Learning Theory by Doing Practice in a Comics Studies Course
Inspired by a combination of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics (and its sequels), and my own experience teaching Design Thinking and Visual Thinking in higher education, I have called on students in my new Comics Studies course at Southern Oregon University to draw their way through some significant intellectual challenges.
As reported previously on this Medium feed, this is the debut offering of an Honors College course on Comics, Culture and Politics at SOU.
This section of HON315 is more about the study of comics than the production of comics, and few of my students rate themselves as strong artists or illustrators. They are not alone: although I am a capable photographer and visual storyteller, my drawing skills are mediocre at best.
But in the early going, this group has really stepped up boldly as I have prompted them to use the visual language of comics to express complex ideas.
In one early session, our group invented their own superheroes, and created comic book covers representing the new characters. In another, the students created a sequential narrative in which the students encountered their heroes in comic book panels, and embarked on a dialog. What might heroes and their creators discuss?
No one’s getting a job at a comics publisher any time soon. But the narratives the students are creating help to take some of McCloud’s ideas about the formal structure of comics from something we read about to something we do. They also begin to involve students in the practice of autobiography, a topic that we will interrogate even more deeply when we read Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis later in the term.
Perhaps most important, the students are creating images and text that help to make real the connection between ideas and the material artifacts of publishing and mass culture. They might not know it yet, but they are deriving practice from the theory of semiotics.
