12018-03-16T22:59:33+00:00Susan Gardnerd75a28c6570c5c305a038bfe36f9b0334fdf86d612plain2018-03-16T23:00:31+00:00Susan Gardnerd75a28c6570c5c305a038bfe36f9b0334fdf86d6Librarian Commentary: This assignment illustrates the power of visual narrative as a technique for encouraging student reflection and meta-cognition about the research process. Some of the comics capture students coming to terms with their failures and expressing them in a creative way.
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1media/Red_ComicBG.jpg2018-01-24T22:16:56+00:00The Journey's End22plain2020-03-23T23:16:40+00:00The hero's journey begins with the hero leaving the everyday world and traveling to a new world, where the hero faces a series of trials and obstacles. At the end of the journey, the hero returns to her world as a changed person and brings with her the knowledge that can help her community, her culture, her tribe, her world. In the student's journey, this knowledge is imparted through the narrative represented in the form of a comic.
While each student completes their own literature review, it is merely an academic paper that the student struggles to complete, and then turns in. If the paper has been turned in at the end of the semester, often the student will not even bother to pick up the paper at the beginning of the following semester. It is a not uncommon sight to see boxes of unclaimed papers in cardboard boxes outside of faculty offices.
In contrast, students' comics dramatize the students' academic efforts, creating a myth that valorizes the hero's journey, where students may face monsters and be aided by supernatural entities. As a form of creative writing, the creation of these comics offers a new way for students to understand their academic endeavors (Bartholomae, 1995; Elbow, 1991).
What should we make of students' self-mythologizing stories? At the very least, asking students to create comics offers them a way to creatively assess what the doing of the work is actually like. It is a way for students to acknowledge and select various moments of fear and shame, and a way for students to play with, to reflect and deflect those moments. By treating that which is shameful with some humor, students find a way to rewrite those shameful experiences, and perhaps to transcend the shame.
Universities are tribes made up of other tribes, including tribes of students and tribes of professors. The tribes meet under various circumstances, including the classroom. Perhaps students' comics are offering up a counter-ideology to that of just doing the work that they were assigned to do. Let's remember that I assigned the literature review, and while they had a few choices, those choices were limited. "Do the work" I said, and so they did.
In students' comics, one part of the business of the university is examined—the comics question and critique the lit review. We rarely see this. Rarer still is that the comics offer up their critique playfully, in a style that is fun to read and easy on the eyes. Academic research could possibly learn something from comics.