Nele Noppe's List: Papers: manga in education

• For the pre-reader, a comic can be purely graphical in nature and help provide practice with sequencing as well as concrete to abstract transitions using illustrations instead of written words.
• For more advanced readers, comics can contain all the complexity of 'normal' written material which the student must decode and comprehend, such as puns, alliteration, metaphors, symbolism, point of view, context, inference, and narrative structures. A comic can also be a stepping-stone to more complex and traditional written work.
• Comics also have the ability to meet the needs of students in a variety of learning styles.

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• Text is not the most efficient medium for communicating all information. Some information — the sound of a child’s laughter, the borders of a country and the proper method of performing a physical exercise — can best be communicated in media other than text.
• Enter the computer. Suddenly in the “New World”, text is stripped of all its traditional advantages. Computer technology has rendered, or will soon render, all media as easy to create, reproduce and port as text.
• In the “New World”, text is no longer the default medium. It follows, then, that in this “New World” the nature of the information to be communicated determines the medium (or media) of communication.

  • "Text is no longer the default medium" --> mention this!!!
• Our students will come of age in a multimedia world. They will be required to compose documents that express their ideas as effectively as possible, using whatever media necessary

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• The characters have a typical manga styling to them, especially in their eyes

• I was working on a research project at Teachers College, which is the School of  Education at Columbia University. The project was called Learning In and  Through The Arts. We were aiming to identify all the ways that the arts impact  kids socially and academically. We came up, as somebody in the arts would  expect, with all these incredible ways that the arts could help kids build social  and academic pathways that typically don't occur during the school day... And  it included all the arts: music, dance, theater, etc. And so having done that  research for about three years, I was ready for all these changes to happen the  way that teachers teach and kids learn. But typical of academic work, it was  published in a journal, and about 18 people read it, and that was sort of the end  of that!
• In terms of reading, I see urban kids really having  adopted the manga, carrying some of those in their back pockets.

• Maar dat is nog niks. In 2002 werden in Japan anderhalf miljard striptitels verkocht. Miljard, geen miljoen. Voor de Volkskrant heb ik wel eens een lang stuk over de manga-economie geschreven en de eindredactie had mijn miljard toen abusievelijk en begrijpelijk veranderd in miljoen, maar dat klopt dus niet. Met die boekverkopen werd 523 miljard yen omgezet. Het stripblad One Piece alleen al heeft een oplage van 2.63 miljoen exemplaren.

• Manga strips die in Japan worden verkocht worden genoemd: 150 miljoen exemplaren PER MAAND. Als je dit soort aantallen ziet moet toch iets van interesse ontstaan in dit medium. Waarom en hoe. Gelukkig zijn er dus serieuze teksten over de werking en het gebruik ervan.

   

  Educatieve aspecten strips

• deze media wil gebruiken in het onderwijs. Ze kunnen worden gebruikt als een politiek instrument om mensen te manipuleren. Sinds halverwege de jaren negentig is het medium van de manga uitgegroeid tot een podium waar commentaar wordt geleverd op de situatie in Japan.
• Voor 70% van de eerstejaars van de opleiding Japans is de aantrekkingskracht die uitgaat van manga en anime (Japanse strips en tekenfilms) een belangrijke reden om Japans te gaan studeren.

• Pink, who previously offered career advice in books such as Free-Agent Nation and A Whole New Mind, participated in a two-month fellowship in Japan before churning out Johnny Bunko, the first manga business book for the American market.

• 
  Fast Retailing hopes to boost sales of the manga and anime T-shirts by luring more overseas customers who seek after Japanese pop culture as "Japan Cool."

• Like Classic Comics decades earlier, the Manga Editions of Shakespeare suffer two fatal flaws inherent in most edutainment: one concerning the content and the other the medium. Regarding content, the Manga Editions do not simply adapt great works of literature to a modern form; they devastate them in the process. The result is an illustrated version of CliffsNotes
• However, there is one major difference contained within the Manga Editions of Shakespeare. Whereas Baz Luhrmann’s modernized film Romeo + Juliet is designed to entertain, the Manga Editions aim to educate, or at least substitute for education.

  • -> so what is 'education' then?
• The second overarching flaw of the Manga Editions concerns the medium. This I discovered via an informal focus group of ten manga scholars: students in the manga club at Martin Luther King, Jr. High School in New York City. These high schoolers are not mere manga fans; they are devoted researchers of the genre. They read, discuss, and debate manga in school, out of school, and in their sleep, I imagine. Moreover, they create their own manga and share their work with peers, just like Japanese youths thousands of miles away. Their first impression of the Manga Editions was voiced in unison: “It’s NOT manga!”
• “Where are the sound effects?”

  • I like this comment best. There should be sound effects ;)
• And these devotees would not be caught reading manga from left to right like “amerimanga”
• Finally, here was an authentic connection between Shakespeare and manga—a student’s creative synthesis and personal reflection of the original Shakespeare text.

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• Manga fans drawn to Japanese comics

  • Manga fans drawn to manga? Imagine that ;)
• The Traverse Area District Library launched a bi-weekly Manga Book Club last Thursday evening, drawing a dozen enthusiasts of the Japanese illustrated novel.

• Outstanding fact this year, we witnessed an increase in attempts made by European authors inspired by the different graphic and narrative codes of manga. Publishers, such Akiléos, Ankama, Le Caméléon, Carabas, Delcourt, Les Humanoïdes associés, Pika or Soleil published 57 ones, in 2007.
• However, the 9th art, itself is more and more a source of adaptations and the commercial weight of the derivative rights or of the adaptations in animations, movies, novels... grows every year; as what's happening in Japan where manga provides, for a while now, about 60 % of the world production of cartoons (source : Matsumoto Kubo).