Reimagining Peer Review in the Comics Classroom Using Digital Writing and Publication
Submission Type
5-minute Lightning Rounds
Abstract
Traditional ways of thinking about peer review have involved peer-to-peer interaction among students reading and responding to each other’s work as part of the teaching of writing. I propose we can leverage the model of peer review that is essential to our scholarship in our disciplines to transform students into our peers through collaborative work in the digital context. Through an experiential learning project involving collaborative research and writing in a digital space, combined with peer review and scholarly communication using WordPress, the students and the faculty member work together to generate and share new knowledge as peers beyond the walls of the classroom.
Start Date
5-23-2018 4:30 PM
Description
The project I will present in the lightning round is a multi-stage collaborative project—a collective course portfolio—from an upper-level course on comics and graphic narrative drawing on the practices of peer review and scholarly communication within the discipline of literary studies. We sought to achieve the following learning outcomes: 1) understanding and using the visual as a means of critical and creative thinking, as well as a tool for interpretation; 2) synthesizing a wide variety of content (historical, aesthetic, metacognitive) and making something in order to demonstrate learning through that synthesis; 3) recognizing the learning that takes place through the collaborative co-creation of new knowledge, and publicly sharing that learning.
I devised an experiential learning project that had the following components. First, students created comics responses sharing reflections and arguments building on class discussion for each text. At the end of the course reading, each student selected their best response and wrote a critical note of introduction with the goal of creating a collective portfolio to be published on WordPress. Then, through a “Speed Geeking” process, students identified partners with whom they collaborated on a shared research paper intervening in some aspect of the field of comics studies. Next, these papers were published on our course website, and each student wrote peer review responses to the papers. I read the collaborative papers and responses, and used the students’ research to write a short introductory essay to the course portfolio. The students then went through the process of peer review on my essay, having become my peers through their work of developing and co-creating knowledge and expertise in the field. The final products have been published on a WordPress site, “Seeing as a Way of Thinking.”
Findings indicate that the use of digital technology—a space for collaborative writing, a means of facilitating our practice of peer review and scholarly communication—allowed for faculty-student and peer-to-peer collaboration, a student-centered co-creation of new knowledge, and the driving and owning by the students of synthesis of course content.
Reimagining Peer Review in the Comics Classroom Using Digital Writing and Publication
Traditional ways of thinking about peer review have involved peer-to-peer interaction among students reading and responding to each other’s work as part of the teaching of writing. I propose we can leverage the model of peer review that is essential to our scholarship in our disciplines to transform students into our peers through collaborative work in the digital context. Through an experiential learning project involving collaborative research and writing in a digital space, combined with peer review and scholarly communication using WordPress, the students and the faculty member work together to generate and share new knowledge as peers beyond the walls of the classroom.
Comments
Project link: https://comicsatwidener.wordpress.com/