Multimodality, ‘New Literacies & New Basics’:
Serious Comics & L2 Graphic Texts
Select Option #1 or #2 or #3
- Use ComicLife (for Mac/PC Windows). If you dig this tool, I can get you a full license.
Option 1) Serious Comic: Putting Multimodality to Work: Starting from the Lotherington & Jenson article, create a multimodal graphic text that explores and develops concepts or themes from the reading (e.g., serious play, ludic epistemology, flat to 4D literacies, L2 learning culture/identity texts, convergence culture, participation).
Integrate at least two key quotes from the text/s. Please dig deep into the theory – and have fun playing with the media tool, coming up with interesting and innovative ways to present knowledge and/or tell a ‘theory story’ mobilizing the ideas from the text (or other readings or experiences).
You can also create a meta novel (if you wish) where you explore opportunities of multimodal text production and theory as you create your graphic narrative.
Option 2) L2/Culture Serious Comic: If your first language is not English, this is an opportunity for you to mobilize your L1 (language/cultural-capital) as a semiotic and cultural resource.
Create an L2 dual-language comic that integrates L1 and L2 (w/ English in translation) and that tells a story about language, culture, diversity, place, identity, etc. (also explored in article by Lotherington & Jenson). You may explore your own experiences, stories, conflicts, and histories navigating language, identity and culture).
If you choose option 2, ensure that the text is dual-language (both languages appear together, somewhat like a polyglot text, though in graphic narrative form).
Option 3) After reading the Option 1 and 2 – come up with your own innovative, ‘template-breaking’ take on digital storytelling using ComicLife – and that pushes the aesthetic, technical and storytelling boundaries of the tool or the graphic text/comic genre.
You can create a multimodal narrative, memoir, an inquiry-based research-based document (based on your own interests/aims), or some kind of experimental work that bends/remixes genres and creates something ‘novel’.
You can also blend in elements of option 1 or 2, or devise your own storytelling conceit and trajectory…
Expectations: Serious Comic does not mean you have to be grim, humorless or dourly solemn in your approach. Serious Comic means that you simply take the communicative possibilities of the genre seriously in conveying ideas and experiences in narrative form…
- Find a few good design models (‘available designs’) – and remix and (re)design. Avoid creating a simple ‘comic strip’ or ‘cartoon’ and experiment with the affordances of the tool.
- Use ComicLife and reflect upon what you do as you experiment with genres, remix practices, original images, curated images, style and the ‘grammar’ of multimodal design, etc…
- Three-Four Page (minimum): Post to wiki > no page limit if you want to keep going.
- See image below for genre conventions to consider.
Due before Class 8, but start having fun now so we can reflect the experience and process of ‘making’ and multimodal design, and explore what and how people learn through remix and digital storytelling.
