The Myth of the Student Hero and the “Dreaded Lit Review”

This book uses images from 27 student comics from roughly 125 comics created in my course, “Introduction to Communication Inquiry,” over a three-year period. Most of the them were created in a couple of weeks, which was the time remaining in a semester after the students had completed a traditional academic paper called a “literature review.” I wanted students to reflect on the process of writing a literature review by telling a story about it. I wanted them to tell the story in the form of a comic. I thought I would get a deeper and better reflection if the process was more creative, something that used images as well as words, and that required a bit of planning and organizing.