Beyond School

Awake and refreshed now. Neurons still firing from a heady mental cocktail blending the Shanghai Learning 2.0 Conference, my RSS subscription to Crooks and Liars (my favorite political blog), the creative potential of iLife for student-people and teacher-people alike and, five minutes ago, a dash of eureka inspired by reader comments to a week-old and month-old post on this blog.

Crooks and Liars linked to an ACLU online graphic novel about racial profiling that caught this English teachergeek’s eye. I followed the link and read the comic. Here are a couple frames:

Then I thought of my AP Literature King Lear project (we’re adapting the Lear story to the present, re-writing the verse as contemporary English prose, still in dramatic format, on our King Lear Street Talk wiki, after which we’ll record “radio theater” performances of it for publication on Librivox).

I thought of two reader comments of late that gave me ideas I wouldn’t otherwise have had (the power of blogging-as-conversation, again, for Those Who Still Don’t Get It): One of those readers - also a writer, in what I want to call the “reader/writer web,” since this new web turns all of us who use it into a new breed of reader/writer/audience/co-thinker - was Diane Cordell (her Journeys here). Reading one of Diane’s posts a month ago, in which she posted a comic creation she’d made on ToonDo, led to me making one of my own here. This led to Diane’s comment,

You DO realize that the next step might be to create graphic novels - or graphic poetry anthologies.

I loved the Illustrated Classics comic books (not the abridged novels we use now for reluctant readers) that were published when I was a child - I’d be interested in seeing how your class portrayed good old J. Alfred - or tackled Blake’s Tyger. Or re-interpreted Beowulf (maybe you could collaborate with Christian Long’s Brit Lit class). Frankenstein might also be fun to tinker with.

Then I thought of another comment from Patrick Higgins of the always-excellent Chalkdust, replying to my post about the Lear project. Patrick wrote,

I am going to scout out our curriculum tomorrow for our AP Lit teachers and see if they, too are reading King Lear and have them [meaning "the students," I think - and being an ESL specialist, I see the value here] use your page as “cheat sheet” when they have difficulty.

And it hit me: Diane was right about Classics Illustrated comics in the Old Days - I loved them. I remember getting an A on a high school English class essay on the Iliad based on the comic version * And Patrick underscored the usefulness of such a product.**

And we have Apple’s Comic Life bundled on our students’ MacBooks, plus ToonDo online, for two options for making a modern King Lear graphic novel.

The only problem I can see is time. Making the graphic novel still requires the re-writing on the wiki, so creating the comic art would add more hours to the project. But I still think the graphic novel idea is pedagogically valuable, because that genre differs from the prose wiki format in a way uniquely tailored to benefit student writing in the much-needed area of verbal economy. Look at this panel from the ACLU comic and you’ll see what I mean:

The graphic novel, by restricting text to limited fields - narration boxes, speech and thought bubbles - forces economy in a way that text-only writing does not. And economy - saying the most with the fewest words possible - is a stylistic skill sorely in need of training for my seventeen-year-olds (and let me beat you to the punch by confessing I need it, on these pages, as well).

So if anybody else out there is reading Lear this year, and is interested in collaborating…. If we could divide the labor, my 35 students creating the book alongside yours, just picture the final product: a talking graphic novel - wiki-based? - with mp3 performances of each page embedded on the page. How cool would that be?

—

*That Comics Illustrated Iliad was probably better than many of the lame, archaic prose translations high schools assign out of either cluelessness or cost-consciousness. I can’t believe how many English classes I’ve seen using horrible, 100-year-old translations of the classics that I would hate to read, but that students, due to the Victorian or otherwise stilted English of those bargain-basement translations, would have a hard time even understanding - when there are fantastic new translations in our own generation’s English that might bring those classics to life in the classroom. Examples: Stephen Mitchell’s new Gilgamesh translation, Theo Cuffe’s new Penguin translation of Candide, Jack Zipes’ recent Signet adaptation of Burton’s translation of The Arabian Nights. Yet teachers still buy the Dover editions. *shudder*

**I shared Patrick’s comment with my classes, and they saw the sense of what he noted, and seemed to see that this was more real-world than a stupid homework or school project because it would be used Out There in the World. Thanks, Patrick. Getting students to understand the Beyond School goal is incredibly difficult.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

1. Shaking Up Shakespeare: an AP Literature Mash-Up _King Lear_ Project
2. Learning 2.0 Conference Shanghai Mashup 1.1: Exotic Soundtrack
3. Back to the Students: Invitation to a Collaborative Flat World Writing Project (redux and update)

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