The Myth of the Student Hero and the “Dreaded Lit Review”

Sympathy for the Devil

I guess I should be pleased to introduce myself. I’m the Devil. At least that’s how I’m being portrayed by Lauren Delisle, who was one of my students. The image above is taken from Lauren’s comic, which tells her story of how she was “commanded” by me to write something called a “lit review.” The “lit review” or “literature review” is a “dreaded” assignment. “Dread.” Rhymes with “dead.” It could kill you. Which is the reason Lauren imagines me as the Devil who appears to her in a nightmare as she sleeps.

The story you are about to read is made up from a bunch of my students’ comics, which were all written after they had completed writing the “lit review,” which is an assignment in my first-year course in “research methods,” which attempts to teach students how to do research; this includes tasks such as finding and reading and taking notes on other research studies that are super-hard to understand.

The “literature review” is a big, scary assignment that each student will work on for three months. It will push the student to her limits. It will scare her and shame her, and bring her to tears, before turning it into me to be graded. “Muahahaha!” says the Devil. And after that, the student will have to create a story—in the form of a comic book—that tells how she wrote the literature review. The comic’s story is how the students deal with their feelings of shame.

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