Media and communication opportunities of comics in university education: the Ukrainian case

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The article presents the experience of teaching a comics-oriented course at the Oles Honchar Dnipro National University (Dnipro, Ukraine) in 2023–2024. The communication and media aspects of comics were tested in three thematic clusters: science, university education, documentary. The paradigmatic approach implemented in the process of the course teaching made it possible to combine communication, educational, narrative, and interpretive models of comic discourse analysis. The effectiveness of the proposed methods was studied through questionnaires and practical cases. The thematic emphases on the latest trends in Comics Studies, Comics Pedagogy, Comics-based research were adjusted. The comics became a trigger for intellectual search, reflective self-disclosure and creative inspiration. While working with the traumatic experience (war/military/documentary comics), a focus was brought to the medial possibility of the comics as a tool of mediatisation of memory. The participatory nature of graphic narratives became the basis for an extensive dialogue with science and educational practice, and the impetus for the creation of personal graphic confessions that posed new challenges to pedagogy wartime.