Guest post by Susan Nevelow Mart, Tom O’Brien, Yasmin Sokkar Harker, Julie Graves Krishnaswami, Nicholas Mignanelli, and Nicholas F. Stump
Susan Nevelow Mart
We wanted to become comic book characters because comics are a proven way to deliver complex material in a much more compact and engaging format than traditional law review articles. Most law students suffer from a research theory deficit. This comic was our response to that deficit – a short and engaging review of theoretical and practical concepts that can easily be used in any level of legal or legal adjacent research instruction and give attorneys, law students, and other academic researchers the intellectual tools they need to integrate the underlying theories of legal research into their ongoing research practices.
So we all worked with cartoonist and storyteller Tom O’Brien: first we distilled our collective 240 pages of academic papers to 35 pages, and then Tom went to work turning the distillation into an illustrated story. If you want to an animation of how the comic stages evolve, click here)
Tom O’Brien
Comics have been used in education for a very long time. Unfortunately, in many classrooms, comics have long been viewed as “reading lite”. At best, a decent option for encouraging reluctant readers to engage, and ideally opening the way for them to start reading “real” books. This was often achieved via comics adaptations of preexisting literary works, like Classics Illustrated’s rendition of Moby Dick. These comics adaptations provided an abridged version of more well-respected literature, while the inclusion of pictures was believed to be ideal for readers who were uninterested in purely written works.
Comics historians will quickly point out, however, that if you expand your understanding of what a comic is, you’ll find that they’ve been used in more complicated and nuanced ways for hundreds of years. Scott McCloud, the father of modern American comics studies, defines comics as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.” While this particular definition sadly excludes single-panel comics like The Far Side, it opens the doors to a host of other artistic works.
The Bayeux Tapestry depicts the lead-up to and the conquest by the Normans in England in 1066. The tapestry is a quite literal example of history being written by the victors. It was used as both an educational tool and a piece of propaganda on the history of the invasion, aimed at viewers with little to no literacy. Throughout the medieval period, churches would fill their windows with Poor Man’s Bibles, stained glass which depicted imagery from famous scenes in the holy text designed to inform, but also enrapture the common people in a time when printed books were of the highest luxury. For hundreds of years, medical texts have included both written descriptions and illustrated examples of anatomy and procedures in an attempt to clarify complex topics to the reader.
Comics scholars and their research have shifted the way that educators talk about comics. Instead of saying comics are just easier to read, they have drawn attention to the fact that they engage multiple modes of literacy simultaneously. Comics use multiple areas of the brain at once, allowing the mind to process both written concepts and take in visual information, creating a deeper understanding of the topic and engaging in complex thought.
It is also true that for many, seeing a page with a mixture of words and images is less daunting. Images are easier to skim across to find key pieces of information, especially if the reader has already created an association with the illustration and the information they’re looking for. In addition, studies have shown that the more simplified an image is, the more generalizable it becomes in the viewer’s mind. This means that readers are less concerned with the specific style of a machine or the shape of a pill, which may be different in their case than it would be in a photo, and are more able to focus on the core information that the author is trying to convey.
In Legal Research Unbound, we strove to take advantage of these tools. It is an approachable, engaging text that’s more information-dense than it appears. Images and logos stand as shorthand that express ideas and entities. Complex thoughts can be expressed visually in clear and creative ways. And it is an easily scannable document to refresh concepts.
Today’s students live in a multimodal world. Whether it’s texts, memes, games, or any other way they interact with the world, they combine text, images, music, video, and other modes. They’re primed and expect to learn via a combination of modes. Comics isn’t the ideal form for all stories or information, but like film, theater, prose, and any other medium with its own unique collection of modes, there are a host of spaces where its unique mixture of modalities shine.
Yasmin Sokkar Harker
My contribution to the book is woven throughout its chapters. Readers will see me “pop up” along the way, offering insights, reflections, and practical suggestions related to Critical Legal Information Literacy (CLIL). My goal is to provide a framework for incorporating CLIL into legal research instruction and to encourage instructors to think creatively about how it might be implemented in the classroom.
Critical information literacy is a complement to information literacy that considers the political, social, economic, cultural facets of information. As such, it asks us to understand information as a social construct that has been created for a purpose and that has many dimensions on which it can be evaluated. Students who look at information as a social construct think about information as not just “true or false” but made by people for a specific purpose. Critical information literacy connects students to the people and institutions that have made the information and helps them reflect on knowledge production as something that comes from our political, social, economic, cultural landscape. Through CLIL, I hope to help law students bring that same critical awareness to legal information and the legal research process.
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