THE PEOPLE's WAR:
How did WW2 challenge people's morality?
2014-15
Year: 9 (13-14yo) What was the brief? This project required Year 9 students to respond to real people's stories, some of which were from first hand sources, by translating them into short comics. Part of the brief involved students having to identify and express a moral dilemma within the story. What did the students learn? Students developed an understanding of the broad historical context of WW2 learning about what led to Nazi rule and the different countries involved in the conflict, including the war in the Middle East and Pacific. Working in pairs/trios, each group chose an individual story about someone affected by the war that raised a moral dilemma, which they were then asked to communicate through a comic. In art workshops, students were taught basic comic making techniques. We were also supported by Patrick Yurick, a comic artist who set up www.makingcomics.com and came to give a lecture about comic making. What was the grounding text / stimulus? We used the comic 'MAUS' by Art Spiegelman as a way into understanding how an artist tells a story and analysing his illustrative techniques. The stories were adapted from real life extracts and video testimonials, which were the starting point for developing a narrative. How was it exhibited? At the the end of the project, all the comics were collated to make a collection of published stories.The comics were also enlarged to A3 and put in frames as part of a whole school exhibition for parents and general visitors. We wanted to sell the comics to raise money for a veteran's charity or comic literacy awareness, but did not manage to do this in time. I believe that this was a missed opportunity to build a more authentic audience/work with a client. What did you learn from doing the project? I was initially attracted to this project because it was an area I had never formally taught and the graphic novel genre is often neglected in schools despite students' enjoyment of comics. I was surprised that the greatest challenge was in the storytelling and the first time I did this project in Autumn 2013, the development of stories was very time consuming leaving very little time to develop their illustration skills. When we revisited the project in Autumn 2015, it was a much better balance of time spent developing stories but also the technical skills required. We also limited the style of comic to link with our grounding text, MAUS. In the future, I believe that it would be a good project to develop between humanities, art and english/drama teachers who are use to critiquing and helping students write scripts/narratives. Written in 2015 |
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Gallery View
This are unedited versions by all pupils and are are not necessarily in order.