Eric Kallenborn and three of his students at Oak Lawn Community High School recently had the chance to contribute to a new instructional manual on comics and graphic novels.
In just a week, Kallenborn, chair of the school’s Fine Arts department, churned out a script detailing what was happening in a comic strip and his students — Elliot Flores, Taylor Fabian and Ola Abdelazeez — produced pages of illustrations.
Their efforts should help students just like them in their studies down the road. The Oak Lawn group produced a comic strip called “Space Burger,” featuring a hungry astronaut who gets a cheeseburger but wonders how he can breathe while eating it.
The strip is part of a book which is expected out this spring, “Hacking Graphic Novels” by teaching specialist and literacy coach Sveta Miller.
Kallenborn is part of an online educational comics community and a friend suggested he shoot Miller an email expressing his interest in participating. The two got to talking and Miller asked Kallenborn to write a chapter with his comics lesson including student illustrators.
The trick was to nudge the students into following instructions carefully but also use their imaginations without seeing the comic beforehand.
“I think they handled it and adapted it really well,” said Kallenborn. “One of the things I’m learning from the process of using this assignment is it’s hard to dictate style. So while I said what was happening in each panel, it’s hard to capture style in words and you don’t want to have students not create in their own style.”
Their imaginations took off, making the work easier, according to the students.
“I found a lot of inspiration with comic books and how they draw their faces and also with cartoons like Garfield that have cartoon imagery but very well (done) imagery as well,” said Taylor Fabian, who is treasurer of National Arts Honors Society at OLCHS and has taken a number of art classes there. “I knew how I wanted the comic to look in my mind, through my imagination and having references make it all come together.”
Ola Abdelazeez, a senior who also contributed, said Kallenborn’s Comic Creation class “opened up my mind to new ideas and new techniques.” Her imagination played a big part, too.
“It helps to understand what is going on … imagining how the setting looks and the characters,” said Abdelazeez, also a member of the National Art Honor Society.
Kallenborn, a comics aficionado, has immersed himself in using the medium to teach students communication, focus and comprehension. He summed it up in a recent blog post on the assignment, which includes the student illustrations at http://theothercomicbookteacher.com/scripting-a-comic-a-classroom-exercise.
“Using comics in the classroom can certainly increase engagement, but the ultimate value is in using the form to develop students’ capacity to look with care, focus with intention, see possibilities in what is expressed or depicted, consider alternatives, ask increasingly nuanced questions, show their messy and unique thinking process, and bravely tell stories they would not have told in any other medium,” Kallenborn wrote in the post.
Comics are also a good way to absorb students’ attention when they might prefer technology to reading.
“It’s a new way of reading,” said Kallenborn. “We’re so connected to technology, bombarded with images all the time, so the way so many students take information is through images.
“The idea of allowing students to learn in a nondigital format with things that are still full of images is really great.”
Janice Neumann is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.
