Drawing Composition and Visual Meaning-Making

• In Event: Roundtable Session 2
  In Roundtable Session: Comics in Education: Innovating Research and Curriculum

Abstract

This discussion looks at the use of drawing and comics in the core-level writing classroom, with students exercising their existing fluency in visual language to help them enter the academic discourse community.

Drawing and sequential art are useful modes of meaning-making, specifically for first-year composition and literature students in core courses. The process of ‘interpretation’ calls on students to engage in both critical and creative thinking, and honing multiple modes of demonstrating that thinking broadens the interpretive space students make for themselves. Looking at drawing as a mode of scholarship, I draw from Kenneth Bruffee’s attention to writing as the re-immersion of conversation in its “external social medium” of communication – just as we translate the inherent way of knowing through seeing into the external medium of visual assessment and communication. It’s useful to look at “writing” and “drawing” as compatible, though not interchangeable, in the discussion of “meaning-making.” And while drawing and comics in particular, are host to their own sets of rules and conventions, these rules often work as facilitators rather than the often arbitrary-seeming rules of grammar and style that students feel bind them when demonstrating scholarship in essay form. Whether students are comfortable with drawing or not, the act of drawing as a form of academic inquiry exists, for now, outside the formal territory of the Academy, allowing students the agency and control to create as “insiders,” a condition in which Bartholomae asserts all writers “must imagine themselves the privilege of being,” in order to write. That privilege is inherent in the process of creating through drawing.

Bruffee, K. (Nov., 1984). Collaborative learning and the “Conversation of Mankind” in College English, Vol. 46, No. 7: pp. 635-652.

Bartholomae, D. (1985). "Inventing the University." In Rose, M. (Ed.), When a writer can’t write: Studies in writer's block and other composing process problems. (pp. 134-65). New York: Guilford.

Author

• Brooke Sheridan, The University of Alaska - Fairbanks