Interdisciplinarity T hrough

GRAPHIC
By Jason T odd
s the creator of The Spirit, one of the original masked

A comic book heroes, Will Eisner established himself as a

critical component of this uniquely 20th century art form.
In the earliest days of the comic book genre, Eisner did things on
the page that artists and writers are still trying to understand today.
Had he done nothing else remarkable following the initial run of
The Spirit from 1940 to 1952, we would still remember Eisner
for his unique and innovative style and his contributions to the
development of what he called “sequential art.” However, Eisner
did do more. In 1978, he published A Contract with God, a collection
of graphic stories set in a 1930s working-class Bronx neighbor­
hood, stories that explore an aspect of American history unknown
to many Americans: tenement life for immigrant families during
the Great Depression. Much like the sentimentalism of Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the social realism of Upton
Sinclair’s The Jungle, Eisner’s Contract was a work of literature not
made simply to entertain, but to inform, to educate, to make aware
of unknown injustices.
Eisner produced a variety of other graphic novels, helping to
concretize the term and to establish the standards of the form.
As an artistic genre, the modern graphic novel is still young and
evolving, yet what is produced today, almost 40 years later, contin­
ues to be assessed through direct comparison with Eisner’s work.
Dropsie Avenue, furthering the stories of Jewish tenement life; Life
on Another Planet, exploring the inhumanity bred by the discovery
of life beyond Earth; Fagin the Jew, reimagining Dickens’ racist
stereotype; Last Day in Vietnam, recounting the struggles of Eisner
and his fellow soldiers — these and others constitute a body of
work that established a genre while exposing harsh truths about
human cruelty.
Eisner’s final graphic novel, published months after his death in
2005, while not his most famous, is one of his most intriguing. The
Plot narrates the tale of the creation of The Protocols of the Elders
of Zion, a nefarious and enduring work of racist propaganda. For
those unfamiliar, the Protocols is a document purportedly drafted
by a powerful Jewish cabal during the end of the 19th century, a
document that detailed their supposed plans for a Zionist world
government. Although the Protocols has been debunked a number
of times since its fabrication in 1905, it has been used for over a
century to promote hatred of and violence against the Jewish

