The Public Humanities Exchange program (HEX and HEX-U) at the UW-Madison Center for the Humanities funds innovative public humanities projects that forge partnerships between community organizations and UW-Madison students.
The following blog post is written by current HEX Scholar Tracey Bullington.
Bullington’s project, Youth Climate Stories through Comics, aims to engage fifth grade students around topics of natural disasters and earth systems. Students will each create a comic that uses words and images to tell stories of resilience through natural disasters and/or that envisions climate justice across landscapes of the future. Students’ visual narratives will be collected, printed in a collaborative comic anthology, and celebrated at a book launch event. The project allows students to demonstrate learning about the complex interactions between communities and their natural environments and to share their visions for a more just and sustainable natural world.
On a Tuesday afternoon in Ms. Pellerin’s fifth grade classroom this past spring, students are hard at work creating comics around the topic of natural disasters. But the scene is far from the stereotypical classroom of students seated in rows, quietly working through the same sequence of step-by-step instructions. Instead, the classroom is a flurry of varied activity. One student talks softly to his computer as he dictates the details of his story using speech-to-text technology. He describes an imagined scene of navigating an earthquake’s aftermath inspired by a historical event. Across the room, a group of students sit close together on a window seat, laughing as they color with markers. One member of the group shows her friends a drawing of a Taylor Swift concert, now filled with brightly colored dots and lines. She’s coloring an illustrated story about acid rain, but the setting of her narrative is a performance of her favorite pop diva. All around the classroom, students are in motion and in dialogue: they borrow supplies from one another, use the smart board to display images, and consult their friends for assistance: “Can you help me draw a donkey?”
This scene is a typical class session during the project Youth Climate Stories through Comics, a Humanities Exchange project that integrated the writing, drawing, and publication of comics within a curricular unit on earth systems and natural disasters. I was first introduced to this group of students and their teacher in the fall of 2023 by my graduate advisor Dr. Emily Machado in the department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After spending several afternoons as a research assistant, taking field notes and interviewing students about their learning, I knew I wanted to design an additional project that would allow me to continue spending time in their classroom. The room felt alive in a way that is hard to describe: kids were always asking imaginative questions, helping each other, laughing, and moving around the space. It just felt good to be there!
Lucky for me, classroom teacher Kristin Pellerin was excited to collaborate on an arts-integrated literacy unit that leveraged my expertise as a former art teacher. We designed our lesson plans around the theme of natural disasters: this topic was not only required content in the fifth grade curriculum, but also played to each of our strengths as educators. Kristin is especially passionate about issues of social justice, and prompted her students to ask critical questions as we considered which communities are most affected by natural disasters and who gets access to resources. Kristin also encouraged me to share my lived experience as part of the unit. As a native New Orleanian, natural disasters–specifically hurricanes–had a large impact on my life growing up, and I talked with students about living through hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. The Center for the Humanities’ Humanities Exchange Program (HEX) provided crucial support in executing the unit. We used HEX funds to purchase fine line markers for the entire class which students needed to color the tiny details of their comic panels. Perhaps most importantly, HEX funding allowed us to print color copies of a collaborative class comics anthology at the end of the unit. Seeing their work in print helped students to recognize the importance of their work in a new way and to share their stories with family and friends.
Kristin and I kicked off the unit with a solid plan; we mapped out the project through a series of discrete steps. Students would each choose a topic, write a narrative from start to finish, and add illustrations over class sessions spanning several weeks. The biggest surprise of the project was the variety of ways that students approached drawing and writing, gently pushing back against our plans as they molded the project to work for them. Students switched up the intended order of steps, used tools and resources in the classroom that I hadn’t planned for, and collaborated with one another in ways that I did not anticipate.
For example, one student Maggie chose to draw her story first rather than starting with words as I suggested. When I asked Maggie about this decision she explained, “drawing is better to start off with… because when you draw, it shows [you] what’s gonna happen. If you write what happens, it doesn’t always turn out that way.” As we talked, Maggie pointed to her illustrations showing a dystopian narrative about a mall that mysteriously began to shake and fill with sand. She explained that she didn’t know what the ending of her story would be when she started but that the process of drawing allowed her to discover the story piece by piece.
Another student, Lina, pushed back against my instructions to write individual stories by working closely with one of her teachers. Lina and her teacher created a comic about siblings who navigated a series of crises when they were left home alone and took turns scribing the text in Google docs. When I asked how she got her ideas, Lina recounted parts of the story that she invented (a stranger who threatened to kidnap the children) and parts that were contributed by her teacher (a fallen powerline causing an electrical fire). Rather than viewing support from her teacher as against the rules, Lina proudly described their collaboration.
The varied approaches of students created an atmosphere that was abuzz with activity and laughter, with art supplies covering desks and slipping on to the floor. While at first glance the environment might have appeared disorderly, students were hard at work. Each student experienced the creative freedom to tell a story that they found inspiring in ways that worked for them. The student’s varied and dynamic final comic anthology illustrates that there are as many ways to tell a story as there are stories to tell.
Note: Student names are pseudonyms to protect student anonymity.