CSotD: Graphic topics
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Friend-of-the-Blog Brian Fies passed along an educational comic about an interesting woman of whom I had not heard, Gertrude Bell, in large part because she reminded him of Nellie Bly, of whom I did a children's biography a few years back.
Bell and Bly come out of a period in which a lot of very intelligent women emerged and carved for themselves, including a lot who put their energy into the suffrage movement, which means, on the one hand, it's good to learn about each, while, on the other hand, you need to be conscious of not considering them as too singular: Rather, they were pioneers in a world about to shift.
From a cartooning point of view, the interesting factor here is the interactivity of the feature, which you have to visit the site to experience: There, the cartoon includes red dots that are clickable and open up primary sources on Bell's life and travels.
Primary sources are a very big deal in education and graphic novels are a very big deal with young readers, so that this kind of cartooning would be welcome in classrooms, at least those able to break free of bubble sheets long enough to teach.
I'm not sure that this particular piece, which has a kind of "and then she did this and then she did that" flatness to the surface narrative, will draw in the reluctant readers, but the sponsoring school, Newcastle University, has an extensive collection of additional interactive resources among which any teacher of about fourth grade and above would be able to find plenty of applicable and compelling curricula.
And graphic interactivity isn't just for teaching history: Two years ago, nearly to the day, I featured a pair of interactive comics from Cartoon Movement, including this piece on the homeless in Brazil, well-timed as the country began to retool for the World Cup.
In this piece, the interactivity allows you to spend a day in the company of a homeless man in one of the cities that was a main host for the World Cup, with an intimacy that would not have been captured in mere words and pictures.
Meanwhile, Kenyan cartoonist Victor Ndula offered this look at an irrigation project, part of an anti-hunger initiative, in which the interactivity once more created an immediacy by opening photographs and videos, but in a somewhat more informational than emotional context, and I cited him in my write-up as noting how the penetration of smartphones in the Third World enables this kind of communication and civic education.
There is no piece of curriculum that will teach itself, no matter how interactive, for which teachers should be grateful, or else why employ them at all?
But these pieces do solve an issue of time: It's all well and good to have a bibliography, but the demands on teachers rarely allow them to get around to all the things they wish they could do in order to add that kind of variety and immediacy to lessons. To have it come packaged is beyond valuable.
Meanwhile, in current events
John Branch comments on the overturn of Houston's human rights law, a defeat being chalked up to a well-financed campaign of panic and misinformation about the nature of transgender individuals, centering on public bathrooms.
Other cartoonists have weighed in, but the directness of his approach appeals to me, not only because it doesn't require a lot of background and interpretation, but because it has more application than simply to this particular campaign.
It's not the only case this week where a small but dedicated group was able to triumph through the simple strategy of showing up and voting. It seems pretty foolish to whine about hate groups having their way with the system, because for all the voter suppression that is real, the balance still rests on turnout.
Back when it was the anti-war, pro-union people who worked the phone banks, conducted registration drives and offered voters rides to the polls, their side won.
Now the other side is expending the shoe leather and elbow grease.
And there is an educational component to this, too:
Dylan Edwards has a short graphic memoir at Fusion about his effort to explain transgender identity to his grandmother, who becomes a focal point for the greater issue of explaining it to the world.
Starting with the issue of explaining it to yourself when your identity has no visibility in the world.
As the Houston vote shows, there's a lot of ignorance on the topic, and, while it's not all malicious, it is still not helpful to have people consider sexuality a conscious choice, or to conflate homosexuality with pederasty with being transgender.
Edwards is right: If the only stories about transgender people you see are stories where being transgender provokes a crisis, that's not going to make the identity easy to embrace, nor does it help explain it to others.
Then again, how helpful are "Very Special Editions" of shows? Is it "normal" to be "very special"?
And at what point does being sensitive cross the line into the not-okay area of bringing up the topic of basketball with your black co-worker who doesn't watch sports?
Even those of us who aren't being deliberately ignorant can be unintentionally ignorant.
And I'm kind of betting that trans people wish Bruce Jenner hadn't wandered into Kardashianland before coming out. It probably wasn't the best context in which to demonstrate normalcy.
Which is why well-done memoirs like this, with a sense of perspective and even a sense of humor, matter.
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