Educational Comics: A novel pedagogy for teaching transferable and humanistic skills in Engineering

Educational Comics: A novel pedagogy for teaching transferable and humanistic skills in Engineering Kai Zhuang (1, 2), Dimpho Radebe (3), Mojgan Jadidi Mardkheh (1), and Evan Hu (2) 1: Lassonde School of Engineering, York University, Canada 2: Brave49, Canada 3: University of Toronto, Canada Transferable, humanistic, and future-ready skills, such as emotional intelligence and ethical leadership, are essential for students' success, thriving, and contribution, particularly in technical fields such as engineering. However, many engineering students, being technically-focused, find these topics difficult to engage with and may lose interest and motivation along the way. We have been developing and piloting a novel method for teaching complex subject matter centered on educational comics. Educational comics combine the engagingness of visual storytelling with the searchability and indexability of text narratives. They can be exceedingly effective for communicating complex ideas and promoting creative and associative thinking, making them an ideal medium for teaching transferable and humanistic skills to engineering students. Once developed, base-comics can be converted to different learning formats and experiential education activities, including self-directed workbooks, standalone workshops, and facilitated online courses. By replacing unfamiliar and hard-to-understand language with intentionally designed comics, we were able to make the learning experience more inclusive, accessible, and approachable. Graphic representations, more so than rational words, facilitate emotional connections to the subject matter, keeping more students engaged and contributing to more meaningful learning. Over the past two years, we have applied this pedagogy to the teaching of visual thinking, storytelling, ethics, teamwork, motivation, and other humanistic topics in various curricular and co-curricular settings in two Universities, including two courses taken by all engineering students, a peer mentorship program attended by all first-year engineering students, two bridge-programs for students entering university, a workshop for graduate researchers, and a STEAM program for female high school students. Our initial experience applying this pedagogy supports our hypothesis that educational comics are a highly effective pedagogical strategy for teaching complex non-technical subject matter to engineering students. We are beginning to develop a formal research program to assess the efficacy and impact of this pedagogy.