I'm going to tell you
a little bit about what was
my dissertation,
possibly the first one done
entirely in comics form
and is now this book
from Harvard University Press.
So to start it out,
I want to give you a little bit
about my back story.
So just to say I didn't show up
at Columbia
and say I'm going to do
this thing in comics,
I was already making comics
before that.
And so as a kid, as maybe many
of us my age were,
I had a much older brother who
read comics to me,
and so I'm one of those people
whose first word is "Batman,"
which I have managed
to replicate in my daughter
already.
As an educator, we think a lot
about comics as a literacy tool.
And I can say, at least
anecdotally, my own education,
I very much learned to read very
early from reading comics.
I think that's a very important
thing about them.
And so I was really into them,
really into making them.
And I made my own superhero
comic, or a sort of parody,
somewhere in between parody
and semi-real superhero thing
that I did through high school,
who makes a reappearance
in my dissertation.
He makes a little cameo,
Lockerman.
But when I got to undergraduate,
I wanted to do intellectuals
things.
And at the time that I went
to undergraduate, comic books
were not the thing that you do
as intellectual work.
And so I did mathematics,
as Faya noted.
I studied mathematics,
and comics stayed
in the background for a while.
And I want to say one thing
about that.
I'm really pleased that I
studied mathematics,
but if you tell somebody
at that time, you say, hey,
I study math,
then they'll say to you,
"oh, you're so smart."
And so now, I say,
"I make comics.
I make this art."
They look at it, and they say,
"oh, you're so talented."
[CHUCKLING]
Yeah, you get it.
So I think what's really
true about that is that I was
a very talented mathematician.
I really knew how to figure
things out,
but I'm sure how well I
understood everything.
And I think at this point,
my art is way smarter than I am
without it.
But I think we have
this distinction between them
built into our culture.
And I think that's something
that this work pushes back
against.
So I think even
in my own development,
I spent a lot of time thinking
that the work I did in comics
was just this fun thing that I
did on the side.
And now I got to do the highest
level of schooling, and did this
as my work.
So things have changed,
and now I get to teach people,
who then teach their students
to use comics.
So I'm really
pleased that they've changed,
but I even see it
in my own lifetime
that I had to come around
to that point of view.
So anyway, as I said, comics
moved to the background.
I kept making them, but not
finishing them.
And in my time in Detroit,
around the 2004 election,
because of this arts magazine
I ran, I was asked to be
in a political art show.
And I made this.
I had only a few days,
so I made a comic for it.
And this really triggered
my return to comics and a lot
about the style that I work in.
And instead
of explanatory things,
I turned to using
visual metaphor as a way to get
across ideas.
So this one is about voting,
or a show of hands.
And so that play
of the visual metaphor
became my primary way
of working.
Shortly after that, I did
the essay for an exhibition we
organized on games and art
entirely in comics form.
So it covers the history
of games, the rules of them,
and becomes
a philosophical piece.
And what I found in that
is that I had this really deep
way to educate people
without simplifying it.
I think when I say I do my work
in comics, people tend to assume
it's the idiot's guide
to whatever.
And I actually think,
and hopefully you'll
be convinced by the end of this,
that you can do more
sophisticated stuff by the way
you can layer images and have
images speak to text and all
those juxtapositions.
So when I decided to come back
to school
and was trying to get
into Columbia, I said, "this is
the kind of work I want to do.
This is what my work is going
to be.
This is the way that I'm going
to be in academia,
but reach people who aren't
necessarily in it, which was
always a concern of mine."
So the minute I got there,
I started making my work
in comics form.
So I really made the case for it
by doing my homework in comics.
I had professors who knew
nothing about that,
but they were open to it.
And this was, as anybody
in the audience
familiar with the philosopher
of aesthetic education, Maxine
Greene?
It's quiet.
One.
Well, you should be.
And I made several comics
about her.
She was in her 90s when I first
had her,
and 96 when I had my defense.
But I made this a comic
about Maxine,
and it's on my site.
She's really a wonderful person,
talks
about the transformative power
of the arts.
So I did that.
And this is the last one I'll
show before we get
to Unflattening.