8 PHI KAPPA PHI FORUM FALL 2015

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people. Eisner’s Plot literally illustrates the
motivation behind and the creation and dis­
semination of this embodiment of antisemi­
tism.
In his preface, Eisner explains his motiva­
tion: despite “hundreds of books and com­
petent scholarly articles” as well as definitive
evidence of the forgery discovered in 1999
— largely ignored by the mainstream media
— the general public was still unaware of
the false nature of the Protocols. Thus, Eisner
decided that “[w]ith the widespread accep­
tance of the graphic narrative as a vehicle of
popular literature,” he had “an opportunity to
deal head-on with this propaganda in a more
accessible language.”1Eisner took advantage
of the openness of his art form — one of the
primary reasons for the form’s enduring suc­
cess — to do something more than entertain.
Eisner was the first but is by no means the
only artist to tap into this potential. It was
this subset of graphic novels, those dealing
with complex issues of social justice, that I
wanted to explore in the classroom. Thus
it was with The Plot that I chose to begin a
new team-taught class on graphic novels
and social justice this past spring at Xavier
University of Louisiana. In May 2014,1 had
been awarded a FaCTS Fellowship through
Xavier’s Center for the Advancement of
Teaching (CAT). FaCTS — Faculty Com­
munities of Teaching Scholars — is a project
funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
to support the creation of new courses or the
redesign of existing courses to fit with current
trends and concerns at Xavier — to support,
in short, pedagogical innovation. For the
2014-15 academic year, the FaCTS topic was
interdisciplinary teaching and learning.
Xavier University of Louisiana is a unique
school for a number of reasons. Established
in 1925 by Saint Katharine Drexel and the
Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, it is the only
historically black and Catholic university in
the United States. Throughout its 90 years,
Xavier has had social justice at the heart
of its mission. I have found that, while all
universities have mission statements, few have
anything that goes beyond providing a good
education to its students. Xavier’s mission
does, very clearly and specifically, and as a
result, the desire “to contribute to the pro­
motion of a more just and humane society”
underlies every academic endeavor at the
university. A class on graphic novels about
superheroes and fantastic adventures would
surely be enjoyable, but limited; a class on
graphic novels dealing with difficult topics,
with acts of injustice and inhumanity, would
be more meaningful and would better fit into
the tradition of teaching at Xavier.
•k k k
According to Julie Klein and William
Newell, interdisciplinarity is a way of teach­
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ing and learning that works as “a process of
answering a question, solving a problem, or
addressing a topic that is too broad or com­
plex to be dealt with adequately by a single
discipline or profession.”2 Interdisciplinarity
is about breaking out of the disciplinary
boundaries so common in the world of higher
education. The traditional academic structure
of an American university is like the tradi­
tional structure of most American businesses:
you begin at the top and break things into
clusters, then break those clusters into smaller
clusters, then break those into even more and
even smaller clusters. At Xavier, for example,
we have programs within departments within
divisions within colleges.
While such an organization, in place since
the Middle Ages,3 looks good on paper, it cre­
ates a sense of fragmentation and isolation,
whether on a university or a corporate cam­
pus. It’s an oversimplification and something
we should not expect from higher education.
It is easy to read, and as anyone involved in
higher education today knows, one of the
greatest battles we constantly fight is against
the idea of oversimplification. The job of
educators is not to help students understand
something by (oversimplifying it, but rather
to teach them to be able to work through the
complexity of the thing. The program-de­
partment-division-college structure of the
American university may be efficient, with its
clear delineation of authority and responsibil-
FALL 2015 PHI KAPPA PHI FORUM 9

ity, but it is a poor educational model because
it works under the false assumption that
knowledge can be compartmentalized.
Interdisciplinarity is a response to that
faulty assumption and the mistaken think­
ing it has produced. But interdisciplinarity
isn’t just an attempt to make connections
between departments and disciplines. The
first thing you notice when you sit down to
learn about interdisciplinary teaching and
learning is that what many people think of
when they hear the word interdisciplinary is
more accurately labeled multidisciplinary. In
a multidisciplinary class, two or three faculty
members from different disciplines take turns
teaching the class, each providing his or her
discipline’s unique take on the topic at hand.
Multidisciplinary teaching provides multiple
perspectives to the question, problem or topic
at hand, but only one perspective at a time,
whereas interdisciplinary teaching demands
that the teachers and the students use those
multiple perspectives at the same time. In
The Heart of Higher Education, Arthur Zajonc
explains this paradoxical challenge: “While
interdisciplinary teaching brings much to
learning, it is not by itself necessarily truly
integrative. Most often it is a case of simple
juxtaposition. The scholars each bring their
expertise and place their contribution beside
that of their colleagues. The students are left
with the difficult task of synthesizing the
10 PHI KAPPA PHI FORUM FALL 2015
parts into a whole on their own. For these
classes to be truly integrative, faculty need to
exemplify integrative understanding through
the ways in which they connect diverse fields
into a comprehensive integrated whole. ” 4
True interdisciplinarity doesn’t simply make
connections between disciplines; it fuses them
together. Or, as Zajonc says, it demands that
the students fuse together ways of thinking
from the different disciplines. As an act of
synthesis, of creation, interdisciplinarity,
then, is the pinnacle of learning and an ongo­
ing process of innovation.
Before developing the graphic novel
and social justice class, I spent a week in
an intensive workshop learning about and
discussing interdisciplinarity with the other
FaCTS Fellows, the staff of CAT, and Dr.
Julie Klein, a leading scholar and proponent
of interdisciplinary teaching and learning.
Through it all, I came to understand Zajonc’s
point that interdisciplinary learning must be
very active learning, that interdisciplinary
learning is perhaps the most active kind of
learning. Interdisciplinarity is in itself an in­
novative pedagogical method, but its greatest
strength comes from the fact that it demands
further innovation. Interdisciplinarity cannot
be taught through lecture. It cannot be a tool
of the “sage on the stage.” Interdisciplinary
learning — interdisciplinary thinking — can
only be taught through active and collabora­
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tive methods of learning. In short, interdisci­
plinarity demands innovation on the part of
both the teacher and the student.
k k k
Interdisciplinarity addressed one of the
stumbling blocks I had faced when previous­
ly contemplating the graphic novel course
— namely, that despite decades of reading
comic books, I had no formal training in the
visual arts. In order to best help the students
learn to analyze graphic texts, I couldn’t
simply teach them to analyze them as literary
texts. They would need to learn to analyze
them graphically as well. Although interdis­
ciplinarity does not require team teaching,
team teaching is often necessary to achieve
true interdisciplinary teaching and learning,
as it allows two or more experts in disciplines
to bring their knowledge and skills together
in the classroom. I was fortunate in that as I
was developing the basis of this new course,
the art department at Xavier was hiring a
new faculty member to teach graphic design.
Thus, I would be able to help the students
think about the narrative structure of the
text, about characterization and the use of
dialogue, while my colleague, Shayna Blum,
would be able to help them think about the
use of color (or lack thereof), the layout of
frames on a spread of pages, and such.

