Comics and Graphic Narratives
Comics and Graphic Narratives
Purpose: to help other instructors teaching the same course
Common Course ID: CWL 213
CSU Instructor Open Textbook Adoption Portrait
Abstract: This open textbook is being utilized in a humanities course for undergraduate or graduate students by Crystal Lie at California State University Long Beach. The open textbook provides students with access to a webcomic for free. The main motivation to adopt an open textbook was to reduce the cost to students. Most student access the open textbook in online format.
CWL 213: Comics & Graphic Narratives
Brief Description of course highlights: Introductory study of Comics and Graphic Novels across cultures and within global contexts by emphasizing visual narrative storytelling as well as the political, social and visual trends that have shaped the powerful creative industry of comics around the world.
Student population: Typically undergraduates and non-majors since this is a GE class, but some majors take it as well. No previous preparation needed. General Education: Lower Division C - Arts and Humanities
Learning or student outcomes: List student learning outcomes for the course.
- Identify the basic “grammar” of the comics, or the chief visual-verbal narrative techniques used to convey meaning.
- Explain fundamental theoretical approaches to the study of graphic narratives.
- Discuss different traditions and (sub)genres of graphic narratives and their social, historical, and cultural significance.
- Apply theoretical approaches to (a) your reading of different graphic narratives and (b) creating your own graphic narrative.
- Analyze the unique affordances and limitations of comics as a medium in regard to accessibility, representation, and inclusion.
Key Challenges faced and how resolved: One of the challenges of this class is how expensive the books are (since this is a lit class, they add up!).
Textbook or OER/Low cost Title:
Brief Description: HANDSAIL Publishing is the Deaf owned online business by Matt Daigle. Matt is a well-known cartoonist who co-created the webcomic “That Deaf Guy.” He was inspired to establish HANDSAIL based on his own needs as an instructor and the scarcity of ASL educational materials available to teachers and families. HANDSAIL marries his loves of art and ASL, and the results are materials that are both aesthetically pleasing and utilitarian.
Please provide a link to the resource
Authors:
Kirstie Poulson, Matt Daigle
Student access: MERLOT or through the direct link
Supplemental resources: The source has a number of Deaf culture centered comics for students to read
Provide the cost savings from that of a traditional textbook. $20-25
License: copyrighted by Handsail publishing according to website, listed as Creative Commons “Unknown” on Merlot
OER/Low Cost Adoption Process
Provide an explanation or what motivated you to use this textbook or OER/Low Cost option. To save students money and introduce them to webcomics as well as Deaf culture
How did you find and select the open textbook for this course? Browsed Merlot but also knew about these comics before
Sharing Best Practices: It's good to mix up required purchased texts with digital options and things you can scan yourself
Describe any key challenges you experienced, how they were resolved and lessons learned. Sometimes it’s hard to go fully low cost because you really need the specific literature offered (I teach literature courses) but there are more and more digital options that are cheaper
Instructor Name
Crystal Yin Lie, PhD
Please provide a link to your university page. https://cla.csulb.edu/departments/complit/faculty-and-staff/
Please describe the courses you teach. I am a literature professor at CSULB. I teach comics & graphic narratives, introduction to health humanities, and literature & medicine
Describe your teaching philosophy and any research interests related to your discipline or teaching.
The goals of my courses are to facilitate opportunities for students’ “light-bulb moments”—transformative, transferrable instances of connection and self-knowledge—as they navigate texts in ways specific to them based on their interests, concerns, and experiences. I believe that training students to be more attentive readers of the way discourse, power, and knowledge are interwoven in narrative helps build critical consciousness and ethical communication skills, serving to empower students’ educational, professional, and personal pursuits long after class is over. Whether teaching writing, topics in literature, or disability studies and the health humanities, I am driven by commitments to accessibility, interdisciplinarity, teaching transferrable knowledge and skills, and engaged learning. In each of these interrelated facets, I consider the diverse ways my students communicate and learn, and with peer and student feedback, I continue to revise my approaches to supporting them.