This was for a book on narrative
research.
And in this was a comic that,
depending on who you ask,
was either about drawing,
or about doing research,
or about seeing.
And to me, that was really a key
to my work,
is to have the metaphors be so
much about one thing
and another thing
at the same time,
that it really depended on how
you read it what you thought
it was about.
And that was OK to me.
That was a way to give people
access to it.
So if you were into drawing,
you could get into this,
and maybe get the larger point.
But if you were into research,
you got to it
from a different direction.
And that really became how I
went with Unflattening,
and a lot
about what I meant
by unflattening.
So to talk about Unflattening,
I really want to start
by telling you what I mean
by flatness.
And by flatness, I didn't mean
something literal.
I meant patterns of thought,
patterns of behavior that we're
trapped in,
a place where we forget what
might be, and we're trapped
in how it is.
We have lots and lots of options
in life, but maybe they're
already chosen for us.
And because I had this word,
"unflattening," I was thinking
about in terms of comics,
and I'll come to that later,
I turned to "Flatland."
And I'm guessing folks are
familiar with the 1880s novella
Flatland by Edwin Abbott.
Regardless, it's the tale
of the geometric inhabitants
of this two dimensional world.
So they know how to move east,
and west, and south,
and northwards, but they have
no concept of upwards.
They can't conceive of anything
that's off the plane.
And so we can all look
at Flatlanders,
and put our heads down, and say,
that's kind of silly.
But what is upwards for us?
What are the directions we can't
go, the dimensions we can't
think about because we lack
that way to see them?
And that became a real burning
question.
How do we get out
of the narrowness
of our thinking?
And I think-- and I'm going
in a school education--
I think a lot of what's going
on in the institution
of education
is causing a kind of flatness.
Education as recipe,
as education as a series
of steps,
of things done to us rather than
things explored.
I don't think it's intentional,
but I think it's the nature
of this institution.
And I think it's everything
from our learning being put
into boxes, whether it's
the boxes of subject, the boxes
of time, the boxes of space,
learning,
it's all in these little boxes.
And so I think we start to take
these boxes into ourselves.
And so somebody who studied art,
and studied mathematics,
and maybe happened to play
professional tennis
is seen as an odd thing.
But I think, really, we're all
very complex creatures,
and it's the boxes that are
artificial.
And so it's really a push back
against those boxes,
and things being lined up
in rows.
And specifically, it's asking
why this 12 point font
double spaced, 1 and 1/2 by 1
by 1 by 1 margins,
why is that what learning looks
like?
Why is that what counts
as scholarship?
It's not to say that's not good.
It's not to say
there's something wrong with it,
but it's to say why is that
the form that counts
and everything else doesn't?
And I think we can go back--
and on this page I do--
as far back as Plato
and his distrust of images
as shadows of shadows.
And we can look at Descartes.
And we won't spend time
on Descartes, but Descartes
completely throwing out
the senses and say that we're
thinking machines.
And certainly these rows of text
worked well for thinking
machines, but maybe not so well
for how complex humans are.
And it's to say, any time you
want to represent the complexity
of our experience,
you have to flatten it.
I can't have the whole world
every time.
I'm talking to someone else.
So we can think about it
in the top there, the Mercator
projection of the globe, which
you're all familiar with.
When you flatten it out to make
the map,
you know that Greenland's not
that big.
You know that these kind
of distortions happen.
And so you can look
in the center there.
This is Buckminster Fuller's
Dymaxion map, where he puts
the globe onto an icosahedron,
and then pulls it apart
that way.
And on his map,
you see connections where
the other one has divisions.
And that's not to say it's
any more accurate.
It's just to say that these are
different ways of flattening it
out.
We can think about in terms
of the weather.
If I ask you what the weather's
like,
and all you tell me is
the temperature, you're leaving
out the humidity, which makes
an enormous difference
in Washington DC.
You're leaving out the wind,
which was nice to find here.
You're leaving out the sun.
You're leaving out all
these things.
So if we're only coding by one
channel, we leave out all
these other ways.
And so maybe my biggest question
became, what are we failing
to see?
