Loosening the Straight-Away of Thinking: Comic-Making as Arts Education

Abstract

What are the possibilities created by teaching comic-making within the field of arts education? Existing research has explored comic-making as a route to the development of artistic skills and art appreciation, as well as showing how comic-making can be linked to explorations of identity and personal development. This paper asks what happens when comic-making is presented as a form of open-ended art practice, without set objectives or known outcomes. By drawing on the ideas and educational practices employed by cartoonist Lynda Barry, this paper puts forward an alternative approach to making comics in the classroom, by exploring what can be discovered by treating comic-making as the starting point rather than the destination of the learning experience.