TEACHING AND LEARNING

How do you Figure?

Engaging and Teaching with Comics

in the VCAL English classroom
Matt McCabe, student at Victoria University

A VCAL English unit, based on Inquiry principles has clear applications

for Humanities and Social Studies classrooms across year levels.
Matt studies Education (P-12)
at Victoria University. He has a
passion for literature, teaching,
hiking and dogs - and a
growing love of comics.

Developing the language for discussion of selected

text(s)

Developing their understanding and use of the verbal,

social and bodily conventions of oral communication
(VCAA, 2006, p. 23).

Its the beginning of my

placement at Fitzroy High
School Im in the third year of
Victoria Universitys Bachelor
of Education P-12 course and
Im walking upstairs with my
mentor, Yolanda, towards her
Year 11 VCAL English class.

The selected text and activities would also need to be

accessible to the range of levels within the class, yet still
provide a rich and relevant overall theme that would prove
effective with a group of students who have struggled to
engage with English and Humanities in the past.

I love having student teachers with me, she says. It keeps

me on my toes and I always learn a lot myself, and a few
moments later: I think youll get a lot from working with
this group and if you still want to teach after this, youll
be set. She laughs, I laugh a joke?
After a couple of sessions with the class, I realise that
Yolanda was kidding the VCAL cohort is a small group
of 13 lively, funny and welcoming students however,
like any English class, they have their own specific
set of challenges; particularly in terms of inconsistent
engagement in the past with English in particular
and their learning in general and varied levels of
development in literacy knowledge and skills.
Following these few introductory sessions, I was asked
to plan a text study as part of Unit 1 of the Foundation
English curriculum, which included the freedom to select
my own text(s). In designing this unit I would need to
choose a rich primary text and a series of activities that
allowed students to develop their ability to respond in
both written and oral forms, including (but not limited to):

Commenting on themes, issues, characterisation and

genre

Discussing the structures and features, tone and style

of texts

Planning, drafting, revising, editing and proofreading

written texts

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Primary Text: At Work Inside Our

Detention Centres: A Guards Story
Sam Wallman & Nick Olle (2014)
After wracking my brain for a couple of days, I recalled a
fantastic, long-form, online comic that had been published
not long before in The Global Mail. In the comic, a young
Melbourne comic artist, Sam Wallman, illustrates the
experiences collected from diary entries and interviews
by journalist Nick Olle of an anonymous, ex-client
support worker with one of Australias onshore detention
centres. The comic, structured as a long, vertical scroll,
follows this mans life as he applies for a job with SERCO
(the company that runs Australias onshore detention
centres) in the hope of helping from inside the system.
He is trained as a guard and begins work at the centre and
is slowly worn down by what he sees to the point where
his personal life falls apart and he resigns.
Wallmans illustrations have immediate impact: they are
thoughtfully constructed, with multiple layers of symbolic

While the comic could be read

and understood as a class in
about 25 minutes, it could also
be studied multiple times from
different angles.
Ethos Vol 23 No 1 Term 1 2015

meaning, and yet, somehow, still instantly accessible a

quality only achieved by the best visual storytelling. This
meant that, while the comic could be read and understood
as a class in about 25 minutes, it could also be studied
multiple times from different angles, or we could focus on
individual illustrations peeling back layers of meaning.
Using Guards Story also gave me a dynamic and relevant
overall theme that I could use to challenge students with

Curriculum
AusVELS
History
AusVELS History

what is, in my view, one of the most pressing moral and

humanitarian dilemmas facing Australia today and draw in
a range of curriculum elements from the humanities (my
second specialisation), including the following (see table
below).

Links

Source

The impact of at least ONE world event or development and

its significance for Australia, such as the Vietnam War and
Indochinese refugees (ACDSEH146)

Level 10 History: The Modern

World and Australia

Develop texts, particularly explanations and discussions that

use evidence from a range of sources that are referenced

AusVELS History, Historical

Skills Scope and Sequence:
Level 5 to Level 10

Select and use a range of communication forms (oral, graphic,

written) and digital technologies
Identify the origin, purpose and context of primary and
secondary sources
Process and synthesise information from a range of sources
for use as evidence in an historical argument
Evaluate the reliability and usefulness of primary and
secondary sources

AusVELS History

Depth study: globalising world (ONE of: Popular culture, The

environment movement, Migration experiences)

