On comic books, travelblogging, and the nature of education

Any Neil Gaiman fans out there?

If you follow Neil’s journal at all, you’ve probably seen him talk about his god-daughters, 13-year old Sky and 11-year old Winter McCloud. Recently, he linked a piece that names Sky and Winter fangirls of the year and details their travels around the country on their dad’s (Scott McCloud, comic writer & theorist)book tour.

Although I didn’t know much about them before this morning, Sky and Winter are the kind of kids whom I think about when I hear people talking about how media has the potential to transform education. The girls are being homeschooled during their trip: blogging on their laptops, going to museums in all of their tour locations, reading extensively from the comic / graphic novel genre, researching and interviewing well-known comic creators, and editing those conversations into video podcasts called Winterviews. Scott is, of course, the star of his book tour presentations, but Winter does behind-the-scenes camera work and Sky has her own talk. She regularly updates her Keynote (Mac powerpoint) presentation about the family’s year-long adventure and presents it at many of the lecture stops, including this summer’s Comic-Con International.

While kids in most traditional schools are largely taught to read their textbooks, find the correct answers, sit quietly in their seats, and listen to authority figures, these girls are learning the value of discourse by interacting with their parents’ colleagues, lecture attendees, fellow pop culture fans, other kids, and the internet at large. Beyond that, they are becoming experts in the genre of graphic novels. As experts do, they are learning to formulate opinions for public consumption, give public talks, and use software tools like Keynote and FinalCut to make professional-quality podcasts that are released on a schedule.

Similarly to what I’ve seen from many of our epistemic game players, Sky and Winter provide a clear example of what advocates of content-driven standardized tests seem to have forgetten: learning how to use media tools, produce creative content, debate opinions, and talk with people is central to our lives. Communicating well with a wide range of people (in person and otherwise) is a skill that will help kids learn how to learn, not to mention expose them to ideas and interests that they might take up later in life.

Kids are curious, smart, and opinionated, especially when given a chance to develop a specialty and act as experts do. Most kids, however, don’t have the chance to spend a year traveling, talking to the leaders of a field, and presenting their ideas to audiences across the country. In How Computer Games Help Children Learn, David notes that epistemic games make these kinds of valuable educational experiences – ones where kids can gain access to the machinery that makes society work – available to many more people. These experiences are powerful, identity-shaping ones, and so I hope that we will have the chance to play these games with many more kids in the years ahead.