7/19: good collective thinking

Chris and I met with two colleagues from work today for the first of our graphic novel workshop sessions. We're each teaching a graphic novel in one of our classes this year, and we received some faculty development money to get together and discuss our different texts and our ideas for teaching them. Today we talked about Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics and Franz Masereel's Story Without Words and The Idea. The conversation about Masereel was especially good; I felt like we were all getting further by talking together than we would have by working/reading on our own. It's nice when time with other people is earnest and productive and idea-oriented. It seems to happen too rarely.