Today we welcome guest blogger Chris Gerben. Chris teaches writing and speaking courses within the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University. His research interrogates ways in which students’ extracurricular and/or online writing may be seen as collaborative, argumentative, and academic. You can contact Chris at cgerben@stanford.edu.
At the beginning of each semester you may confuse me for a priest holding confessions. Students line up to confide in me that they’re not good writers (despite grades or early writing assignments to the contrary.)
For thirteen years as an instructor, I’ve heard the same insecurities from both stellar and struggling students. Students often tend to think that becoming a “writer” is something that is far off, like a goal line that, once passed, will be seen only in hindsight where the hard work and difficulties are behind them. In this view, “writers” are other people, and the rest of us are still struggling to find our way.
Experienced instructors fully understand the fallacy of such thoughts, and yet we often teach and assign texts that inadvertently reinforce it.
Comics in the Classroom
Part of the problem feeding the aforementioned confessions is that our assigned texts often reinforce paradigms of what it means to author: everything from the style of academic prose to the hardcover bindings of books tell students that writing is an indifferent, far-off success. As a result, how we teach students to read (and consequently write) is equally walled off: we seek to understand and to analyze hidden motives and far-off meanings, and we read to write through the text, but not necessarily to the text.
Comics in the classroom, however, provide us with examples of where authors look directly at their readers, and students can imagine themselves as equally active agents in the ongoing dialogues. Likewise, these texts provide multiple entry points to knowledge.
Page 44 of Understanding Rhetoric, for example, uses smart, economical visuals to explain the classical appeals in a variety of ways: providing definitions, paraphrases, examples, and even an author’s facial reactions mimicking the given appeal (e.g. Liz looking emotionally distressed to display pathos.)
This page, which I’ve taught with equal success to both high school and college students, demonstrates these strengths of comics in the writing classroom: meeting readers exactly where they are on their journey to seeing themselves as writers. Such a graphic approach takes advantage of its visual means to connect directly with readers and, perhaps, restore some of their confidence in their ability to talk back to the material.
Production Over Consumption
Here, “talking back” is the bridge between reading and writing (or consumption and production), where teachers can use comics to deliver information, but also invite students to produce visual narratives, such as comics. Bedford provides a nice list of sites and sources to accomplish this.
One way I’ve used comics successfully in my college classroom is to use them in assignments I call “visual conversations.” In these assignments, students bring in a digital photo of themselves (or choose an impersonal yet significant avatar) and then use Google or other online resources to find photos of the authors we’ve discussed in class. For example, if a student were writing about this blog, she may use the author photo above. Once the author photos are in place, students use comics to simulate an actual conversation they may have with the authors. The conversations often start as informal, and even silly, but eventually scaffold to incorporate class themes, the students’ claims, and even direct quotes.
Though students use the paradigm of comics to model this conversational give and take, there are many variations I allow:
- Use an app/program like Comic Life to drag and drop visuals and text into actual comic forms (students often create pages-long narratives with this)
- Use software such as Photoshop or Powerpoint to create a low-tech visual mock-up of a social network site, where authors become the student’s virtual “friends”
- Use Word or any word processer to mimic the give and take of a text message or instant message conversation
Conversation as Writing; Writing as Conversation
What the above assignment and Understanding Rhetoric have in common is that they position the students as active agents in a conversation that they (the students) are invested in. In the assignment, students control the language, flow, and outcome of the conversation. In the textbook, the authors are drawn to literally look readers in the eye, forming a direct connection to the content. Both instances make the metaphor of writing as conversation more concrete, and provide a powerful lesson for our student writers that the best writing isn’t some far off goal of getting published, but is the immediate action of connecting with a singular individual.
Comics provide us, in the form of texts like Understanding Rhetoric, not only novel ways to read and analyze the inherent conversation of writing; they provide us with a heuristic for transferring the often abstract forms of thought and oral conversation with the very vivid world of rhetorically-aware writing.