Retracing memory: Using multimodal scaffolding to create autographics in the classroom

This article examines how undergraduate composition students at Nevada State University used a multimodal scaffolded workshop to compose autobiographical comics alongside their study of two autographics: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. The workshop pairs two pedagogical strategies: the narrative approach, drawn from collaborative work on summer bridge programmes (Tavecchio & Pazargadi, 2020), which asks students to exchange life stories as a route to mutual transformation; and a multimodal scaffolded approach, drawing on Robin Jocius’s CLICK model, which sequences three modes of composition (mind map, written reflection, six-panel comic) in incremental stages. Drawing on Comics Studies (Groensteen, 2007; McCloud, 1994; Polak, 2017), the article argues that comics is specifically suited to memory work because it requires viewers to assemble meaning in-between the gutters, and to enter the affective and ethical exchange of testimony. Read alongside Gillian Whitlock’s account of the testimonial transaction (Whitlock, 2015), students’ six-panel autobiographical comics emerge as both pedagogical artefacts and exercises in life narrative, in which the work of representing trauma and ordinary memory is at once aesthetic and relational, resulting for the student in a moment of deeper self-realisation.