Comics as Pedagogy: On Studying Illness in a Pandemic

Abstract

During the pandemic, graphic medicine has become even more central to what and how I teach. In this essay, I discuss how I used comics as pedagogy in classes on illness and illness politics that I taught during the first year of the pandemic. I begin this commentary by briefly addressing how I framed the problem of studying illness in a pandemic before discussing two assignments that show graphic medicine in action as a pedagogical tool: the first, an asynchronous online group discussion exercise in which students practiced annotation as a method of visual analysis, and the second, a documenting COVID-19 final project assignment for which students could document in comics form a pandemic experience.