However, interdisciplinarity also addressed
the new challenge of focusing on issues of
social justice in the class. Over the past few
years, my approach to teaching literature has
become less literary and more contextual.
Increasingly, I feel that the best way I can
help my students access the literary texts I
have them read is to provide them with the
context in which those texts were written and
the context in which they are set. This itself is
not all that innovative: Michel Foucault mas­
tered the approach in the 1960s and 1970s,
followed closely by Stephen Greenblatt in the
1980s, and eventually many others. In order
to consider texts exploring issues of social
justice, my students and I would have to
have a strong understanding of those issues.
It would not be enough to simply rely upon
the graphic novels themselves; we would
need to know more than what the texts told
us. Adding a third faculty member from the
history department was not the issue. For
one thing, having never taught with another
person before, I feared that teaching with
two other people would be more problematic
than effective. For another, we had no focus
beyond the topic of social justice, and finding
a single faculty member able to teach about
the wide variety of historical and political
issues our reading list would cover would
be unlikely, if not impossible. Moreover, the
thought of having the students read these in­
teresting texts and then come to class to listen
to lectures on the real world contexts of those
interesting texts would, I felt, defeat any and
all excitement the students would have about
the reading.
To address this problem, I embraced
the flipped classroom, something else I’ve
thought a lot about in recent years, yet again
couldn’t figure out how to integrate into my
teaching. The flipped classroom is a more
recent pedagogical innovation than interdis­
ciplinarity. The basic idea is a rejection of the
“sage on the stage” model that has been the
hallmark of education for the past 500 years.
We don’t learn by listening, but by doing.
Content delivery is only one component of
effective teaching, and despite what most
of us learned in school, it is not the most
important. Flipped classrooms come in many
shapes and forms, but at their core, they hold
to the same principle: “instruction that used
to occur in class is now accessed at home, in
advance of class. Class becomes the place to
work through problems, advance concepts
and engage in collaborative learning.”5 In
short, the classroom becomes a place for
active and engaged learning.
* * *
I was asked to write an article on class­
room innovation, and I haven’t spent any
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time yet talking about what went on in the
classroom. Teaching this class, The Graphic
Novel and Social Justice, has unquestionably
been the best teaching experience in my
career. The class was not perfect — things
did not always go as planned, and many
things went mostly unplanned — but at its
core, with what we wanted to accomplish —
to help our students learn to interpret and
evaluate the ways in which these texts dis­
cussed instances of injustice — the class was
a great success due to the innovative nature
of its components — the combination of the
flipped classroom and interdisciplinary team
teaching, a combination of two innovative
teaching methods, allowed students to arrive
at a much deeper understanding of the texts
than any traditional class could have accom­
plished.
Yet, to anyone observing the class on a
day-to-day basis, it would not have seemed
all that innovative or unique or effective. We
ultimately had two kinds of class meetings:
discussion days and studio days. On studio
days the students worked on their projects
and Shayna and I floated around the studio
asking or answering questions. On discus­
sion days we would come together and
talk about whichever graphic novel we had
read. Before and during the reading of the
assigned text, the students would complete
a reading guide that asked them to consider
FALL 2015 PHI KAPPA P H I FORUM 11

