Think Visually

Comics Plus

Provides digital access to comic books, including graphic novels, adaptations of classic stories, and manga. Great resource for students to explore new text structures and relatable stories.

Slideshow with information about the structure of graphic novels and its connection with meaning.

Reach out to the Media Center for an in-class presentation and guided analysis of comics as critical texts.

The three assignments below encourage students to compare traditional mediums (like a novel) with something from Comics Plus to consider how medium impacts meaning and reader reception. Beyond analyzing both texts, students are encouraged to reflect on which medium they connect to better.

Navigating Media Depictions

Students consistently move between different mediums, often translating their experiences multiple times before landing on a final expression.

Media Center collaborations help explore those translations in our subject areas. What changes in biology if students encounter it in a diagram rather than a writen description? What can students gain by looking at a number of depictions as part of their analysis?

Explore the sample from of the depictions of Dorian Gray in comics, film, art, and even a coloring page. Every resource for this comparison came from Media Center resources.

Google Arts & Culture

Google Arts & Culture pulls together art and manuscripts from museums around the world as individual scans with background information. Museums have also created online exhibits about specific topics that bring together multiple pieces of art and information to show connections.

Exploring the artistic products of different eras or culture can give students insight into the values that drive that culture. We can ask students to notice trends from a collection of works to infer the values they will find there. It can make a great intro to a unit.

Reach out to the Media Center for help gathering pieces together, embed them into Google Classroom, or building your own galleries to share with students.

Concept Attainment - Aestheticism

In this example, we used pieces gathered from Goolge Arts & Culture, along with other texts, to help students get insight into the period of Aestheticism before reading The Picture of Dorian Gray.

There is a range of things you can find and do with Art & Culture beyond ELA and Social Studies.

Porcelain often has botanical inspirations that aim to depict a plant with many of its parts (flowers, fruit, leaves, etc.).

The Georgia Botanical Garden has explored these connections, incorporating a porcelain museum alongside its botanical collections.

Follow the Experts

Through many careers, traditional projects do not look like an essay, or not only an essay. The task usually has more layers.

The Media Center has resources to orient students to those types of projects, such as helping them find projects to try out for themselves.

For the context of Creative Writing, we considered that few authors write in a vacuum or just begin writing. Many begin with a language (Tolkien), and image (Lewis), or a map (Faulkner) and fill the story in around that.

Beginning with this map of William Faulkner's fictional county, students learned about mapping in storytelling before they created their own map to tell a story.

Our Assignment

Part I: Brainstorm

Create a list of 4 human-made and 4 natural landmarks. For each landmark, consider its meaning.
Natural Landmarks: What do they symbolize? Is there a pathetic fallacy associated with it? Do some deep brainstorming here.
Human-Made Landmarks: Is there a history behind that landmark? Does it allude to another place/time? If you were to describe it with Prosopopoeia, what characteristics would it have?
Create a list of 10 Place Names. For each Place Name, consider its meaning.
1. Does your place name represent the history of the land (example, it has a Native American name)
2. Does your place name symbolize what it represents (example, “New Hope Cemetery" could offer hope to the Bundrens)?
3. Does your place name allude to another piece of literature or history?

Part II: Outline a Plot

Using Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth structure, outline a plot that you will set in your land.
You should:
1. Have a major event for each part of Campbell’s Hero Journey (9 events total)
2. You need to think deeply about how these events are connected with the place names and landmarks from Part I. The symbolism of your landmark or place should add a layer of meaning to the events happening there. This is how your setting will impact your story/characters.

Part III: Mapping

Your Map should include:
1. All of your human-made and natural landmarks
2. All of your place names
3. A map title (this can be one of your ten place names)
4. All of your events with a path guiding us through the story

Sample Maps

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