Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Creating Digital Comics In Response To Literature: Aesthetics, Aesthetic Transactions, And Meaning Making, Kelly Wissman, Sean Costello

Literacy Teaching & Learning Faculty Scholarship

This article explores how eighth-grade students in a reading support class responded to the novel The Outsiders with the software program Comic Life. Rather than viewing this work from a new technologies or digital literacies perspective, we argue that unique insights can be gained by analyzing students’ digital compositions with lenses attuned to the arts, the aesthetic transaction, and student perspectives. In our presentation of four case studies, we are informed by two conceptualizations of aesthetics. First, we consider the aesthetic qualities of students' comics by analyzing the presence and impact of image selection, color choice, and overall design on …