Comics

The Comic as a Method of Multicultural Pedagogy

This week, Anna and I started an optional study course on comics as a method of multicultural pedagogy, run by the Tampere Kesä-yliopisto.

My impressions on the two days we were there were entirely positive and I'm already looking forward to the continuation in October.

Day 1, Tuesday 16th September

Our day began by introducing ourselves and getting to know each other. The groups wasn't very big, so it was possible to hear everyone's voices and get a sense of why people were there.

It turned out that nobody, ourselves included, had very much of an idea what to expect.

We started off learning about the World Comics project, which is an NGO founded by comic artists and aid activists in 1997. The idea is simple and that's the beauty of it. Comic creation is taught in third world countries to help people tell their stories and put forward their own point of view about issues that affect them. As they say on their website:

Almost any issue, idea or fact can be expressed with comics. It is a flexible, attention-grabbing and inexpensive medium, and a powerful tool in communication.

The comic itself involves just two pages of white A4 paper, each with two large boxes, making a total of four boxes within which to tell your story. Putting these together, you have the equivalent of one A3 sheet, with four boxes and a header. That's it.

Here's an example of what it can look like:

This comic tells of a man who is suspicious of his political opponents, but then one of them comes to help him in the end when he is attacked by a rabid dog.

As part of the first day's workshop, we started to hone our own skills in drawing comics, particularly facial expressions and body positions. It turns out that it's not very hard and basically anybody can do it with the most minimum of guidance. Even though everyone always complains from the start that they cannot draw.

This seems an important point, that drawing amazingly isn't the point of the comics. It's about expressing oneself and putting forward  a message or idea or questions or feeling. It's about storytelling.

I was most impressed by the simplicity of the idea. Our teacher, Leif Packanen, told us a story about how when he was in India, he saw a girl drawing a comic where there was a school principal. He commented that the principal could be a woman and the girls balked at the idea. But it made him think that it's not right to interfere with the reality of the stories that people want to tell.

On the back of this, I inquired about how much diagnostic tools in storytelling did he think it was permissible to discuss with the comic drawers and he said that it's not an issue as the instructions are so simple and clear that it never gets to a level of talking about good storytelling techniques.

I found that approach refreshing. He also said that in the beginning, they would allow people to choose how many panels they wanted in their story, but then in the end, the decided that it was distracting and they should only be 4. So, the format is not to be messed with and anything, to a degree, works, as long as it's something that people understand as a story, with (and it pains me to say this, being a scriptwriter myself) a beginning, a middle (two panels) and an end.

During that first day we also looked at some theory on multicultural learning, Especially interesting was the examples from James Banks, which we have covered before. Here, the emphasis is on involving different cultures and allowing different voices to be heard. For me, I feel that the marriage of comic art and multicultural studies has great pedagogical potential, which has been proven by the successes of the World Comics projects.

That first day, we also started working on our own comic ideas. The purpose was to consider first of all, an issue that we are interested in. I chose the widening wealth gap in the world and the psychological effect that has on those who are wealthy, how they think about poor people and what the consequences of that are for the future. There was a story in The Guardian that I read that morning which stated that the top 1% (in wealth terms) viewed homeless people as akin to sub-human. So, I decided to go with that.

Day 2, Wednesday 17th September

The second day of the course was again a mixture of multicultural theory and drawing comics. We began the day by finishing off our own comics and here's what mine's ended up looking like:

To get to this stage, we learned about the final part of the process, inking the pencil drawings after they had been finalized. This took some time and it was honestly quite exhilarating.

As part of the afternoon's theory discussion, we looked at, among other things, what each person understand to be culture, how there are different points of view and how we can understand them.

We looked at Trompenaar's Culture Onion as well as Hofstede's Culture Pyramid, which both proved insightful.

There's a lot more to learn on this subject. There's more to understand about the power of comics, about the power of voices and storytelling. I would like to finish this section by posting the following video, a TED talk from the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, titled The Danger of a Single Story.

