The Story Behind the ‘Comic/Photonovel Project’: A talk by Aggeliki Papakonstantinou in 10th Teaching & Learning Conference 2016

It was a great pleasure to participate in the Learning and Teaching Conference at Sheffield. It gave me the opportunity to share my experience but also to listen to other great ideas and practices.

The title of my presentation was: ‘Generation Y: the Visual Learner’. I shared the idea of this project with you few months ago (March, 2015) in our blog. I thought it would be more interesting to go through the story behind the scenes now…

The idea behind came when reading an article about Generation Y and its characteristics. What caught my attention was the phrase: "Short attention spans, stimulation overloaded and even attention deficit disorder". I remembered a discussion we had with another colleague teaching Marketing as well to level 2 students. For many years now during the first week he was asking them to recall the basic theory on consumer decision making process. Very few students were able to remember the theory. I was surprised by that fact and I was wondering why a person who has written a project on the topic and also had the chance to answer an exam question on the same topic was not able to remember it.

  

On the other hand, although not a fanatic reader of comics I was always admiring the technique, the design and the stories. Comics and photonovels have always been considered as a popular form of entertainment almost never used for learning purposes. During 1990s though the first ‘academic’ comic books appeared. Comics which were created by academics and were actually referring to students. The aim was/is to facilitate students with new and difficult concepts. As a student I clearly remember the series: “For beginners"…. "Foucault for Beginners", "Postmodernism for beginners". Still, it was us to create and produce comics for students.

Having these into my mind I came up with this project. The question for me was: why don’t we have students to create a comic for us? By doing so they will remain focused and will also be able to recall at least few basic theories for the years to come. They love technology, they love pictures and most of all they all want to share their own stories (check Facebook).

In other words…The aim of this project is to:

• Understand in depth the theory
• Remember the theory; be able to recall after a long period of time
• Sense the excitement and get involved in their own story (GenY uses extensively social media to tell their own stories)
• Engage their imagination
• Increase their retention
• Work with technology
• Develop their critical thinking
• Work effectively in teams
• Develop their presentation skills
• Have FUN

I was happily surprised to find out that more students are now able to remember the theory when progressing to Level 2. I was really happy to see them also presenting their project in the Student Spring Symposium. I was happy I could share their success and experience with the colleagues at Sheffield as well. It was great to participate in the Learning and Teaching Conference for the second time. 

Aggeliki Papakonstantinou 
BAED UG Programme Director

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All presentation of the Teaching & Learning Conference are available at:
http://conferencesheffield2016.blogspot.co.uk/