Pixel International Conferences

Writing courses seldom give students the opportunity to improve people’s health and even save lives. Yet in Fall 2018, I taught an advanced undergraduate writing course at Stanford designed to do precisely that. Laura Kwong, who had just earned her Ph.D. in Mechanical and Environmental Engineering from Stanford, heard that I taught a course about picture books.1 She approached me to see if we could collaborate on a project she had been involved with to improve health among new mothers and young children in rural Bangladesh. Specifically, her project aimed to improve maternal nutrition; early childhood stimulation; responsive feeding; water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH); infant and young child nutrition; and lead and arsenic exposure prevention. Laura thought that a more visual, storytelling approach might complement the team’s project to help educate rural mothers during visits by community health workers. I proposed the course to the Program in Writing and Rhetoric, and soon students were brainstorming and pitching ideas for picture books that could convey hefty lists of behavioral recommendations in engaging, culturally sensitive ways. Instead of producing their books in 18 months, as in the publishing industry, students had 10 weeks. Creating five picture books, in groups, involved many cycles of deliberation, countless rhetorical choices, and a lot of creative problem solving. To help navigate the cultural complexities and nuances, students received generous feedback from the project’s research team in Bangladesh. In addition, students received feedback on black-and-white book dummies from Bangladeshi mothers, who shared what worked well and what caused confusion. Dr. Kwong also helped students make their stories and books more culturally accurate and authentic. For example, she let them know that their initial sketches of characters cooking while standing up in Western-style kitchens did not match the reality of mothers cooking while crouching before small stoves on dirt floors. She shared photos from her research trips to Bangladeshi villages so students could see what a street vendor’s table looks like, what a lead-contaminated mustard oil tin used to store food looks like, or how women dress. Ultimately, although the picture books that students created in the course may not become bedtime classics, they have great potential to improve real lives in impoverished communities. Using picture books in innovative educational contexts can reveal how they are “hugely complex and amazing in their own right.”2 In my presentation, I will share takeaways, offer pedagogical and logistical tips for anyone interested in pursuing similar multimodal projects, and help educators think about how to orchestrate such projects in local science education environments.

Keywords: education, picture books, service learning, international education.

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