OER Teacher Guide – NASA’s “First Woman”

In an ongoing project, Sean Holt, M.Ed. and his students in the course “Teaching multiliteracies with digital literature” created a guide for teachers to use the graphic novel First Woman (2021) by NASA.

NASA’s graphic novel First Woman, published in 2021, tells the story of Callie Rodriguez and her robotic sidekick RT. In the story, readers follow Callie’s journey from a young girl full of potential to an astronaut candidate and eventually the first woman to land on the moon. The graphic novel’s colorful style and upbeat tone are clearly aimed at inspiring and educating young readers about the exciting field of space exploration, but also about the important contributions of women in STEM fields. You can read the entire graphic novel here.

We believe that First Woman is an excellent teaching tool for English language learners. Not only is the graphic novel engaging, easy to understand and accessible, but it also features a strong female character with whom students can identify. In addition, the inspiring, optimistic nature of the text promises an entertaining reading experience. There is also an audiobook version of the novel available on SoundCloud for those who prefer the audio experience.

For these and other reasons, we have decided to create a guide for teachers that will provide them with guidance and resources on how to effectively integrate First Woman into their foreign language teaching. The guide, which will be published under a CC-BY NC license to ensure pedagogical freedom and open accessibility, will provide practical materials that will encourage and enable teachers to incorporate digital literature into their TEFL lessons, while demonstrating the potential for teaching English language proficiency and literacy skills. The teacher’s guide therefore focuses on combining language teaching with the development of digital and media literacy through a multimodal approach to digital literature.