What are we missing when we're
only allowing one way
of thinking in our classrooms,
in our scholarship?
And what might we start to make
visible when we bring
in other ways of thinking?
And so I had an aside here.
I talk a lot about ways
of seeing.
And by ways of seeing, I really
meant ways of knowing,
but I'm quite literally talking
about seeing,
because it's about comics,
and it's about visual thinking.
But I wanted to explain that I
meant this in a broader sense.
So I introduced my dog
into the book, which may be
another first for dissertations.
I don't know how many times they
get drawn in.
So we all know that the dog's
sense of smell
is stronger than yours and mine,
right?
You know this.
But what's really
important about the dog's sense
of smell is that it's more
nuanced than yours and mine.
Which means I come up
to this podium,
and I can see that it's cream
colored, right?
It's cream colored.
It has certain a kind of edges.
I can see the size of it.
But that's about it.
A dog comes up to this,
and it knows who was here
a couple hours ago, if anyone
was, who spoke here maybe
yesterday, the day before,
maybe as far back as seven days.
The dog has access
to those layers of time
that you and I do not have,
and can't have.
So I see that the dog has a kind
of upwards that we just don't
have.
And it's not to say we should
develop it, but it's to say,
when we think about what
learning looks like we need
to incorporate those ways
that people have access
to upwards
that we don't, and make them
part of learning.
I'm very much specifically
talking about comics and visuals
here, but it's really to say,
how do we get these ways
of knowing into what
our learning is?
And so unflattening
is a ridiculously simple idea.
I almost get a little
embarrassed when I explain it
out loud.
You all know this,
but I don't think we think
about it.
I look through this eye,
and I look through this eye,
and they're not telling me
the same thing.
And they have to get along.
They have to get along so I
don't bump into things.
And they get along so that I can
have a more dimensionalized view
of the world.
And obviously, this is also
true of the fact that we move.
And this is a way we figure out
the distance to the stars.
We look out at the stars
from the Earth today,
and we look six months later,
and it allows us to have
two eyes very, very far apart.
And I think that very simple
idea of displacement,
to move from your singular point
of view
to another point of view,
and keep those views connected,
and keep them speaking
to each other, I think that is
how we grow.
And I think that's a big issue
that we face today, is how do we
take other perspectives
alongside our own
so that we can change them?
And I think we don't need
to stop at two.
This is not simply about,
you have to have two.
It's how many different ways can
we look, how many
different perspectives can
we include, different ways
of working?
And when we do that, I think
instead of seeing things head
on, we see that they have sides.
We see that they can be turned
over, turned upside down,
turned around and be opened up.
So for me, comics was not only
this way that I loved to work,
but it was a way
to be amphibious, breathe
in the worlds of both image
and text at the same time,
and maybe find ways to step out
of the boundaries
of my own thinking,
and maybe get a look at them
and find some other ways to do
my work.
So we're going to talk
a little bit more
specifically about comics right
now.
I won't do a huge history
on them.
I could have, but we won't here.
But I think comics, we're seeing
this as a new thing.
I mean, people are very excited.
The movies make people very
excited about it.
We see comics as this novel
thing.
Why hasn't there been
a dissertation in comics form?
Why hasn't Harvard published one
before?
I think the excitement
about that is very good,
but in some sense,
comics as they are
have been around longer
than film.
And I think even more
importantly, I think our ways
of making sense of the world
through images
are as old as we've been human.
And I think that's something,
when we think about what goes on
in classrooms,
we're still OK with art
up on the walls, but art
as a way of figuring out
our world, art
as a vital literacy,
that's been left out.
And I think it's a travesty,
and something I hope we can
speak to.
This is really very much
one of the things
I think that makes us human.
But let's talk about comics very
specifically right now.
Folks in this room
heard of Scott McLeod's 1993
comic
about comics, Understanding
Comics?
I see some nods.
If you're interested in comics,
and you want to do something
with them either as maker
or teacher, it's a great book
to start, Scott McLeod's
Understanding Comics.
Not the place to finish,
because there's lots more going
on about how comics work,
and I know there's
comic scholars in the audience.