The Australian Curriculum

AusVELS Historical Knowledge
and Understanding Scope and
Sequence: Level 10

AusVELS

[Students] analyse global issues and challenges and the key

actors which influence these

Civics & Citizenship Level

10, Civic Knowledge and
Understanding

Civics and Citizenship

They explain the development of a multicultural society

and the values necessary to sustain it.They take a global
perspective when analysing an issue, and describe the role of
global organisations in responding to international issues

VCE

Analyse global issues and challenges and the key actors which
influence these

Australian and Global Politics

Study Design, VCAA 2012, p8

VCE History

The content provides opportunities to develop historical

understanding through key concepts, including evidence,
continuity and change, cause and effect, perspectives,
empathy, significance and contestability

The Australian Curriculum

AusVELS Historical Knowledge
and Understanding Scope and
Sequence: Level 7 to Level 10

VCE Australian and

Global Politics

Evaluate the effectiveness of responses to global crises

Australian and Global Politics

Study Design, VCAA 2012, p8

Australian and Global

Politics

Develop skills of logical and rational analysis, synthesis and

argument

Ethos Vol 23 No 1 Term 1 2015

17

Taking Note
The issues surrounding asylum seekers, refugees and
mandatory detention are complex, therefore it was
necessary to plan some preliminary exploration so that
students would be able to contextualise our analysis of
Guards Story. This process mostly consisted of short,
interconnected activities, bridged by discussion. These
included: group-based research tasks, reflective/roleplaying tasks and short videos (mostly from ABC and SBS
sources, such as: Four Corners, Go Back Where You Came
From, The 7:30 Report, etc.) that focused on either the
nature and history of asylum seeker policy, the purpose
and conditions of Australian detention centres, or the
background stories of refugees and asylum seekers. We
were also able to organise a guest speaker from the Asylum
Seeker Resource Centre.
One of the most effective activities I facilitated in these
first few sessions was Amnesty Internationals roleplay activity Time to Flee. In this activity, the class is
confronted with a possible asylum seeker scenario.
Students are broken into families, with each student a
specific member. The family is living in an area affected
by a military coup and must leave suddenly. The family is
forced to decide who to take and who to leave, choose
their method of transportation and the ten most important
items to take with them. They have ten minutes to make
their choices and, once students have decided, they
discuss and debate these with the other families. I knew
the activity had succeeded when, during this concluding
discussion, one student called out over the others, This is

bull----! Theres no way to win! This activity is available free

on Amnesty Internationals website, and would work well
in any secondary classroom.

Figuring Things Out

To some extent, and in my admittedly limited experience,
a well-chosen resource seems to teach itself. When I first
considered using Guards Story I was hesitant, as Im much
more at home with other literary forms, and very much a
novice in the world of comics and graphic novels. I found
this was a fantastic position to teach from the crucible of
my own enthusiasm for a new form.
I decided that the best course of action was to arm
students with some fairly basic analytical tools (symbolism,
visual metaphor and motif), as well as descriptive terms
for graphic texts (panel, frame, gutter, closure, graphic
weight, tone, etc.) and use these to focus on and dissect
particularly poignant illustrations in the comic, as well as
to discuss the overall effect of the motifs Wallman weaves
throughout to form his own distinctive visual style. These
understandings were accumulated gradually through short
workshops on just a few concepts/terms at a time, using
examples from the text. Robust and inclusive discussions
were key to this process of development. I discovered
at the beginning of the unit that this group of students,
given the relatively small and close nature of the class,
loved a good discussion and worked a lot more effectively
when they were allowed to chew over new information
verbally. Between these discussions, the effectiveness
and accessibility of Guards Story as a resource and our

Walking Away From The Place.

Artist: Sam Wallman

18

Ethos Vol 23 No 1 Term 1 2015

introductory exploration of the asylum seeker issue was

addressed; we were able to share discussions that ranged
from the ideal and actual purposes of Australias detention
centres to Wallmans symbolic use of negative space.

This group of students, given

the relatively small and close
nature of the class, loved a
good discussion and worked a
lot more effectively when they
were allowed to chew over new
information verbally.
Secondary Text: Rainbow Bird
Czenya Cavouras (2007)
Part of exploring the symbolic and structural elements of
Guards Story was to prepare students to create their own
comics as a final assessment project (see below). In order
to help students understand, and be able to use, the dozenor-so visual literacy concepts I was introducing them to
as well as to help students appreciate the uniqueness
of Guards Storys visual style and structure, I compared
elements of the comic with other well-known graphic
novels such as, Art Spiegelmans Maus (1996) and Marjane
Satrapis Persepolis (2000). Since, however, I was going to
ask students to create their own comics and was loath
to disengage those who feared their artistic talents werent
up to the task I wanted to present visual texts that made
a poignant artistic and moral statement without necessarily
being examples of perfect technical artistic skill.

