by Amanda Brown (amariebr@umich.edu)
In teaching a Writing 100 course, Lecturer Scott Beal from the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) needed to assign an essay to his students, but he wanted a way to grant them creative freedom in the task as well. Beal decided to reach out to Instructional Support Services (ISS) at LSA.
“He wanted to offer students the opportunity to do an alternative mode of an essay,” Instructional Learning Consultant Carla Stellrecht said of Beal reaching out to ISS. “He offered them the option of a blog, a website or an audio-visual essay, but he was also keen on the idea of offering them comics as a possible opportunity.”
While ISS was eager to help, they didn’t have experience with comic projects. This is where Breanna Hamm, a Learning Technology Specialist from the U-M Library, came in.
“A couple years ago was when this [comic work] started,” explained Breanna. “[The U-M Library] did some translation work in a Greek course with Plato’s The Republic. That was cool because we got to add that visual component to The Republic. We also did a zine for an Arab American feminism course, which was more of a storytelling project.”
To allow the students to gain hands-on experience with the technology they could use, Carla and Breanna invited Beal and his students to the ISS Media Center during one of their class periods. During this visit, students rotated around multiple “stations”. Each “station” gave students a brief overview of different technology and equipment they could use for whichever format they chose for the alternative essay.
Collaboration between the U-M Library and ISS ensured that all students would have the information and resources necessary to complete their alternative essay in whichever format they chose to complete it in.
We really have to make sure we can rely on one another,” said Breanna of working with departments that support visual and multimedia projects. “There’s a lot of talented people, but we’re also limited, so we can’t always take on every request. This is why having the referral to other departments and other people is so important. If someone in another department, say, has a slower week or is more specialized in a certain area, a request can still be fulfilled.”
Carla also emphasized the value of collaboration in this project. “There is a tremendous benefit to all of us when we all keep in touch with one another. We can really utilize the expertise that already exists. For this project, we could have run out and quickly researched some comic apps, but we just would not have had the depth of experience that wound up being at the Library.”
(Illustration by Adam Buell and Davyn Abalone, http://platosrepubliccomic.com 2017)