This lesson is designed to be an instructional aid for 10th and 11th grade ELL and REP students taking on-level Astronomy. Many of the students in this group are struggling with basic language acquisition skills and need additional ways to process information that are both informative and hold their attention, as many of them already have developed deficiencies in attention due to cognitive overload or learned behavior that includes self-distraction (e.g. doodling and phone use) and mental isolation (tuning out). The instructional delivery model I am using with this is a paper self-paced model (Piskurich 2015). It has several advantages for the target audience, including being a self-paced, easy to distribute, multi-modal delivery (pictures/textual) that is inexpensive to produce. It is also portable, similar in format to the manga and comics read by the target audience, and small in size (three full-sized pages). By using Mayer's principles of spatial contiguity and temporal contiguity, along with coherence, the message about the structure and organization of the solar system should be fairly easy to remember. The assessment that follows would also involve the main character (Pixel the ferret) returning to ask questions about what had been presented.
A Ferret's-Eye View of the Solar System
My own definition of comics, cartoons and graphic novels might be a bit different than what has been suggested by the authors. I grew up with comics, and they were strictly entertainment - or so I thought, when in fact they actually were designed to model how to resolve conflict both physically, and intellectually. Despite the high level of physical violence in the comics, the characters very rarely actually died. When they did, it was due to force of circumstance, their own poor choices, or by accident. Cartoons were short, funny (we even called them 'funnies') and if they had a point, it was usually oblique - either political or social in nature. Graphic novels to me are the graphic re-representation and interpretation of existing works, like Maus. They are the static equivalent of a movie, where the artist is the director, producer and key grip all at once. The challenges with this assignment were surprisingly few. My biggest challenge was deciding which program to use. After signing up for trial versions of entirely too many of them and attempting to create my own, I realized that I hated the cookie-cutter paper-doll look and feel of the programs and preferred the more laborious and personal hand-drawn version I settled on. I had already done a storyboard, and decided to just clean it up and color it by hand. What you see is the result of about eighteen hours of work, designing the lesson, laying it out, creating the main character to narrate the lesson, and doing the final inking and coloring. I am unreasonably proud of it, and will be taking this to school to show off.
Piskurich, G. M. (2015). Rapid Instructional Design (3rd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.