Through Comics and Advertisements

There’s a number of interesting ways recommended by this site http://www.ereadingworksheets.com/e-reading-worksheets/school-project-ideas/ to think about Literature assessment and creative projects. Most ideas here are really fun, and easy to implement such as asking students to storyboard the set texts or draw panels of comics—giving room for more creative ideas such as tasking students to re-imagine Shakespeare’s works in today’s world. Particularly, my love for comics and further ‘googling’ led me to a number of sites that are useful for the “Comic idea”:

I use the example from Shakespeare's works because when I was a student, trying to relate to Shakespeare was quite an uphill task. There are several ways of using comic in assessment.

a) Check for Understanding- Summary of Plot sequence

At its simplest, the use of comics can be as simple as summarising the plots to check for understanding: eg. http://goodticklebrain.com/three-panel-plays/

I like the goodticklebrain.com site because Gosling does a blow-by-blow account on a number of works by Shakespeare through simple stick figures. Refer to Gosling’s comic illustrations of the entire King Lear here http://goodticklebrain.com/king-lear-act-one 

b) Check for Understanding + Creative Expression/ Interpretation of Text

Just for fun, a more creative angle for the use of comics would be to get students to come up with their own interpretation of the text in their own setting/ social context.  

Cartoon Stock http://www.cartoonstock.com/directory/w/william_shakespeare.asp

Another creative assessment/ projects is to create an advertisement.

Students can create an advertisement of the text by rehashing the main plot, themes, characters and even biography of the author/ poet. I also like how this would allow students to explore various mediums to create their advertisement— posters, brochures, videos, radio adverts/podcasts. This allow students to place themselves in the position of exploring the “selling” points of the text and how they can use those points to market the text. Giving them the power to choose what to “sell” and not to sell also require them to imagine the significance of the text twofold 1) in the ideas/themes explored in the text and 2) the text in relation to an audience.  

As teachers we can also set the limits of this creative project by choosing the audience that they are task to advertise to.  For instance, if we want them to sell King Lear to audiences in Shakespeare’s time, would that dramatically differ from selling King Lear to audiences of today?