Something from Nothing

Leon is a senior teacher-librarian who puts his interest in the screen as the site of 21st century literacy engagement into practice in this project to create comic books in grades 2 and 4. Leon has developed an approach to teaching children who have special needs in literacy acquisition, which centrally includes digital technologies to facilitate interactivity and dynamism in textual comprehension and construction. In the Something from Nothing project, based on a touching story about a favourite childhood blanket that gets remade into smaller and smaller articles as it dissolves: a tie, a book cover and a button, until all that is left of the blanket is a story, Leon carefully scaffolds the children’s understanding of visual literacy. He describes in his interviews how he guides the children to recreate Something from Nothing in comic book form requiring their deep understanding of the narrative, and their individual interpretations of what the story might look like in a graphic format that indicates a fastidious attention to visual semantics. The children go on to create comics focused on social and cultural issues of their own choosing, of which, as Leon remarks, they feel a profound sense of ownership.