Pedagogy and graphic narratives

The role of graphic narratives in representation of discourses has long been a part of India’s history and political culture. In recent past of independent Indian political history, images have on multiple occasions been the cause of political controversies at different points of time. The power of visual literacy has been largely undermined by the current educational systems and pedagogical practices in India, specifically when it is forms of visual literacy that have long been used to communicate to a population where textual literacy grew over decades. Integration of visual literacy, apart from communicating effectively various ideological positions, narratives, and discourses with education solves many other problems in students deal with irregular cognitive and feedback patterns. The following review of literature covers social, political impacts of graphic narratives, appropriation of historical narrative, and dimensions of integrating graphic narratives in curriculum.

In his dissertation, Dipesh Chakraborthy attempts to look at the evolution of graphic arts for massive consumption through the field of print advertisement in post-independent India. It takes looks specifically at humour as a means of communication in advertisement and how it has been deployed across creative media, including graphic arts. It locates the evolution of graphic art across what is considered history, although anachronistically use the term "graphic art" multiple times. However, the paper adds clearly the dimension of consumers and market and the association of these with commercial art, stating facts and information, and an overview of relationships among economic, political and social changes occurring in the nation at large.

McKlain’s essay about the institutional deployment of comic arts for a structured narrative as a publication material looks at comic book adaptation of MK Gandhi’s life and works, published in 1966. The author makes interesting observation of how history transforms when it comes to academic and visual histories of the Indian people, especially in relation to the nationalist struggle for independence. The essay views how transmedial narratology occurs in relation to history for nationalist agenda.

Multiple articles look at the controversies that have followed in textbooks on the usage of cartoons as political commentaries, and how they are seen as threat in terms of influencing ideas. As a tool, graphic narratives and their potential can be channelised as a powerful means of communication and an effective tool for sensitisation as children get socialised into their intangible environments.

In terms of case studies of the fragility and volatility of historical narratives, the Rudolphs assess political implications of history rectification commissioned by former PM Morarji Desai in 1977 on the Janata Party and contemporaneous ideas of secularism/communalism and the direct of implication of these complex discourses on Indian democracy. The authors mention that, “ […] the controversy became a public and political debate on how the writing and teaching of Indian history affect national identity and public philosophy”. The article juxtaposes this controversy with a loose idea of cultural policy implemented in the time. The article is essential in our understanding of textbook politics in India concerning nationalism and “secularist” discourses, the state’s tumultuous experience with history writing, and the intervention that historians have experienced in crafting narratives in regard to the Indian nation. This issues have sustained over time as we run into the second decade of the 21st Century.

Romila Thapar analyses how ancient Indian history has been interpreted differently in the past 200 years by different agencies with various vested interests in India. The work highlights not only the importance of ideology, but also places it in the Indian context to show how history is subject to interpretation determined by the background of the interpreter. The text points out many interpretational matters often not assessed with essential parameter, and treated with sufficient queries. The text is an important instance in our formation of our opinions of pedagogy of history.

The author’s understanding of the impact of visual narratives in pedagogy borrows heavily from C.W. Chun’s essay, which attempted to understand whether "using graphic novels in the classroom can help explain how language works both for and against people and enable students to acquire an appreciation for critical literacy." The author advocates multi-dimensional, critical literacy that are inculcated through graphic novels. He has located the crux of his argument in lingual literacy and takes instance of Maus by Art Speigelman. The paper is important to the study in understanding how multi-dimensional and critical literacy are understood, assessed, and can be worked towards in practice.

A paper by Decker and Castro, who function as university educators, explores the potential of graphic novels to communicate violence, war and genocides in their respective contexts, and weigh the usage of the work in an undergraduate classroom space. This essay dwells on Unknown Soldier, by Joshua Dysart and Alberto Ponticelli, which focuses on war and violence in Africa. Through this paper, one learns that the ability to construct the more difficult aspects of socio-political reality is something graphic novels have handled and communicated with efficacy, where the art, the text, and the engagement of the reader results in a quality understanding of a story and the context.

Communication of violence visually can be disconcerting idea, but to respond to desensitisaiton, one must also look at through what perspective the violence is being pictured. It is in order to speak about a paper by J. Hodapp, which aims to contextualise Joe Sacco’s works and focuses on the post-colonial factor in Sacco’s narratives, making his works extremely different from the Western mainstream media owing to the subaltern angle in his works. Hodapp looks at how the Sacco’s documentation of the lesser know aspects of conflicted areas, of different aspects of human suffering, the representation of which “troubles” the reader due to having built “institutional barriers” against such subjects. The work further goes on to analyse the discourses Sacco is engaging in to judge the full implications of his texts. Hodapp focuses on The Unwanted, Palestine, Kushinagar, and The Pilgrimage to assess Sacco’s postcolonial narratives. The instance of Kushinagar and his documentation of Dalit experiences only resonates the utter helplessness of human condition and the lack of agency to change that condition for themselves. Hodapp also notes Sacco’s portrayal of the subaltern silence, which is a precondition to their status, implying that the agency and self-representation of the subaltern is necessary in affecting their status. The reading was essential to our work to understand , firstly, that complex discourses can be incorporated in graphic narratives and secondly, the many parameters of a narrative that are used to assess such narratives. Thirdly, Hodapp’s contextualisation of the works the contemporary political context highlights postcolonial attitudes proposed as a component of self-determination of different former colonial communities, which are essential in guiding us in fabricating our narratives as well.

Williams, a student of narratology, developed an essay collection which examines the theory and history of graphic narrative – realized in various different formats, including comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels – as one of the most interesting and versatile forms of storytelling in contemporary media culture. The contributions assembled in this volume test the applicability of narratological concepts to graphic narrative, examine aspects of graphic narrative beyond the ‘single work,’ consider the development of particular narrative strategies within individual genres, and trace the forms and functions of graphic narrative across cultures. Analyzing a wide range of texts, genres, and narrative strategies from both theoretical and historical perspectives, the international group of scholars gathered here offers state-of-the-art research on graphic narrative in the context of an increasingly postclassical and transmedial narratology.

Williams explores graphic novels as an educational tool looking generically at the interactional value of comic books with students and their subsequent impact, wherein she claims that graphic literacy "encourages students to become more skilled at critically consuming and creating texts that examine complex concepts (Frey & Fischer, 2004; Morrison, Bryan, & Chilcoat, 2002; Berkowitz & Packer, 2001)." The focus of the paper is on various aspects presumed to be positive impacts on the young readers, where it looks at visual literacy and allowing an understanding of art, build a better empathetic connect with the story, allow for a community experience of reading, discussing, and learning, and lastly, become a tool for espousing various kind of human rights and sensitivities. Although the context of this particular essay is based in the United States, the parameters of assessing graphic novels as educational material can be taken up and applied and adapted to the Indian context.