Creating Comics About COVID-19 to Understand the Intersections Between Science, Community, and Equity

• In Event: Using Storytelling as an Approach to Researching, Teaching, and Learning About Complex Community-Based Socioscientific Problems

Abstract

Objectives
We developed a virtual program where 13 high school age youth from India, the U.S., and Mexico explored socio-scientific phenomena relevant to COVID-19. Students were tasked with authoring comics that illustrated their particular experience with COVID-19 in light of their local context. We encouraged students to consider inequities exposed among and within communities as a result of the pandemic (Katamneni, 2020) by asking students to consider three questions throughout the development of their comic stories: (1) What is COVID-19?, (2) How does COVID-19 impact community?, and (3) How does COVID-19 impact different members of the community? We used these three questions to examine student understandings of the interconnectedness between science, local context, and equity.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
The design of this program was grounded in theories of complex systems thinking that advocate learning about complex problems through a thinking-in-levels approach (Resnick & Welinsky, 1998). We devised and utilized three main goals, each with an associated question in student- friendly terminology, to frame our program design and learning content, such that students were constantly thinking about (1) How can I make sense of, and address, complex problems?, (2) How do scientific phenomena impact different communities, and in what actions can/do communities take in order to respond to scientific phenomena?, and (3) How does inequity further complicate a complex problem, and what can be done to address inequity in order to better address the complex problem?

Methods/Data sources
Students designed comics that fell into one of three themes: Life at Home, Education, or Finding Solutions. Using the three questions we asked students to consider in the design of their comic stories, we qualitatively analyze comics for ways students commonly and contrastingly represent science, local context, and equity.

Results
The results of our investigation reveal differences in complex systems thinking abilities between students who primarily viewed the pandemic as a personal issue versus a communally shared issue. The results also render different representations of community and the extent to which community played a role in the students’ pandemic experience. Lastly, the results help us to differentiate between stories that narrated the injustice of the pandemic as a personally experienced inequity versus a larger social injustice.

Scholarly significance
In this study, the process of creating comics presented an opportunity for youth to apply systems thinking to scientific concepts in creative and personally relevant ways. We conclude our paper with the significance of the processes of authoring comics; the representation of science, community, and equity using graphic elements and storylines; and the relationships among students’ identities, knowledge, and experience.

Author

• Ryan M. Rish, University at Buffalo - SUNY