Braiding a Life: Comics as Living Curriculum

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

Abstract

Comics is a “braided” art form, (Groensteen 2009), constructed through fragmentation, disjunction, and segmentation. It is woven together by narrative and aesthetic unity. Comics and cartooning has long occupied a marginalized place near art and literature, touching both at times, but never quite being accepted as either. This relegation to the margins and the inherent fracturing in the art of comics has constructed, over time, a medium uniquely equipped for absorbing artistic practices and lived experiences that are traditionally neglected, forgotten, or silenced.

In this paper, I explore my process of constructing a fictional graphic novel-as-dissertation, and the curricular possibilities of cartooning. Drawing on the work of William Pinar, Ted Aoki, and Elliot Eisner, I assert that cartooning offers particular opportunities to construct an autonomous self, and, in the process, “disturb the landscape” of the meta-narratives that seek a passive, idealized human for participation in a globalized economy. In our current age of infinite war, oppressive economic structures, and violent xenophobia, our curriculum ought to be concerned with helping students choose who they are and resist coercion and homogenization.

Through sharing my own cartooning process and lived experiences, I aim to de-emphasize the product of cartooning—the comic itself—and instead focus on the chaotic process of making a comic, one that incorporates the excess of a life: all the memories, desires, interests, beliefs, and embodied sensations that lie “outside the acceptable” (Springgay, 2008, p. 41). Ultimately, I explore making comics as a curricular activity, one which examines lived experiences, explores the relationship between self and others, and creates questions and choices about how to live in the world.

References

Groensteen, T. (1999.) The System of Comics. Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi.

Springgay, S. (2008.) Body Knowledge and Curriculum. New York: Peter Lang.

Author

• Jarod Roselló, Pennsylvania State University