A small update with tons of comics making activities that I do in classes for you to try for yourself or with students!
First, I did an interview with Michael Hawley for the Podcast the Well Read Investor. A fun conversation – we got into my back story, my creative process, and a lot of thoughts about the importance of comics and visual thinking in education and for everyone. Available at the Well-Read Investor here. And, oh yes – in April I gave a Keynote to the UK Transitions 9 Comics Conference (which was to have been in person a year prior). I’m not sure if the talk is available online yet, but some of the sketchnotes made during it are, and I’ve shared them here.
This has been, to say the least, a challenging year (not) in the classroom. But despite everything, I have to applaud my students for doing some of the most amazing work I’ve seen in my years teaching comics. I took some time end of this term to document EVERYTHING I did in my Spring Making course – that includes my outline, ALL the activities we did in class and projects students did on their own, and that is accompanied with a ton of examples of student work for each of these activities. It’s all available on the Education part of my site here, and I hope you’ll check it out to spark some ideas for yourself or to put into practice with students. And I’d welcome any sharing back if you do end up incorporating in classes – would love to see how it goes for you. I’ve fully documented a few other classes over the years (and I’d do more, but it takes a long time to get everything organized!) and all of those are available along with my syllabi and all the teaching resources I’ve compiled here.
In part, I compiled this so fully as I’ll be on sabbatical this Fall to work on the sequel to Unflattening currently titled Nostos. I’m grateful to have received the Marcus Transformative Research Award from San Francisco State University to make this time to work possible. (Details on that and the two other recipients here.) Even though I’m off, our growing Comics Studies program will be rolling along with a slate of cool classes for the fall. We graduated another great group of students this spring, and have lots of big plans for the coming years with where we’ll go with this program (learn more about CS at State here).
I’m plugging away on Nostos, it’s been slow, particularly with everything of the past year and a half, but I’m thrilled with how it’s taking shape. Hope to have more to share in the months. – Nick