So I went home for the holiday week and on my way back I thought I'd stop in at one of my favorite little city-towns, Hudson. When I was there I realized this guy that I went out on a date with once was also visiting from Chicago. I took this as a sign to meet up again, since our first date was so fun. So we met up at a great bar/restaurant called the Red Dot and started catching up immediately over some Makers Mark... now your probably wondering why the hell is she blogging about this for her Theory and Practice class. Hold on to your trousers, I'm getting there. So we started talking about comics, because he's a big nerd and Chicago supports a lot of comic stores. We started talking about comics and jumping from that to my education experience. It reminded me of the guest speaker, who I so terribly have forgotten his name, but we had this great speaker come in and talk about the importance of comics and how they can change the classroom! I thought it was a great idea, but didn't think much more on it, until this nerdy cute date I was on.
Nerdy date was telling me about this great comic called Understanding Comics by Scott Mccloud. He was saying that there is this great tension of narration and visual representation, and how reading comics creates a different train of thinking as well as a completely different path way in your brain to travel compared to just reading a book or looking at picture. This was very intriguing to me, because being someone who doesn't very much enjoy reading (it puts me to sleep), and has had a hard time their whole life with finding comfort with reading, this could be a possibility for me to find a hidden path into enjoying a narrative on paper. Then this got me to thinking about the decrease in reading skills and English skills within our school systems. Now I'm not saying get rid of books or picture books, but why not have a book that applies to both learning styles of visual v.s literature. I know I personally am a visual learner compared to literature, but my friend Emily is the complete opposite. I also remember reading To Teach: the journey, in comics in curriculum and instruction, and being so excited when ever a chapter was assigned. I'm not saying get rid of the old, but I am saying embrace and accommodate with the new.
This all branched off to our discussion on the comic Maus, and how comics are a great bridge into relating, and finding comfort from a lack of shock with a topic or emotion. This specific comic is a illustration and narrative of the authors father being in the Holocaust and surviving from a death camp. This got me thinking about the idea of how important it is for Art educators to represent their curriculum and the importance of their subjects to their coworkers of other subjects, and how important to the students well rounded education that all the teachers are on the same page, as well as layering and weaving everyone curriculum and lessons into a universal unit. Now I know that's wordy, and I know it seems ideal, BUT I do think that this is something that could be practiced with small movements, like talking over lunch with your history coworker about a great comic including visual arts and narrative called Maus that you believe could really help the students engage and almost be more comfortable with the topic due to it's humorous imagary of mice and cats, and subtle ways of creating the terror and horror of the victims lives. I believe that a student will learn from shock, but this will be forced and rushed, compared to if a student in engaged and comforitable, they will want to dissect and dig deeper into the topic. I also feel this is a good example of why comics would be a good tool for learning, because having the control over the time you are exposed to the images and if you want to go ahead or back, is a great practice in self motivation, researching and enjoying the time you have with a piece of literature. Things that I feel are not practiced in schools as much, or are not succeeding within the system. Something I like to remind myself constantly when living life is, if it doesn't work, fix it. Maybe we should try something different that may seem so strange and so out there, but really is very relevant and close by... comics and communication.
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