But it's really
a wonderful place to start,
and I think the big deal
about Scott's book in '93
is that it opened up people
to stop thinking about comics
as a genre, and much more about
what could I do with this form?
What are different ways I could
approach it?
And I think we've seen that
since then.
We see all kinds of comics.
And I think for me--
Faya, in your introduction,
you said something about "why
not?"
And I my approach to doing
my dissertation in comics
was more of
was less an effort to be
radical,
and more an effort to see why
not?
Maus, for people that would know
Art Spiegelman's Maus.
had come out, and Persepolis
by Marjane Satrapi had come out,
and Understanding Comics,
and many, many things
had come out,
so I feel like this argument had
been won.
But it still has to be fought
some more, and probably will
still have to be fought
at many other places
for a while.
But anyway, comics specifically.
So we'll start with Scott's
definition.
I think it's
a nice starting point,
and then we're going to move
past that.
So he says,
"juxtapose
pictorial and other images
in deliberate sequence."
So basically that means, here's
my fist.
I'm going to draw a box
around it, and then I'm going
to stretch it out here.
I'm going to draw a box
around it."
You guys are all going to make
the action happen.
Comics are static.
Nothing moves.
They're the flattest kind
of thing you can get.
But because of the way
our eyes connect the dots there,
we make the action happen.
The reader animates it.
And his big idea is about comics
as the sequential form.
And I've represented it here
with the change of seasons.
And there's that sense of time,
moving from this to this,
to this, to this, to this.
So you can see it in this page.
So we read left to right,
top to bottom.
But because it's visual,
you can't help but see
the whole thing
at the same time, which means
you're starting to make
connections.
Whether you want to or not,
from the lower right
back up to the upper left.
And that whole page is holding
together in a way that changes
it in some ways.
And in fact,
within any single panel, you're
connecting.
Do you read the box first, or do
you read where the marmot--
I forget--
it's Rikki-Tikki-Tavi--
where that is, which part
comes first.
And maybe I'll ask you guys
a question first.
When you read comics,
who reads the words first?
OK.
Who reads the pictures first?
All right, third option.
Anybody got a third option they
want to voice?
Both?
Depends on the picture.
It depends.
Any third options?
Anybody do the page first
as a whole, and then?
You probably do, whether you
know you do it or not.
Oh hey.
Thank you.
So that's a pretty interesting
question, the fact
that this hierarchy of reading,
which if this was a novel,
you would say, yes, I
read this way.
This is how you read.
It has been broken up,
and it's much more
interconnected and all at once.
So I think that idea that comics
are
both sequential and simultaneous
is where they get really
exciting, at least for me.
And that's what we're going
to get into.
So this one page from Watchmen,
which is a very celebrated
comic.
Or maybe it's a graphic novel.
And so that center panel, which
I've blown up here,
he says, "There is no future.
There is no past.
Do you see?"
And I think that is
intentional meta-commentary
on how comics work.
So in some sense,
we could say
that upper left panel happens
first, and the lower right panel
happens last.
And that's, in some sense, yes,
you do read that way.
But in fact, the lower right
hand panel comes 30 years
before the upper left.
And time and space are mashed
together in an unusual sort
of way here.
And we can think about that.
I think about in terms of how
our brain works.
And I think we have two kinds
of awareness.
And that is, we're
aware of the sequential moments.
Like, you've come to this talk.
You've got something else you've
got to do in an hour.
You had something you did
this morning.
So you're experiencing time
in a fairly linear fashion.
But at the same time,
you're also having things I've
said that are making thoughts go
off to the side here,
or other thoughts about what
you're going to do later
in the day.
So while we move through time
in a somewhat linear fashion,
or maybe we don't, but let's
assume we do,
we wander in our thoughts
in many directions
at the same time.
So I think that interlacing
of sequential and simultaneous
that comics do a really good job
of capturing something about how
things go on in our heads.
And so here's some examples
from comics that aren't mine
that I think I speak to that.
So this is a comic
about the Louvre.
And if we cut it up into nine
panels, and I showed it to you
as a slide show,
I think you'd missed something.
And I think you see the sort
of superimage that's going on
behind that.
