Know Your Rights\u201d comic<\/a>, which educates readers about their rights during encounters with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The cover features illustrations of Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels, flanked by a multicultural group of New Yorkers and the Statue of Liberty. The first panels remind readers they have the right to remain silent, ask to see warrants, and choose not to open the door if officers don\u2019t have them. At the end, there are emergency phone numbers and groups to contact for help.<\/p>\nOfficials said New York City Public Schools have produced 6 million copies of its various comics, making it one of the top 10 comic book publishers in the United States.<\/p>\n
Schmidt, who didn\u2019t grow up reading comics, still appreciates the importance of an origin story. For him, it was seeing how his students responded to comics back when he was still a teacher in the classroom.<\/p>\n
\u201cI saw the students gravitating to this book in a way that they didn’t necessarily with a traditional prose book, and it was able to tell a non-linear narrative. It was able to get into symbolism. It was able to get into representation,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Schmidt said comics boost literacy because they tend to include higher-level vocabulary than grade-level books, and the \u201csynthesis\u201d of words and images advances learning.<\/p>\n
\u201c\u200aComics actually bring together both text and visuals, and does something that just prose doesn’t, which is ask students to synthesize information from both of those things,\u201d he said. \u201cIt sounds a little counterintuitive, but for many students, they actually learn better with comics as the text than with a traditional prose text.”<\/p>\n
At the education department\u2019s table at Comic Con Friday, which happened to be sandwiched between a “Ghostbusters” slime station and “Star Wars” activity table, kids and adults from the tri-state area were scooping up freebies.<\/p>\n
Matteo Soares, 10, a fifth grader from Westchester, said he came to Comic Con because he\u2019s a \u201cdiehard Marvel fan.\u201d But he was happy to grab a handful of Civics for All Comics along the way.<\/p>\n
\u201cI like all of these,\u201d he said. \u201cThey’re cool.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fuat Celik, a dad from New Jersey, came by with a wishlist of Civics For All comic titles on his phone.<\/p>\n
\u201c\u200aMy daughter especially really loves the exposure to the ideas of civics,\u201d he said. \u201cWe’re trying to complete our collection.\u201d<\/p>\n
Celik, who grew up in New York, said the comics also offer him a way to connect his kids to some hometown history.<\/p>\n
Schmidt said he often hears from people outside the city who are interested in the comics, including a gay teacher in Texas who said he printed out a poster associated with the NYC schools\u2019 LGBTQ+ comics and curriculum.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of my favorite stories was a LGBTQ teacher in Texas who sent me a picture of some of our [LGBTQ] \u201cHidden Voices\u201d posters, saying, \u2018I can’t get this through my local district,\u201d he said, \u201cand here it is on my wall, here it is on my door. So students know that while I can’t say I’m a gay teacher, they know that I am an ally.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The New York City Department of Education will be at Comic Con throughout the convention until Sunday. On Saturday afternoon, it will participate in a panel on the department\u2019s new comic about the Young Lords, the Puerto Rican activist group in the late 1960s and early 1970s. On Sunday, the department will take part in a panel on LGBTQ+ comics coming out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s Comic Con this weekend, where teeming crowds of cosplayers and superhero fans \u2014 plus a smattering of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":369839,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[9,24,63,134,136,135],"class_list":["post-369838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-staten-island","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-staten-island","tag-staten-island-headlines","tag-staten-island-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369838"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369838\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/369839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}