Reinventing Inquiry: A Doctoral Dissertation in Comics Form

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

Abstract

The academy has historically regarded words as the sole means for representing serious thinking, while relegating images to the realm of aesthetics and spectacle. This bias runs deep. Plato dismissed images as “shadows of shadows” (Murdoch, 1977, p. 31); Descartes sowed doubt of sensory perception, and Western thought and scholarship have followed along these lines of thinking since. Through a dissertation written and drawn entirely in the comic book medium, I pose a challenge to verbal-linguistic dominance and seek to broaden the forms academic inquiry can take. The dissertation’s very form embodies its central argument for the value of visual thinking in teaching and learning – and it specifically serves to demonstrate how comics can be powerful tools for thought and serious inquiry. The acceptance of comics in educational contexts for their literary and literacy merits (Bitz, 2010) paves the way for the next step – the establishment of comics as a legitimate medium for representing scholarship.

Far beyond simply illustrating ideas, comics’ capacity for both text-like sequential reading (McCloud, 1993) and image-like simultaneous viewing creates a unique thought-space where ideas can be juxtaposed and intersected in a single space. It makes for an ecosystem where image and text can cohabitate, resonate (in what Lewis (2001) calls a “double orientation” (p. 69)), and complement the other’s limitations. Furthermore, comics allow for the incorporation of multiple modes, signs, and symbols, outside of words and representational imagery (Goodman, 1976) which all contribute ensemble to the meaning of the whole. In contrast to text’s linear nature, comics present their meaning in a variety of ways: there are sequential but also nonlinear connections, the overall composition of the page, as well as the depth of layers through the multimodal – all of these reading approaches speak to one another. These qualities make for an ideal platform to facilitate discovery and clearly present complex information without having to simplify or sacrifice content. If anything, the form’s inherent multimodality and multiplicity of layers allow for the inclusion of more information and a more sophisticated treatment of it than text alone. We make meaning in a range of ways outside of the verbal, it is time to recognize it in the work we do.

References

Bitz, M. (2010). When commas meet kryptonite: Classroom lessons from the comic book project. New York: Teachers College Press.

Goodman, N. (1976). Languages of art. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing.

Groensteen, T. (2007). The system of comics. (B. Beaty & N. Nguyen, Trans.). Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.

Kress, G. (2010). Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication.
London & New York: Routledge.

Lewis, D. (2001). Reading contemporary picturebooks: Picturing text. London and New York: RoutledgeFalmer.

McCloud, S. (1993). Understanding comics. Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press, Inc.

McGilchrist, I. (2010). The master and his emissary: The divided brain and the making of the modern world. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Murdoch, I. (1977). The fire and the sun: Why Plato banished the artists. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Author

• Nick Sousanis, University of Calgary