Doré Ripley is a lecturer at Cal State East Bay and an adjunct professor at Diablo Valley College. She specializes in intensive writing and, this year, two of her students took first and second place in the CSUEB annual essay contest. You can visit her on the web at www.RipleyOnline.com.
In the last episode, our instructor was using graphic novels to open channels of knowledge and creativity to empower super students . . .
Or at least that’s what she planned.
This fall, my introduction to college writing students explored Peter Kuper’s adaptation of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, an essay ideally suited to the graphic-novel format due to the protagonist’s sudden transformation into a bug. This unexpected transformation leads to his alienation from family, society, and species. After reading Metamorphosis,students were asked to write a chronological narrative expressing a time when they felt alienated, which would be the basis for their own graphic novel. Students were encouraged to create an avatar for their character to free themselves from their own physical and psychological constraints and write beyond themselves—something hard for anyone to accomplish. Finally, students wrote a process essay describing the steps they took in creating their graphic novel while considering what they learned about language and visual texts.
College students feel isolated for a number of different reasons, from returning to school after 50 to being a foreign language speaker, and they live and cope with alienation in different ways. In the college classroom, nonnative speakers work hard to learn English as quickly as possible and fear being misunderstood, or unable to comprehend the works assigned. Returning students often express a fear of being unable to keep up because most of them have full-time jobs. Post-adolescent traditional age California freshmen feel alienated because they somehow became estranged from their peer group for a variety of reasons, ranging from refusing to do drugs or drink, overindulging in drugs and/or alcohol, being seen as having “changed” from their peer group, or some other social taboo, but for whatever reason, it’s the separation from their traditional peer group that causes them the most anxiety. Most often, this feeling of not fitting in, or being alone, culminates in a single or series of events, which students were asked to write about and then illustrate for their graphic novel.
When it comes to the creation of the graphic novel, students have a number of options: a ruler and a steady hand, a comic generator such as Toondoo or Toonlet, PowerPoint when run off as a handout, or creating a collage from photographs and magazines—and this class used all of these methods to create projects with varying degrees of success. In order to keep the graphic novel from becoming an art project, 80 percent of the grade was reserved for rhetoric—how a student said what he or she illustrated and how they engaged their reader. Specifically, I asked students, “Why should your reader care about your story? What lesson can readers learn from your graphic novel?” As could be predicted, there were many lessons to be learned. The student who had to travel down the hall in Building 51 to escape the Alien Bullies ended up making a friend. The dirt bike rider with sepsis, who was shunned by his friends after a long hospital stay, escaped into music, his “saving grace”. The Japanese woman grossed out by American eating habits ended up cooking Thanksgiving dinner causing her triangular points to soften into curves resembling the American circles that surrounded her. Our big city girl escaped a small east Texas town and learned, “Where you’re from doesn’t have to define who you are.”
Of equal importance is what students learned about language from visual texts. “I learned that I could say much more with pictures than I could with words,” discovering firsthand that age-old adage about images producing entire tomes. To keep them from trying to illustrate each sentence, they were advised to start with the introduction and the conclusion, or lesson, and then judge how many panels they would need to fill in the middle, forcing them to boil down their 500- to 750-word stories. “While a cohesion of form is essential to the identity and personality of the project, the sweetest fruit of them all is simplification. Trimming away the festering fat proved the key to mobility, pace, and clarity.” This is the key to concise thinking and writing because “decid[ing] how to cut down whole sentences and make them into just a couple of words” doesn’t allow any side trips away from the thesis, which is so often the case in the standard college essay. They learned new things about themselves as writers since “it inadvertently taught me multiple ways to deal with writer’s block, and also a couple new techniques on how to engage the reader.” But most of all, they learned about themselves. “Taking my essay and introducing it in the form of a graphic novel allowed me to express more deeply my feelings of alienation.” Raw feelings students were “unsure [they] wanted to share…with everyone. This was a very personal experience and it became even more personal when I added the drawings.” Ultimately, most of them summed up their learning experience in a similar fashion. “By using graphics, the author can send a more direct and clear message to the reader.” And that, dear reader, is the key to being a good writer of written or visual texts.
In the next installment: Exploring horror with graphic adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe.
Below, see some examples of students' work in the class:
