Morality in Marvel (Spring, Periodic)

• Description

  The purpose of the course is for students to learn the basic features of the superhero comics genre and to utilize those features to aid their understanding of the relationship between society and morality as understood across multiple disciplines. As this is a one-credit course for first year students, features, themes, and disciplines are introduced at a very general level.

• Objectives

  • Understand the basic features of superhero comics.

  • Read comics and discuss how these features highlight significant characters, events, and themes. Both in terms of an individual comic issue and in terms of a larger narrative unfolding over multiple issues.

  • Use the integration of multiple disciplines as a tool for analyzing real and hypothetical (alternative) comic events that have moral implications.

• Highlights

  • Seeing students identify affordances of superhero comics when it comes to asking questions explored by multiple disciplines.

  • Seeing students leverage their creativity and critical thinking in reimagining a morally significant event in an assigned comic and exploring its implications using multiple disciplines.

• Relevance

  • At a general level, the course is relevant for anyone who is interested in exploring similarities and differences between key assumptions of various disciplines.

  • The course is also relevant for students interested in the affordances of multimodal and multi-textual learning for creativity and critical thinking.

• Considerations

  Utilizing some of the classroom time differently so students can demonstrate their knowledge of and engagement with superhero comics and the key assumptions of various disciplines in multiple ways.