what they knew before and after the reading.
They would also watch the videos, usually
one or two, each five to ten minutes long,
posted to our Blackboard site. These were
either guest experts talking about real world
issues addressed in the text or found videos
of scholars talking about relevant concepts.
To introduce Art Spiegelmann’s Maus, we
heard from a Holocaust scholar; to intro­
duce Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, a woman
whose family fled Iran after the 1979 revolu­
tion; to introduce Craig Thompson’s Habibi,
Camille Paglia speaking about phallocen-
trism and patriarchal violence. The reading
guides and videos were meant to prepare
us for the discussions. And the discussions
were excellent. We spent no time going over
the basics, no time rehashing what happened
in the book. They’d done all that on the
reading guides. We spent entire class periods
asking why: Why did the artist draw this
panel this way? Why does this spread evoke
such an emotional response? Why do we un­
derstand what is going on in this character’s
head, even though we don’t have any text on
the page?
Our most successful discussions centered
around a simple assignment given to each
student: Select a significant two-page spread
from the text and explain to the class why
you think that spread is so significant. The
students consistently did impressive work
with this task, and it ultimately became the
12 PHI KAPPA PHI FORUM FALL 2015
primary form of assessment for the class, as
both the midterm and final exam. Through
these, we could see the students achieving
most of the course’s learning outcomes. Not
only could they use the terminology of both
literary and visual analysis, but they could
do so effectively and insightfully to discuss
both the narrative aspects of the text and
the graphic aspects. Most importantly, they
could do so to explore the statement being
made about social justice. In other words,
they were able to synthesize the different
components of these very different disci­
plines and areas of knowledge — history, art
and literature.
I have said that interdisciplinarity is the
pinnacle of learning as it demands synthe­
sis and creation. The final innovation we
instituted in this course, something again
I would not have considered or attempted
had I taught it on my own, was a creative
project. To see if our students could do more
than simply discuss how someone else fused
word and image to make a statement about
an issue of social justice, we decided to have
them do so on their own. We ultimately de­
voted a good deal of the semester to studio
time, during which our students worked on
these projects, a higher-order thinking activ­
ity we would not have had time to explore
without using innovative teaching methods
liked flipped instruction and team teaching.
And we, the teachers, were able to provide
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the support necessary to allow the students
to dig much deeper into the material than in
a traditional course, in which the majority,
if not all, of the work is done outside the
classroom with little or no guidance from
the professor. Their projects demonstrated
that the students understood how to pull
together ideas from literary analysis, visual
analysis and socio-political analysis. In the
end, the innovative structure of the course
accomplished something completely unex­
pected. It not only allowed me to teach a
course I had previously thought impossible
to teach effectively; it also made our students
much more than just learners. It made them
innovators. #
Jason Todd (The University of Southern
Mississippi) teaches English at Xavier
University of Louisiana, where he is also
the director of the university's Read Today,
Lead Tomorrow initiative. His fiction has
been published in Red Savina Review,
the Xavier Review, the Southern California
Review, Phantasmagoria and other
publications. His scholarly writing has most recently appeared
in the Southern Literary Journal. For more information, visit his
website at jtodd.info.
For works cited, go online to
i:<PKs>f www.phikappapni.org/forum/fall2015.
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