The Visual made Audible – Co-constructing Sound Effects as Devices of Comic Book Literacy in Primary School

Abstract

This paper analyses and discusses ongoing comics literacy events where two 3rd Grade students and their teachers are working with comic books, focusing specifically on visual representations of sound. The purpose of the paper is to explore how these representations, as multimodal aspects of comics literacy, provoke literacy experiences in the classroom. Visual representations of sound come in different shapes and sizes, but are generally written outside of speech bubbles in bold letters. Using discursive psychology –allowing the researcher to view participants’ verbal and embodied actions as performing actions in social and situated contexts– the current paper analyses how pairs of students and teachers co-construct visual aspects in comic books, translating them into verbal sound and embodied action. Results show that embodied motion, sensation, and audible sound are utilized to interactively display comic sound effects to enhance the reader’s experience of the narrative. This is done as co-construction between adult and child through re-enactment of the visuals as real-life sound and action –also connecting this to other visual aspects of adjacent panels in order to make this meaningful. The paper argues that this challenges both teachers’ and students’ perceptions of what literacy can be and how sound effects –through the shape, colour and font of the graphic text– influence and enliven the comic narratives created in the classroom.

Humour, empathic concern and perspective‐taking in children. Cartooning about social inequality

“…This is not the case with comics, a close genre that is widely used in classrooms. The pedagogical value of composing comics has shown how this creative activity helps students place themselves as authors and critical readers (Issa, 2017), refines rhetorical consciousness and fosters multiliteracies (Comer, 2015; Wallner, 2020), generates engagement (Williams, 2008) and cross‐curricular links (Ogier & Ghosh, 2017). In line with the pedagogical value of composing comics, Motherwell McFarlane (2019) proposed a social justice comics lesson plan which consisted of asking adolescents to create stick‐figure comics in order to enhance their understanding of social injustices related to Indigenous people.…”

La creación de humor gráfico como espacio de problema cognitivo-comunicativo en adolescentes

“…Es en el campo de la historieta que algunos estudios han analizado los recursos narrativos gráficos en relación con el contexto educativo y considerando aspectos de la alfabetización multimodal. Se han ocupado por conocer qué recursos emplean los niños y/o adolescentes al crear historietas con y sin un andamiaje educativo en un contexto formal (Pitri, 2011;Segovia, 2009;Teberosky et al, 2010;Wallner, 2020).…”

“…La historieta, ha recibido mayor atención en contextos educativos de diversos niveles (Carl, 2010;Hill, 2017;Vento Escartí, 2012). Se ha destacado su valor para atraer lectores (Chandler-Olcott y Mahar, 2003), para desarrollar pensamiento creativo (Williams, 2008;Wright y Sherman, 1999;Ziv, 1989), para fomentar la imaginación y la curiosidad (Johnson, 2017), para practicar determinadas habilidades (por ejemplo toma de decisiones, véase Shoji y Pateman, 2004), para trabajar pensamiento crítico sobre temáticas determinadas (Bickford, 2016;Krusemark, 2015), para trabajar sobre los aspectos multimodales y/o retóricos de los textos (Pantaleo, 2011;Watkins, 2014) y la forma de interpretarlos (Wallner, 2020), para trabajar sobre la autobiografía (Hughes, King, Perkins y Fuke, 2011). También se ha promovido la creación de historietas mediante el uso de plataformas interactivas, (por ejemplo www.makebeliefscomix.com, en Zimmerman, 2006Zimmerman, -2020 o "Storyboardthat": https://www.storyboardthat.com/comicmaker), con diversos propósitos, primando el desarrollo de pensamiento crítico sobre problemáticas sociales cuando se trata de adolescentes (Bamford y Francoise, 2001).…”

“…Asimismo, hemos visto que si bien los trabajos en torno a la interpretación de humor gráfico e historieta son relativamente numerosos, los de producción son bastante escasos y toman como objeto fundamentalmente a la historieta (e.g. Carl, 2010;Segovia, 2009Segovia, , 2010Teberosky et al, 2010;Vento Escarti, 2012;Wallner, 2020;Watkins, 2014).…”