Graphic narratives and digital mapping in the world language and culture classroom

Graphic narratives and digital mapping in the world language and culture classroom

Presenters: Drs. Lynn Wolff and Matthew Handelman

In this workshop, we will present a major component of our newly revised third-year German language and culture course that was piloted during the fall 2017 semester: Our work with the graphic novel Der Boxer by Reinhard Kleist (2012) and a digital mapping project that provided ways to explore how time, space, and place are intertwined in the graphic novel’s stories about the Holocaust. This component of the course had two main goals:

(1) Help students gain a deeper understanding of the Holocaust and Second World War as told in words and images in the graphic novel;

(2) Give students the opportunity to engage with a graphic novel – through visualization, contextualization, description, and analysis – beyond what is possible in the traditional essay form.

By bringing graphic narratives and digital projects into the language classroom, we hope to enable students to critically engage with contemporary approaches to the memory and representation of topics as (seemingly) familiar as the Holocaust. We look forward to sharing the results of this project and to discussing the ways that graphic narratives and digital projects can enhance the study of language and culture.