RSS

Tag Archives: education

Using Comics to Teach Philosophy, Inclusively by Joyce C. Havstad

As an educator, I’m always looking for new ways to engage students. As someone who teaches philosophy at a large state school—in fact, at a prototypical American Research University—I’m always trying to convince college students that my subject matter is truly relevant, to their lives and to their budding careers. At the very least, I try to make philosophy fun. And one of the tools that I have developed to help achieve these goals is to use visual arts, especially non-traditional arts like comics, in the classroom.

So, the rest of this post is going to be about what I’ve observed from using comics in the classroom. I’m going to focus on two main things: one positive, and one less so. I think that both of these observations are worth taking seriously.

Read the rest of this entry »

 
1 Comment

Posted by on 2014/01/17 in educators, Guest Writers

 

Tags: , ,

Keep watering the rocks by Di Laycock

For goodness sake put that graphic novel down and get yourself a real book to read.

Overheard in the school library, this comment was a short, but far from simple, remark made to a student by a colleague. Given the work I’d done with this teacher as to how graphic novels might be used in the classroom, I was disheartened to hear that graphic novels still struggled to make her literary cut. And whilst another colleague once told me not to waste time ‘watering the rocks,’ a part of me wasn’t going to give up so easily – I enrolled in a professional doctorate and grabbed my watering can.

The above scenario took place nearly six years ago, around the same time that Carter (2007) suggested graphic novels ‘still remain largely on the fringes of the [teaching] profession’ (p. 1). To reposition graphic novels more centrally, added Carter, more success stories of their use in schools were needed.

Read the rest of this entry »

 
 

Tags: , ,

Anthropology goes Comics by Hannah Wadle

While film and photography have fallen on fertile ground from the early days of Anthropology and moulded the sub-discipline of Visual Anthropology, comics has not yet become an equally respected and applied ethnographic methodological tool and format of presenting anthropological knowledge. There are a few individual artists-anthropologists, who contribute to a discussion on comics and anthropology, but thousands of anthropologists returning from fieldwork, with their numerous little diaries, filled not only with written notes, but also with sketches and drawings, leave their graphic work behind and begin with their “real work”, the writing, as soon as they are back in their home universities.

Read the rest of this entry »

 

Tags: , , , , ,