The Campus Writing and Speaking Program regrets to announce that the visit of Karen Head, Executive Director of the Naugle Communication Center at Georgia Tech, has been cancelled. Dr. Head’s workshop, “Comics & Storyboarding: Using Visuals to Help You and Your Students Better Communicate Complex Ideas,” will be rescheduled sometime during fall semester.
Comics & Storyboarding: Using Visuals to Help You and Your Students Better Communicate Complex Ideas
April 14th, 2-4pm, in room 129 of the 1911 Building
When you watch young children draw, they view the page as a space for an experience with time and narrative built in. They create scenes that, to quote Walt Whitman, “contain multitudes,” and are not concerned with a relationship between their drawings and reality.
Around second or third grade, many people stop drawing, especially in an academic environment. However, as Graphic Novelist, Cartoonist, and Educator, and 2019 MacArthur Fellow, Lynda Barry’s research has shown, drawing can help us analyze, evaluate, communicate, and clarify ideas. Barry has helped a wide range of audiences, from professors in natural sciences to graduate students in education to undergraduates studying agriculture, use drawing to make their research clearer and more engaging. This workshop will demonstrated how to use comic book style storyboarding to help you and your students more effectively communicate complex ideas and research to a wider audience.
Important Note: No artistic skills necessary.
Karen Head, (Ph.D., U. Nebraska; M.A., U. Tennessee; B.A., Oglethorpe U., A.A., Dekalb C.) is Executive Director of the Naugle Communication Center as well as the Associate Chair and Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. Since 2006, she has been a Visiting Scholar and Artist at Technische-Universität-Dortmund. Her research focuses on higher education rhetoric; sustainable and innovative pedagogical spaces; development and administration of writing centers; and creative writing. She was part of a team awarded a Gates Foundation grant to develop a MOOC on college writing, and has published widely about the experience, including in her book, Disrupt This!: MOOCs and the Promises of Technology (UPNE, 2017). She has published five books of poetry (including the newly released Lost on Purpose), exhibited acclaimed digital poetry projects, and won the 2010 Oxford International Women’s Festival Poetry Prize. In 2019 she won the Class of 1934 Outstanding Faculty Service Award, and in 2013, she won CETL/BP Junior Faculty Teaching Award. She is the immediate past editor of Southern Discourse in the Center: A Journal of Multiliteracy and Innovation and the editor of Atlanta Review. Recently she was awarded a grant from the Waffle House Foundation to tour some of the Southeast’s poorest counties to talk to students about the arts and about pursuing higher education. As a humorous aside, she was also given the title of Waffle House Poet Laureate, a distinction that has received extensive media coverage, including in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