References/links:

http://worldcomics.fi/

https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story/transcript?language=en

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/sep/15/how-super-rich-got-richer-10-shocking-facts-inequality

http://www.afs.org/blog/icl/?tag=fons-trompenaars

Day 3, Tuesday 30th September

The third day of the Comic course allowed us to get more feedback on the homework that was set, which involved, among other things, drawing another comic ourselves, using the same methods we had learnt in class the previous times, as well as getting feedback for our last comic attempt and reading a graphic novel called Näkymättömät kädet (Invisible Hands) by Ville Tietäväinen.

The comic I drew focused on the same theme of inequality among people, this time looking at the plight of migrant workers today and in a historical context. Here is a slightly low-resolution version of it:

The feedback I got from the comic was quite muted. I'm not entirely sure I understand what's expected from me with this comic drawing. Normally, I would try to evaluate effectiveness of telling the story and maybe be much harsher with criticism and stronger in praise, but I think our teacher was operating in a much softer and more narrow framework, so that everything/anything almost seemed OK. I guess the point of the exercise was not to improve our comic drawing skills, but just to deepen our understanding of the process. Fair enough.

But, as before, I enjoyed the process of producing it and I am fairly happy with the result. It's not obvious to me how the story and message could be improved and I think it might even hit the mark better than my previous effort.

The second part of our homework involved getting feedback from at least 5 different people (preferably of significantly different backgrounds and ages) on the first comic we drew. The feedback I got was mixed, which I accept. It seemed that people mostly "got it", some had suggestions for how it could be improved (which of course I disagreed with) and some comments were even in direct opposition to each other. One person said that Peter was a good name for a dog; another asked if there was any need to name the dog/pig in the first place. I stand by Peter as a good name for a dog.

For me, this task held possibly the most important pedagogical lesson of the entire course, the need for feedback from an audience. I think this is the only way one can truly learn about one's own art, when it reaches a public who are prepared to give fair, objective criticism. Too often I have worked on student projects where the end result has been to produce something, like a short film, advert or music video, for example. But then, towards the end of the process, when everyone has run out of steam and the editing is dragging on, the final reviewing can be left out. I think this is a criminal mistake and it ought to be prioritized form the start.

The third part of our homework involved reading the Ville Tietäväinen graphic novel, Invisible Hands, which was about migrant workers coming to Europe from North Africa. This was challenging for me as the book was in Finnish, quite long and the text was very small. And the book was heavy. Physically, it is work to read this book.

I would say that if you like graphic novels and can read Finnish, it's maybe for you. I have read certain socially aware graphic novels recently and I have enjoyed them. For me, this one didn't have much humour and seemed altogether too serious. Just because the subject matter is serious, doesn't mean everything has to be so grim. Or maybe I just didn't get the jokes.

But what I certainly took away from this was the use of graphic noels in an educational setting. If I can do so in future, I will happily incorporate them into my lessons.

Day 4, Wednesday 5th November

The last day of the course involved looking at more homework tasks as well as thinking about theories of otherness and the benefit of having people tell their own stories.

For this task, we looked at two comics, one called Meet The Somalis, a collection of illustrated stories about Somali immigrants in seven different European cities, created by Europeans and Akokhan, by Frank Odoi, a well known Nigerian comic artist, telling folk tales of black magic and morality set in Africa.

The styles were markedly different and we were asked to consider what benefits and drawbacks came from people telling their own stories or having others do that for them.

I found myself more drawn to the European style in Meet The Somalis and in a very simplistic way, I would say that it doesn't matter who tells the stories, as long as they are well told and hit the mark with the right audience. I found that the African book was made more for an African audience, both in terms of drawing style and narrative tools. That's fine. If I wanted the same stories to make more of a mark for a European readership, I might suggest making some changes. Likewise, for the Meet The Somalis comic.

The other significant thing to mention is that we have one remaining piece of work before completing the course and it's a big one. We are required to host our own comic drawing course workshop, lasting approximately three hours, where we introduce the World Comics concept and get students to create their own comics. This will be something quite exciting and I have plans to do this with Anna quite soon. I'll post more here to report how that goes.

Resources/links:

http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/multimedia/meet-the-somalis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ville_Tiet%C3%A4v%C3%A4inen