Communicating science through the Comics & Science Workshops: the Sarabandes research project

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of Comics & Science workshops where forty-one teenagers (designated Trainee Science Comic Authors [TSCAs]) are asked to create a one-page comic strip based on a scientific presentation given by a PhD student. Instrumental genesis is chosen as the conceptual framework to characterize the interplay between the specific characteristics of a comic and the pieces of scientific knowledge to be translated. Six workshops were conducted and analyzed. The results show that the TSCAs followed the codes that are specific to the comic strip medium and took some distance with the science integrity. Nevertheless being involved in the creative process allowed them to understand the reasons for certain choices of science illustration or storytelling. This approach can foster the emergence of a critical mind with respect to reading science stories created in other contexts.

Unveiling Potential: Fostering Students’ Self-Concepts in Science Education by Designing Inclusive Educational Settings

“…Moreover, comics can foster motivation and enhance learning processes [35,36]. As a specific form of narration, science comics combine storytelling with a high proportion of images to convey scientific learning content [37][38][39]. Science comics thus combine the advantages of storytelling for imparting knowledge with the advantages of comics.…”

“…Utilizing a comic-style format, we leveraged the power of storytelling in learning [30,31,38,39] to foster motivation for scientific content. Hence, a story was told in which two pedagogical agents flew in a spaceship.…”

Teaching Science Communication with Comics for Postgraduate Students

“…Examples of graphical abstracts taking a comic-like form are becoming common (Caudron and Barral, 2013;Poisson et al, 2020). Creating comics is generally found to have a positive effect on students (Scavone et al, 2019) and comics-science workshops are more and more being evaluated for younger people (Tatalovic, 2009;Hosler and Boomer, 2011;Spiegel et al, 2013;de Hosson et al, 2018) or undergraduate students with a background in arts (Wang et al, 2019a). While guidelines or instructions for using this medium are now provided in the form of academic works (Friesen et al, 2018;McDermott et al, 2018), concrete initiatives to train graduate and postgraduate students to the use of comics in their research project remain scarce.…”

“…While guidelines or instructions for using this medium are now provided in the form of academic works (Friesen et al, 2018;McDermott et al, 2018), concrete initiatives to train graduate and postgraduate students to the use of comics in their research project remain scarce. All these initiatives are mostly held by external facilitators (de Hosson et al, 2018) and rarely by academic institutions.…”

Students as storytellers: mobile-filmmaking to improve student engagement in school science

“…In order to help meet NoS curriculum goals previous strategies have had students create their own representations of science, allowing them to work with content as active producers of science communication, rather than as passive consumers. For example, a successful project having students make science comics [de Hosson et al, 2018] allowed for students to explore the content and storytelling aspects of science together, but mostly focus on students' writing skills. Since 2015, social media platforms YouTube, Shapchat, and Instagram have surpassed Facebook to become the most popular with adolescents, and all centre on the production of photo and video stories [Anderson and Jiang, 2018].…”