Gender Through Comic Books

Gender Through Comic Books (also known as #SuperMOOC because of its popular hash tag on Twitter) was a MOOC taught April 2, 2013 through May 18, 2013.

More than 7,000 students enrolled in the April 2013 Gender Through Comic Books course taught by Christina Blanch of Ball State University on the Canvas platform. Blanch, an anthropologist, thought that "using comic books could be a way to approach teaching gender without the trepidation some students feel" when approaching the subject. Students read scholarly articles each week in addition to comics (offered as e-comics by Comixology), plus participated in live interviews with comic book creators with questions submitted via Twitter. There has been some controversy over issues of gender and patriarchy related to MOOCS, and Blanch's class served to break through barriers related to gender, the comics medium, and pedagogy.

The course was divided into six week-long modules and covered the topics of: What is gender?, Gender and Culture: How we learn our gender, Who is producing comic book culture?, Femininity, Masculinity, and Gendered Spaces and Consuming Comics.

Significant to the course content were the interviews with prominent comic book creators: Terry Moore author of Strangers in Paradise; Mark Waid, writer for Superman; Kelly Sue DeConnick, Steve Wacker, and Sana Amanant, creators of the new Captain Marvel; Gail Simone author of Secret Six; Scott Snyder author of Swamp Thing; and Brian K. Vaughn author of Y: The Last Man. Students could put questions forth in the discussion boards for the class, or use a Twitter hashtag to tweet questions during the interviews.

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