Research topic/aim

Ambitions to promote empathy has been discussed from different angles and contexts, and empathy is generally seen to be fostered within the realm of education, achieved through a variety of materials. Researchers have analyzed the ways in which empathy can be enhanced through art (Phillips, 2003), literature (Rydén Gramner, 2022), and photography (Lorenz, 2011). This article sets to contribute to this research by including comics; a medium that has been granted sparse academic attention in education (see Wallner & Eriksson Barajas, 2020).

Theoretical framework

Identity construction can be seen as establishing a border between the self and the other by articulating who we are not; while fiction enables us to see ourselves through others (Felski, 2008). Therefore, the purpose of this article is to explore how students can use a comic text in upper secondary school to construct empathy towards ‘the other’.

Methodological design

This article builds on data from five Swedish upper secondary classes in Year 10 (16 years old), with 91 students and 4 teachers. The students read a comic story in Swedish called “Report from Ukraine”, a freely accessible online comic from Swedish publisher Galago. Students read the comic and discussed it in small groups during a one-hour lesson. Some group discussions lasted only about 15 minutes, while others talked for almost the whole hour. Video and audio were recorded, resulting in a total of 13 hours and 18 minutes of data. This was then analyzed using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006), focusing on students’ verbal and non-verbal actions, in order to explore how students construct empathy. The category of ‘them and us’ turned out to be the most common (n=38 out of 218), wherein students compared, e.g., Swedes and Ukrainians.

Expected conclusions/findings

The results can be summarized through three themes: 1) Portrayal of the other, wherein students construct otherness as being both similar and different to themselves, and how imagery is used to construct this. 2) Knowledge , how students’ knowledge about the situation in Ukraine, the invasion, etc. differs, and how this is important for their (empathic) reading of the story. 3) Fear and other emotions, containing both students’ emotional narratives about the war, as well as perceived

emotions interpreted through the comic characters.

Relevance to Nordic educational research

We consider this to be indicative of how comics, as multimodal narratives, can engage students in discussions on empathy, relating current global events and issues of ethnicity and otherness to their personal experiences and individual viewpoints.

References:

Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology 3(2), 77-101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa

Felski, R. (2008). Uses of Literature. Blackwell Publishing.

Lorenz, L. S. (2011). A way into empathy: A ‘case’of photo-elicitation in illness research. Health 15 (3), 259-275. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363459310397976

Phillips, L. C. (2003). Nurturing empathy. Art Education 56 (4), 45-53. https://doi.org/10.1080/00043125.2003.11653509

Rydén Gramner, A. (2022). Cold Heart, Warm Heart: On fiction, interaction, and emotion in medical education [Doctoral dissertation]. Linköping University.

Wallner, L., & Eriksson Barajas, K. (2020). Using Comics and Graphic Novels in K-9 Education: An Integrative Literature Review. Studies in Comics 11(1), 37-54. https://doi.org/10.1386/stic_00014_1