Associate Teaching Professor Northeastern University Northeastern University
Multi-frame comics are well suited to reflection on service-learning because they afford learners an opportunity to make sense of their experience through storytelling and have potential to render incremental learning concrete and visible. This lightning talk examines how undergraduate international students at a US-based university created comic strips to reflect on their communication during service-learning. Creating comics obligates students to attend to relational and contextual factors that influence their interactions during service that can easily be overlooked in a written reflection. In this talk, I will describe how students created comics to reflect on communication challenges, misunderstandings, and successes. Drawing from Hymes’ SPEAKING framework for the ethnography of communication, I will then explore elements of communication relevant to a range of service-learning settings. Throughout, I will share examples of student-made comics that demonstrate that notable learning happens in taken-for-granted situations, such as greetings or moments of self-doubt. Attendees will gain insights into the learner experience through the information conveyed in the drawings, dialogue, and thought bubbles in students’ comics.
