On Feb. 13, students at St. Mary’s College of Maryland (SMCM) explored environmental advocacy through an unconventional medium: comics. Their Applied Sustainability Practicum (ENST 390) class, taught by Associate Professor and Chair of the Environmental Studies Department Barry Muchnick, welcomed Joy Reeves as guest speaker that day. Reeves is the assistant director for policy and programs of the Rachel Carson Council, a national environmental organization founded in 1965 to honor the work and ethics of environmentalist Rachel Carson. The Rachel Carson Campus Network, of which SMCM is a member, includes 59 colleges organized to involve students, faculty, staff, administrators and community partners.
Reeves presented “From Comics to Capitol Hill: The Art and Advocacy of Sustainability Storytelling” to provide the background for the class’s creative project. A cartoonist herself, Reeves worked closely with Muchnick to design the workshop.
The assignment prompt for the students was simple, yet open-ended: “Create a comic that addresses and ‘debunks’ an environmental myth.” The students spent the second half of the class planning, scripting, storyboarding and drawing their own comics. “Any concern students had about their artistic abilities was quickly replaced by excitement about new and nontraditional approaches to change making,” noted Muchnick. “As their ideas came alive on the page, they embraced the idea that art—as an expressive and communicative medium—has a central role in telling sustainability stories that matter. Equally important was the recognition that creativity is an essential part of interdisciplinary problem solving that aligns art and science.”
The students produced a gallery of self-expressive comics: some poignant and provocative; some humorous and topical; and many revealed that students had an environmental issue close to their hearts that they were ready to share with the world. In doing so, they addressed a question Rachel Carson first raised to the generations of storytellers that followed her: How do we tell stories that matter? Stories that touch hearts and change minds?
The full published gallery of SMCM student work is at rachelcarsoncouncil.org.
