Category: Blog

Webinars on comics and graphic novels in language education

Comics and Graphic Novels in the Language Class in Secondary Education – Ghent Uni Societal Value Fund

From January 2025 until December 2025 Eva Van de Wiele is working on a side project, inspiring teachers to use comics in language education.

Since 2017 the Netherlands has a “Graphic Novels voor de Leeslijst” , a selection of “literary comics” with which Margreet de Heer hoped to inspire teachers and pupils. The pedagogical advantages of comics in language education have been promoted by scholars (Amann & Walner 2022) and teachers. Lesson plans made by teachers for teachers focus on making comics or on approaching the literary aspects of graphic novels (Klascement). Still, comics appear in a plethora of formats and materials (zines, webcomics) and reach their diverse publics through diverse distribution channels. To help language teachers with a background in literary and linguistic studies, this project develops workshops and a webinar on comics as a medium, with attention for multimodality, publication format and implied audience. The corpus will provide teachers with a multilingual corpus (Dutch, French, German, English, Italian, Spanish).

Enroll for Eva’s workshops ->Strips en beeldromans in de taalles | Humanities Academie

Watch the webinars for inspiration

 

Thanks to Ghent University BOF fund for financing this project!

Thanks to Robbe Wulgaert for helping record and finetune the webinars!

Strips in de taalles en rondleiding in de Van Passen collectie

 

Ben je taaldocent in het secundair onderwijs? Dan ben je misschien geïnteresseerd in onze volgende activiteiten op 30 april en 23 oktober 2025:

Deze studievoormiddag combineert een workshop over strips in de taalles met een rondleiding in de uitgebreide stripcollectie van de Faculteitsbibliotheek.

In anderhalf uur behandelt dr. Eva Van de Wiele in een workshop hoe je strips en graphic novels in de taalles kan gebruiken. Aan de hand van verschillende strips in verschillende formaten en verschillende talen, proberen we elke taaldocent inspiratie te bieden. Je leert ook de belangrijkste vaktermen en hoe je die in jouw doeltaal kan doorgeven aan je leerlingen.

Prof. Maaheen Ahmed neemt je aansluitend mee door de boeiende en uitgebreide Van Passen collectie van de UGent.

Inschrijven 

New publications about the COMICS project activites

We are incredibly happy to report two short publications about our project!

First, Sylvain Lesage devotes a nice, insightful article (in French) to From Private to Public, Philippe Capart’s volume dedicated to exploring and contextualizing the Van Passen collection (link to the first episodes here).

Second, Eva Van de Wiele (with contributions from Maaheen Ahmed and Lou Braibant) writes an in-depth review (in Dutch) of the exhibition ISSUE ZERO – Reading the Van Passen Collection, which takes place (and renews it material every two weeks) from September 16 to December 22 this year at KIOSK, Pasteurlaan 2 in Ghent (clicking on this link one may download the biweekly ‘issues’ that accompany the exhibition).

The Cambridge Companion to Comics

The Cambridge Companion to Comics is out!

 

With original and insightful chapters by Simon Grennan, Paul Williams, Matthieu Letourneux, Jaqueline Berndt, Giorgio Busi Rizzi, Blair Davis, Jan Baetens, Daniel Stein, Nicolas Labarre, Shiamin Kwa, Erwin Dejasse, Benoît Crucifix, Kim Munson, Mel Gibson, Susan Kirtley and Joe Sutliff Sanders.

 

To find out more, read the blogpost on Fifteen Eighty-Four:

https://www.cambridgeblog.org/2023/06/so-you-think-you-knew-comics/

 

Or listen to the History of Literature podcast:

 

Or listen to the New Books in Literary Studies episode for the New Books Network:

https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-cambridge-companion-to-comics

 

 

A new article on the Van Passen collection!

Prof. Hugo Frey, affiliated member of the COMICS team, has recently discussed the Van Passen collection in a new entry of Paper Trails, the BOOC (living online book) edited by University College London Press and dedicated to “The Social Life of Archives and Collections”.

Prof. Frey detailed the acquisition and curation of Alain Van Passen’s “enormous personal collection of predominantly, but not exclusively, Francophone comics” by Prof. Ahmed, and explore its holdings, now “preserved in over 700 box files” and comprising “comics from much of the twentieth century, with some core emphasis on the long period of 1940–80”, making it, in Prof Frey’s words, “one of the key sites of comics research for twenty-first-century scholarship”.

You can read the whole article here: https://ucldigitalpress.co.uk/BOOC/Article/3/125/ .