Czenya Cavouras short picture book Rainbow Bird fit

the bill perfectly. The book, which Cavouras published at
age 14, follows the impressionistic story of an unnamed
asylum seeker who flees their home and ends up in a
detention centre. Though her technical artistic skill in the
text is within reach of the majority of students in the class,
Cavouras shows a compelling use of structure, colour,
graphic weight and negative space, along with using visual
metaphors to note the relationship between our treatment
of Indigenous Australians and asylum seekers, as well as the
role the media plays in the issue. By discussing Rainbow
Bird and some of Michael Leunigs cartoons relating to the
asylum seeker issue, I was able to communicate to students
that visual art, and visual storytelling is often as much
about how you use a page as it is about technical ability.

Drawing Things Together

Given the scope of the unit so far, it seemed counterintuitive to make the major assessment task anything
other than a creative project. As well as assessing students
understandings of the unit material to date, I wanted
the task to include the assessment of the oral elements
of the curriculum (aside from those referred to in class
discussion) rather than implement a separate oral task. I
decided on a portfolio project in which students worked
through an extended planning and drafting process to
create a short four to six page comic using a segment of
comedian Anh Dos (2010) autobiography The Happiest
Refugee. I started reading sections of the book in class as a
secondary text, and the humour and pacing of Dos writing
really struck a chord with the class. The book was also
perfect for this project, as it is written in short vignettes
of around two to three pages, which provided a narrative
structure for those students who were already feeling
pressured by the artistic elements of the project, let alone

Borders.
Artist: Sam Wallman

Ethos Vol 23 No 1 Term 1 2015

19

having to create an original story although, students

could still elect to create their own story if they wished.

study design: Area of Study 4 The study of texts, State

Government of Victoria.

In brief, the process of developing the portfolio was

broken down into eight parts:

Wallman, S. & Olle, N. (2014), At Work Inside Our Detention

Centres: A Guards Story. The Global Mail, viewed 31
January 2015, http://serco-story.theglobalmail.org/

1.

Get inspired: Students collect and annotate sections

from comics and graphic novels in the schools library
(or their own collections).

2.

Breaking down your passage: Students analyse and

annotate their chosen passage from the Happiest
Refugee and start planning how they might render the
story visually. Students with original stories work on
developing their ideas.

3.

Finding references: Students think about what will

challenge them the most to draw, or what theyre
unsure about drawing and collect a collage of
reference images.

4.

Practise, practise, practise: Students practise drawing

from their reference images.

5.

Drafting/storyboarding: The comics finally start to

take shape, with students drafting their final piece in a
basic, thumbnail form.

6.

Interview/pitch: Students meet with teachers to

discuss their draft and develop their ideas. Students
explain how and why they are using the visual literacy
concepts we have discussed throughout the unit.

7.

Exhibit: Once students have finished their final copies,

they stage an exhibit of their portfolios in the library
for a Year 7 class to attend, and include Q&A sessions
with small groups of students.

Two useful titles for teaching graphic

novels:
Understanding Comics The Invisible Art by Scott
McCloud (1993) Harper Collins, New York
Teaching Visual Literacy by Nancy Frey and
Douglas Fisher (2010) Hawker Brownlow
Education, Moorabin

Thankfully, during this process, we were lucky enough

to have the occasional assistance of Bernard Caleo, a
prominent Melbourne cartoonist, who was able to assist
students with workshops on drawing and structure. The
project was largely a success, with the majority of students
remaining engaged throughout this creative process.
Despite its challenges, they worked to create thoughtful
pieces of visual storytelling, reflecting their exploration of
both visual literacy and the complex asylum seeker issue.

References
Amnesty International Australia (2015), Activity: Time to
flee, viewed 31 January 2015, http://www.amnesty.org.au/
images/uploads/hre/activity_time_to_flee.pdf
Cavouras, C. (2007), Rainbow Bird. South Australia:
Wakefield Press.
Do, A. (2010), The Happiest Refugee. New South Wales:
Allen & Unwin.
Satrapi, M. (2000), Persepolis: The story of a childhood.
New York: Pantheon Books.
Spiegelman, A. (1996), The Complete Maus. New York:
Pantheon Books.
Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (2006),
Foundation English: Victorian Certificate of Education

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Artist: Sam Wallman

www.penerasespaper.com

Ethos Vol 23 No 1 Term 1 2015