Unflattening the Classroom: Collaborative Critical Thinking Through Student-Made Multimodal Narrative

• In Event: 35.047 - Unpacking Unflattening: Interdisciplinary and Multimodal Inquiry in Teaching and Research

Abstract

In response to the theme for the 2019 AERA Annual Meeting, this presentation will share findings from the use of Nick Sousanis’s Unflattening in an upper-level English course on graphic narrative at a comprehensive university emphasizing undergraduate teaching. Two of the course objectives are, To practice the habits of thought necessary for critical thinking—comfort with ambiguity and contradiction; an ability to question assumptions, values, and traditions; an attention to diverse perspectives particularly with regard to race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality—by using the artists under study as models and working particularly with the visual as a mode of thought; and To strengthen a range of research, written, and oral communication skills through multimodal assignments, collaborative work, and formal analysis. Findings indicate that not only did the use of Unflattening further the meeting of these objectives, but students’ engagement with this text also led to a greater sense of ownership over the processes of research and scholarly communication of evidence. The presenter discovered throughout the course the democratization of these processes and a resulting investment in the collaborative work of critical thinking.

Unflattening served as the foundation for the conceptual framework of the course:  that seeing is a way of thinking.  The ideas in Unflattening were applied throughout the semester in weekly comics responses created by the students. These responses had to articulate a claim, offer an interpretation, or narrativize the student's own thinking.  Thus multimodal narrative was used to communicate thinking or argument. The end product of the course was a digital course portfolio—each student selected their best comics response and wrote a headnote reflecting on the work of "seeing as a way of thinking."  This was complemented by the production of collaborative research papers and a process of peer review.  The portfolio, along with an introductory essay and an explanation of the course method and purpose, may be found online.

With Unflattening as a handbook for thinking in a new way, fostering a focus on making, students developed a sense of expertise around multimodal narrative which they deployed in the co-creation of knowledge in the course. Students were asked to think about evidence from multiple perspectives:  to provide evidence of their own thinking in multimodal narrative, to identify evidence for their claims about the discipline and find ways to manage and communicate that evidence in a collaborative space, to think about peer review and scholarly communication as a public means of sharing evidence and the responsibilities that accrue thereto.  This development of a sense of openness, ownership, transparency, and a valuing of specialized expertise regarding research, evidence, and knowledge was an unexpected finding, beyond the meeting of course objectives, made possible by the multimodal work of the course. The presenter suggests that these findings may be traced back to the development of expertise using Unflattening and the resulting new understanding of what it means to think critically about thinking, learning, and scholarship as made visible in Sousanis’s text.

Author

• Janine Utell