A new semester, and yet another new class – my 7th semester in a row of coming up with a new class and designing a new drawn syllabus (third time I’ve done them as mini-comics)! It’s a lot, but I’m pleased with how it came out and super excited for the class and where we’ll go together! This is CMX326 Comics in Education. (Note, You can see all of my syllabi and teaching resources collected on my site here.) My first time teaching comics was while still a doc student at Teachers College, and that set the tone for much of my teaching since. All of my classes have elements for that first one, so for this one, I’m trying to look very specifically at the ways comics can be used in educational settings – how to deal with state standards, to support literacy and neurodivergent minds, address censorship, argue why comics belong in education, and much much more.  I mapped it all out here, and now we are off and doing it! If you want to print, cut, fold, and staple your own mini-comic, here’s the PDF for that. And to read it as a PDF online, that’s here. (I uploaded a text-only version too here.) As I did with the Superhero Course, I’ve decided to make a permanent page devoted to this class, and you can find that here. All the resources, activities, and such I do with CMX326 Comics in Education, we’ll live there.

 

Like Spring semester’s Superhero course, I made the syllabus as a larger mini-comic, a format I came across in Scott McCloud and Raina Telgemeier’s Cartoonist’s Club. See the excerpt below from their book for how to print and fold your own in this format! And see here for all my compiled resources on how to make mini comics of all sorts!

See resources and activities in this page I made on a Comics Workshop of Teachers, and here for Teaching One’s Own Comics class! Some of the books I used to prep for class and featured in the syllabus drawings.

The syllabus itself demands a key to all the references, a proper annotation! I’m tempted to leave it as a game to see who can spot them all, but I’ll likely update here as I can all the things I drew on, referenced to create it. It’s a lot, and much of it is drawn tiny, and pretty sketchily!