build Jamie’s Decision: The Jerry Rescue. This custom local graphic historical inquiry contextualizes the Fugitive Slave Act for the Syracuse community. Our team worked with Nick Stamoulacatos, a group of teachers, and students to turn the Fugitive Slave Act from just a law into the defining piece of legislation that drove the actions of communities across the U.S. at that time— a document that encouraged some, led others to betrayal, emboldened others, and inspired others to fight against oppression. We created a story that led to an inquiry into how communities unify against unjust laws.
Driving Rigor
Graphic narratives provide a great opportunity to integrate learning sciences principles into the design of learning materials. If we are thoughtful, we can address rigor intentionally. Lev Vygotsky is famous for his theory on the zone of proximal development. He builds on the idea that the tools we use to teach not only help learners master content but also transform learners' cognitive abilities (Cole, 2010).
In the context of social studies and inquiry, the tools we present to students transform our students and how they participate in inquiry, helping to place students in their zone of proximal development. The lack of content standards, and therefore the lack of standards for mediating artifacts, inhibits our ability to keep students in the zone.
As we continue working with partners to make comics and inquiries, we are thinking about the power of comics for cognition in social studies classrooms. The power lies in the affordances. Comics let readers engage with information through a multimodal medium that forces them to build their own perspective on the coherence of information.
“Comics require readers to develop strategies for dynamic meaning-making across words and pictures.”
Comics require readers to develop strategies for dynamic meaning-making across words and pictures. Comic books can drive 4E cognition: embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted. If cognition is embodied, comic books are embodied communication artifacts that stimulate cognitive processes that draw on our perceptual and cultural knowledge to make meaning (Borkent, 2024).
Our experiences of reading a comic book are grounded in our past experiences and activate multisensory background knowledge to create meaning, foster development, and surface specific images in our minds (Borkent, 2024). The affordances of comic narratives, combined with inquiry, can be powerful learning tools if we design them to be.
Driving Engagement
For social studies inquiry, we’ve found we can build on existing graphic-narrative designs and the idea of affordances for engagement. One specific type of graphic narrative is Kate Polak's definition of historio-metagraphic fiction, which encompasses works that depict real-world events in fictional ways to comment on how we shape, receive, and reframe narratives (Polak, 2017). Historiometagraphic fiction offers the following affordances for engagement in inquiry:
The comics medium invites readers to explore representation choices and their impact on cultural memory and ethical engagement, fostering deeper discussions.
Historio-metagraphics expose how historical narratives shape present-day cultural and ethical perspectives.
They challenge the marginalization of histories that affect current social dynamics. Point of view is crucial in graphic narratives, shaping how readers access and interpret the story.
This approach emphasizes both individual and collective viewpoints. Comics naturally lend themselves to exploring complex ethical questions relevant to contemporary issues.
They challenge readers to think critically about morality and justice.
Emphasizing historical facts at the expense of emotional or ethical concerns risks oversimplifying history. Comics balance these elements to enrich understanding.
Readers bring their own experiences to the story, enriching the narrative with diverse perspectives and interpretations. This dynamic process emphasizes individual agency in meaning-making.
What’s Next?
New formats and design standards can help us integrate learning science principles into classrooms and help students make the most of their learning experiences. The field has already created amazing inquiries based on great primary sources and secondary sources. But there is still much work to do around making inquiry engaging and rigorous. We are excited to keep building on the future of inquiry and comic-based learning.
References:
Borkent, Mike (2024). Comics and Cognition: Toward a Multimodal Cognitive Poetics. Oxford University Press.
Cole, M., & Wertsch, J. V. (2010). Beyond the Individual-Social Antinomy in Discussions of Piaget and Vygotsky. Human Development, 250–256. https://doi.org/10.1159/000278475
Polak, Kate. (2017) Ethics in the Gutter: Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics (Studies in Comics and Cartoons). The Ohio State University Press.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes (M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, & E. Souberman, Eds.). Harvard University Press.