And if you know the Louvre
and the pyramid and all that,
that's a significant part
to the storytelling.
But when you read it,
did you read that first,
or did that come to you
all at once?
I mean, that's changing
the reading.
This is Gasoline Alley
from the 1930s.
And we can see our character
bumbling along sequentially
through it,
but it's
a single simultaneous scene.
So those two ways of thinking
are going on at the same time.
And we'll do one more,
and it's a joke,
so I'll wait till you get it.
That was fast, somebody
over there.
So the only way this little guy
can get the fruit
is because time and space are
mashed up in this unusual way.
And I think that really is
a very exciting thing
about this form.
In a film, for all of film's
great powers, it's hard to move
backwards in the film.
Film, you have to go at the pace
of the cogs,
or whatever it is now, of how
the film turns.
And so for me,
I'm very interested in comics
as a way to not illustrate
things,
but to embody them
through the visuals.
So this is a page from a chapter
on ruts or routine.
And I was contrasting my wife's
commute in Manhattan, which was
different every day,
in different places, and always,
always changing,
with the typical commute, which
is we go out, and we go back.
We go out, and we go back.
And so instead of starting one
here and the other here,
in the background, the grid
has the out and back.
And so it's this base thing that
happens the whole time.
But in the foreground,
I'd noticed the connection
between Manhattan's shape
and falling leaf or a falling
feather.
And I was thinking about how
her route was adrift,
or the [INAUDIBLE].
She was drifting
through the city.
And so I have the contrast
of her drift, and I mapped it
out differently on all those,
against that background.
So the page
is both illustrating,
but it's also doing those things
at the same time.
And I think that's a really
exciting potential for where
comics can go.
This is not from the book.
This is from a piece I did
for the Boston Globe last year.
It's a piece about entropy.
And it never says the word
"entropy," but that's what it's
about.
It's about how things fall
apart, whether sand runs down,
or your coffee gets cold,
but it's also
about the few moments
where things spin back up
against that stream of downhill.
And so it's
about these vortices.
So the shape of it itself does
a lot of that thing.
And in fact, this comic,
the middle section,
you read down,
then you come to the center,
and you come back out.
So it asks you to read right
to left in one section,
and it asks you to read back up,
which is difficult to do.
And it was insane to figure out.
I don't recommend it.
But I think that question
of changing the way we read,
changing the direction you read,
that's a pretty unusual
question.
When you read things,
when do those moments happen?
I think that's something
we really can play with,
and do a lot of things
about our thinking in comics.
And so that becomes a question.
What do our thoughts look like?
Before you put them out
into some form,
what do your thoughts look
like in your head?
I know it's a big room,
I'm going to another question.
Does anybody want to say what
do your thoughts look
like before you get them out?
Is anybody bold enough to throw
that out into a room strangers
at the National Gallery
in Washington DC?
Has anybody got a?
I've gotten spaghetti before.
I've gotten fireworks.
There's no answer that's going
to really hurt my feelings.
Oh, I got a brave soul
over there.
Ratatouille.
What's that?
They look like ratatouille?
The movie or the food?
So give me a couple more words
with that.
I'm a little slow.
Mixed.
So mixed.
So I like that.
So there's mixed.
All right.
Does anybody want to build
on that or say their own answer?
Yeah?
I see pain as color
and geometry.
You see pain?
I see pain as a geometry.
It's kind of cylindrical.
All right.
So we've got ratatouille.
We've got geometry.
And, sir?
I would say sand falling down
a hill in a dune,
and it has an avalanche effect.
It moves downward, fills up,
[INAUDIBLE].
Got it.
All right.
So we get one more.
Anybody brave enough on this?
I would say mash potatoes,
squash, and [INAUDIBLE].
Me saying spaghetti probably
triggered a lot of that,
didn't it?
Mashed potatoes?
All right.
Fair enough.
Does anybody want to say rows
and rows of text?
Really?
That's it?
That's all you got going on
in there, Mike?
Maybe.
I think we'll stick
to ratatouille and other things.
But I think what we can say
for sure is, it's probably
not rows and rows of text.
