Exploring culturally relevant topics in-depth through multiple lenses is one of the things Watershed students and educators do best. One need only spend a few minutes in Chris Carithers’ class, The Graphic Novel, to see this in action.
Integrating studio art and literature, The Graphic Novel course asks students to explore how this genre helps shape, structure, and record perceptions of our world. Beginning with a look into the history of cartooning, students then studied the emergence of the graphic novel in contemporary art and literature. Students honed the skills necessary to read, write, and draw graphic novels, taking a deep dive into the drawing skills required to communicate setting, body language, and human emotion through facial expressions.
“The potential for multiple layers of empathy is an exciting aspect of this course and this project. I empathize whenever I read or hear someone else’s story, but that feeling only expands when I work to honestly adapt that story into a graphic format. Additionally, imagining a future reader for these graphic short stories allows another opportunity to consider another person and their feelings and their experience,” remarks Chris Carithers.
Students in The Graphic Novel also read a variety of traditional short stories that highlight BIPOC and LGBTQ voices with the ultimate goal of selecting one to adapt into a graphic story of their own. As a class and individually, students studied how and what key moments to capture graphically from a short story onto Bristol boards. Short stories selected by students for adaptation included Louise Erdrich’s “Red Convertible”, “Monkeyman” by Walter Dean Myers, “Cooking Time”, by Anita Roy, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Cell One” and “Spunk”, by Zora Neale Hurston.
Cameron ‘21 describes his process like this, “After reading my story, I had to identify the most important parts of it to include in my 11 panel drawings. That was hard. Then I searched for historically and culturally relevant photographs to get the clothes and setting correct. Finally, I had to find ways to imagine how I would feel in the situations my story’s characters were in so I could figure out how to convey their emotions graphically. I learned so much more than I thought I would by going through this process!”
As with many Watershed experiences, the work in this course was both deeply personal and relevant to the issues and experiences in today’s world. And, in true Watershed fashion, the experience will extend beyond the walls of our school. Students’ graphic story adaptations will be shared with local teachers and schools to be used as companion pieces for emerging readers reading these short stories in their English classes.
By Zora ‘24
By Ella ‘21
