Beyond Words: How Visual Storytelling is Transforming University Learning: A Q&A with Dr Eleanor Chiari

The Heart of the Matter is a cross-cultural, interdisciplinary project that explores how visual storytelling can support student wellbeing, foster creative academic engagement, and deepen critical thinking. Initiated through a Global Engagement Seed Fund from UCL and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, the collaboration brings together Dr Eleanor Chiari, Associate Professor (Teaching) at UCL, and Professor Subir Dey from IIT Delhi’s Department of Design. Both educators were drawn to the power of images to articulate complex inner experiences, especially following the COVID-19 pandemic. In combining visual culture, design, and pedagogy, their workshops invite students to use drawing and storytelling as a means of academic expression and a tool for connection and self-reflection. We interviewed Dr Chiari shortly after the succesful running of a zine-making workshop at our recent Celebration of Humanities Education.

1. Where did the idea for this project come from?

Our collaboration started from a call for a Global Engagement seed fund for interdisciplinary pedagogical collaborations matched by UCL and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi. During lockdown, Professor Subir Dey taught a module on Comics for Mental Health in the Department of Design at IIT Delhi and he found me through my UCL module on Trauma in Visual Culture. From different angles and in very different contexts, we were both considering the power of visual images to process complex private and public traumas. Given the challenges some of our students were facing with classroom engagement after the pandemic and with the threat of generative AI looming on the horizon, we wanted to explore ways our disciplines (design and cultural studies/visual culture) might come together in productive and joyful ways. We came up with a project that helped us explore how graphic visual storytelling might be used in the classroom. Professor Dey was interested in helping his students become more critical readers of images, and I was immediately thrilled by the possibilities that design approaches might offer to the creative assessments I was using with my students.

2. You mentioned the challenges students were facing after the pandemic. Could you tell us more about the current needs of students for emotional support and how your project addresses these needs?

Subir and I both hold active pastoral roles in our universities, he as undergraduate tutor for the Department of Design at IIT Delhi and I as Programme Director for the BA Language and Culture in UCL’s School of European Languages, Culture and Society (SELCS). We both found that the pandemic accelerated processes that were already manifesting in our classrooms in recent years. Anxiety in particular seemed to be on the rise, not helped by insecurity over the future and increasing pressures over the cost of living.

Many students seem to find the classroom environment more emotionally charged than they used to. Establishing moments of joy and connection early on during the educational process can help students feel safer and better able to open up in front of classmates. The zine exercise we showcased at the Celebration of Humanities Education can be adapted in a variety of ways to get students to introduce themselves to fellow classmates (and could be assigned as homework if there isn’t time in class). In Delhi, we asked students to answer the question ‘who are you?’ and it was fascinating to see how many students chose to introduce themselves through the harder challenges they had faced in their lives. Showing fellow students their drawings and telling their stories allowed them to break the ice and get to know each other on a much deeper level than simple introductions might have done.

Drawing as a practice is a powerful tool for bringing people back into their bodies and, when well managed, creative practices in the classroom can be deeply bonding experiences. Sometimes, what we cannot say in words, we can communicate through stories and that vulnerable act of sharing unconscious parts of ourselves can help students feel seen and heard, a bonding and restorative experience. In our workshops, which were aimed at exploring scholarly ideas visually, we were struck by the students’ curiosity to share their personal stories and how that process helped establish deep connections between participants that ultimately also affected their learning and their enthusiasm for doing so.

3. How does interacting with visual storytelling and zine-making shift students’ understanding of knowledge production, pedagogy, and academic communication?

Zines are deceptively simple canvases those for thought. For those not familiar with what a zine is, it is a self-produced micro-magazine or booklet, in our case consisting of six pages plus a front and back cover. Zines are very useful thinking tools because they restrict the space for expression… Like the word count in academic essays, challenging students to express their ideas in a fixed number of pages requires them to make strategic decisions about what they want to communicate and how. This is in itself a very useful exercise in narrowing down ideas and exploring effective communication.  There are some wonderful purely textual zines out there, but we were interested in using zines as tools for graphic visual storytelling. For that, we needed students to consider visual metaphors and also to reflect on all the ways they already communicate visually every day (on WhatsApp, through memes, cinematic spectatorship etc…) and to explore how these techniques might be used to communicate academic ideas visually as well.

Telling a good visual story is challenging, but when someone is able to pull it off, the experience is deeply gratifying. In our workshops we also took this process to a second level by getting students to plan a zine collaboratively. In negotiating and discussing ideas with others and planning how best to express them in drawing, students further consolidate their own understanding of those ideas and they engage with them in an entirely new way.

4. In what ways did the interdisciplinary nature of the workshops enhance or challenge the learning experience of students?

If you are working in a group with students who study different disciplines you often need to simplify your ideas to explain them. Students have to shed academic jargon, or become critically aware of academic practices which have become second nature to them. This reflective practice can be invaluable. In our Delhi workshops, the humanities students really benefited from working with extremely talented design students, who could quickly transform their ideas into beautiful drawings. Design students also benefited from the structured analytical planning and depth that humanities students brought to their storytelling. All students benefited from being pushed to think and work beyond their comfort zone. We have received wonderful feedback from all the workshops and have already seen students use their zines to promote their research at postgraduate conferences. One research illustration was even accepted for a journal contribution in comparative literature!

5. What role did the workshop’s balance between structured guidance & open-ended exploration play in fostering student creativity and critical thinking?

Our workshops were designed, first and foremost, to be as inclusive and friendly as possible and to create the illusion of casual exploration. But they were, in fact, very carefully scaffolded. Each activity ensured that learners would be prepared for the next stage of engagement and aimed to build their confidence and encourage them to push themselves further.

A storytelling workshop requires careful consideration of time, objectives, expectations, and overall learning. While these factors were closely integrated in our workshop, we also ensured activities contained a playful element to make them light and enjoyable. This approach ensured that creativity was gradually revealed through the activities without overwhelming the students. The paced-down approach also gave them enough time to reflect and progress through the activities efficiently.

6. How might the practices of cross-cultural collaboration and visual literacy cultivated in this project be applied across broader educational contexts, e.g. at UCL?

During the Celebration of Humanities Education, I was delighted to see that my colleagues who teach languages in SELCS saw real potential in how zine-making could be used in Language teaching. It could be a very fun way of exploring and explaining complex grammar rules but also of getting students to do all kinds of storytelling in the classroom. We are already discussing a training session with me as part of our peer dialogue practices. I now regularly use creative forms of assessment in my teaching and  I am very keen to promote such methods to any colleagues interested in adopting them for their modules.

Subir Dey and I used the generous contribution from the Centre for Humanities Education to create a workbook that can be used by students, teachers and creatives alike. The activity book will be a hands-on practice book to be used to enhance and polish creative storytelling skills, which can enhance academic thinking more widely. It is in the design stages now, but please watch this space for information on how to access it soon!

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To find out more about Eleanor and Subir’s project, visit their website at: https://www.heartofthematter.in/

Dr Eleanor Chiari is an Associate Professor (Teaching) and the Programme Director for the BA language and Culture in the School of European Languages, Cultures and Society at University College London. She has been teaching interdisciplinary modules on history, photography, and visual culture for the past 16 years. In her non-academic life, she runs creative workshops and secular rituals to improve wellbeing and connection in small groups in London and the South East.