But I like to think about them,
because I like to cherry pick
my answers here.
I think there's very much we do
have linear moments.
We do have sequence going on.
But we also do have
the sideways tangents that I
think comics can handle so well.
And so this is Chris Ware,
extremely famous
contemporary cartoonist.
I think his comics talk
about the way to capture
fragments of memory
in these little images.
And they move off to the side.
And I think you can think
about this.
When you try to get
your thoughts out, maybe you're
having a hard time writing it
down, but you go out for a run.
And when you're moving,
things start to make sense.
And I think that act
of movement, that act of finding
other directions to go,
allows your mind to find
the ways that it needs to.
Whether you end up making comics
or whether you bring it back
down to a textual form
because you have to
is a different question.
So on the one hand,
I think comics are
this extremely powerful way
to represent the complexity
of our thinking.
And the flip side of it
is I think they're an extremely
powerful way to generate
our thinking.
And that's what I want to wrap
with here.
So your eyes, at every second,
are darting about probably about
three times a second.
And they're finding edges,
and they're finding things
that they notice.
And they're making
relationships.
I know that she's sitting
in front of that empty chair.
I'm doing all these things
that I can't even tell that I'm
doing it, but we're doing it all
the time.
And so the minute you make
a mark on a piece of paper,
this relationship engine that's
going on all the time starts
to see things in the drawing,
starts to see things that you
didn't anticipate,
so I said it earlier,
but I really do think my comics
are smarter than I am because I
have this partner that I work
with.
I start making marks,
and my visual system starts
to interact with the things I
made, and I start to have
this conversation that teaches
me a lot about where
the work needs to go.
So it's when I engage
both the sort of I'm
thinking about things,
but I'm making them and seeing
them.
Your eyes are very powerful,
and the visual system is very
powerful.
We don't know it, because it
works so automatically.
So people ask me all the time.
What do you think
of first, words or pictures?
And I say, yes.
I mean, it's funny, I think,
but it's true.
Because the page evolves
from this play of having
the words,
and having pictures, and seeing
how they connect in ways that I
didn't anticipate.
It's deciding that this page,
this is a page about the lousy
name that comics have,
and it's playing with
Shakespeare's--
and here I substitute "rose"
for "comics"--
by any other name would smell as
sweet.
I've decided
that at the beginning,
every panel's going to have
something to do with a rose.
And I draw a juncture,
or I draw this two forking
branch, and that becomes
the juncture.
Did I think of the juncture
first and think of the image,
or the other way around?
I don't even remember anymore.
But each of those things
is triggering the other.
And the work in some sense,
I'm not a mystic at all,
but I feel like when you trust
that, when you start to let
the pictures, and words,
and spatial orientation of them,
they start to teach you where
to go.
And sometimes, I really felt
like I just held on and let
the work go where it needed to.
And I was really happy.
Harvard reproduced many
of the early sketches
in the back of the book.
This is the very first outline,
which is exciting to me,
just because you can kind of see
some of the things I
anticipated, some of the things
that didn't happen.
But why I really like it is
I think, to people who don't
draw,
or to people who don't make
music
or whatever, that when you see
finished work,
it looks like magic.
You walk through the gallery,
and oh my goodness.
This is magic.
I could never do that.
But I think if we see the mess
that is the thinking--
and that's
the other important point.
This isn't a drawing
of my thinking.
This is my thinking.
My work doesn't exist
without this.
I couldn't make it
without having done this.
And honestly, if I'd written
a book and then drawn pictures
to it, it would've been
a completely different work.
It had to be made this way.
I mean, there's nothing wrong
with doing it the other way.
It's just saying that it would
be a different thing.
But I think seeing the way we
figure our way into the work
is really important to make
this something
that other people can do.
And I think we all can do it.
So I want to give you one very
specific example from the book,
and then we'll wrap it up here.
In the chapter on imagination,
I had a page about stories,
the transformative power
of them.
And very early on, I thought
I would do it on Scheherazade
and the 1,001 Nights tale.
And so that seemed
like a productive thing,
and I was playing with this idea
that page would have stories
within stories,
and it would zither across
in the way
that Scheherazade's name did.
And I would have
these little zooms.
Folks are familiar with the book
Zoom, where they're
in a postcard, and then we zoom
in, and they're watching TV,
and we keep going.
Or Powers of 10, the film
and the books where they're--
anyway, I would have
these literal or metaphorical
zooms.
But midway across the page,
I wanted to say, by stories,
I don't just mean the fanciful,
but I also mean things
like science.
So had I been writing,
I would have probably said,
"and by stories, I also mean
things like science."
And maybe I'd put period on it.
But because, as I said earlier,
I'm much more interested
in embodying the work
through the visuals
and in the structure
of the page,
I had to find something
that both suited
this visual structure I was
building and also was science.
So I started looking,
and I started digging into what
had been done in the time
the Nights tales were written
down, in the Arab golden age,
which is where they were written
down.
And I stumbled across a work
by a man named Al-Tusi, whose
astronomical figurations were
later used by Copernicus to do
his big revolution.
So I was over the moon,
because I'd already had a page
on Copernicus in which
the main point was that nothing
changed except the point
of view, which changed
everything.
So I was like, all right.
I had this page on Copernicus.
Things are coming.
And so I spent about three weeks
learning what he'd done
in astronomy,
trying to figure out how I could
make it work with the structure
that I'd built of the page
to come out to the what
is those three lower
panels there.
So nothing in my notes said, you
should learn
obscure Arab astronomy
of the 1300s.
That is not part of my proposal,
not part of my notes.
But what did tell me to do
it is that I had to go
from there to there,
and I had to have something that
talked about science
through the pictures,
and it had to actually teach
the science too.
It couldn't just be, let's throw
Einstein in there,
because that's the easy thing
to do.
It had to actually
be a real thing.
So the work taught me where
to go, and took me in directions
that I didn't expect to go.
And I think that's a really
crucial point about saying why
this is important.
And I want to turn the corner
as I close this to say
a few words about my students,
and I'm going to show you one
example.
So most recently, I taught
this class, Comics as a Way
of Thinking, and I primarily
have had
non-drawers or self-described
non-drawers in my class.
But we make comics
from the first day,
and we make work
for their finals,
and we keep doing it.
And I find across the board
that the act of making
changes how they think,
and changes where they go
with their work.
And it doesn't matter
about the skills.
So the work I'm going to show is
by someone I'm guessing you
probably wouldn't put up
at the National Gallery
necessarily, because this was
a very shy student-- it was
really difficult to get her
to speak much in class--
but did
these extraordinary stick figure
comics, where her thinking just
poured out.
So if we graded this
on the basis
of her artistic skills,
that wouldn't count.
And if we graded it on grammar
or whatever other rubrics we
have in the world,
it would be hard to say.
But if we think about what she
did in her thinking,
this is one of most
extraordinary things
that I've seen.
And I'm only showing you
a fragment from it.
She did all this play
with the boxes, these things
that work which is very
much about comics, these things
that trapped her.
In the whole comic,
you don't see her face
till the last page, which I'm
now going to show.
But she's moving
through her thinking.
And I'm going to read
the last page.
So she makes her own box out
of word, sounds, and pictures.
And soon, she learns that there
is no need for borders,
that borders restrict her
unnecessarily, since she can go
anywhere she wishes.
And I mean, I try to read it
without getting teared up,
but I think what's
important in that,
and what's hopefully
important out of my own work,
is that incorporating
other modes
lets us go places we need to go,
and lets us discover things
that we need to discover.
So I think about it in terms
of myself,
in bringing these other modes,
rather than fitting pieces in,
it opens spaces up,
and that my research process
became more journey, more
adventure of discovery
than you've got to fill
in that last little brick
that somebody's supposed to do.
And I think as educators,
as people, as students,
as whatever we are,
I think when we encourage,
and when you encourage
those ways of learning to count,
to be cultivated,
I think it allows us to go
in all kinds of directions
that we need to go.
And it's really something I hope
as a society
that we really embrace that,
and see the value of it.
And I think that's very much
what this institution is here
to do.
So with that,
I want to say thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
