Kiezcomics
Robert Conev

As a painter, I, Robert Conev, conducted the „Kiezcomic“ project together with the teacher Torsten Braunsdorf at the Carl Kraemer Elementary School in Wedding. The school is a full day school, which has an emphasis in art. In the end, six girls, and four boys from a sixth grade class took part in the project, all of them had an immigrant background. Many of the children had a computer at home.

The collaboration with Torsten Braunsdorf evolved from a previous project from Pro Artis, under whose umbrella I was already occupied at the school as an artist. The Project „Kiezcomic“ was directly connected to this function. It took three and a half months. During this time we met a total of seventeen times with the students in order to work. In the rule these sessions were two hours in length, although sometimes there were also full days.

The goal of the project was to produce a comic book, whereby the students independently thought up the individual stories and subsequently independently drew or edited them on the computer.

The idea to produce a comic, originated from within the framework of Pro Artis. It occured to me that the children frequently chose this form of expression out of their own incentive, and that the comic medium was quite popular for them. Copying heros from Japanese Manga comics was preferred in particular. In the comic book project, this urge to express themselves was to be promoted. The drawing was to go beyonf te pure reproduction of ready-made character.

It should therefore become a „"Kiez“" comic, in order to give the students the possibiltiy to creatively examine their impressions and experiences in their daily life.
The preparation and revisionary work for the individual project hours took place one to two times per week. Only Torsten Braunsdorf and myself were present. During these meetings we evaluated the last hours, and discussed how things would proceed.

For everyone working in the “Kiez” project that the project took place within the VA – Visual Arts class, and was thus an integral component of the regular teaching. This meant no addtional time expenditure for the children and they also attended reliablely.

Unfortunately the whole class couldnot participate in the project. The technology, in the form of the ten laptops was not the schools. They were made available through LISUM for the length of the project, and LISUM only had ten of them.



After the stories were transcribed and illustrated, they class had to be divided up, only ten of the students could edit their drafts on the computer. Since the children had thought up each and visualized each of the stories in paies, we chose one out of each pair who was to complete the project on the laptop. We wanted to thuse also avoid that the same story appeared twice in the book.

One of the criteria for the chose was the drawing abilties of the students. In addition, Torsten Braunsdorf decided to exclude students with behavioural problems from working with the laptops for security reasons. In the end a heterogenous balanced group was successfully put together.

The following technology was available to us: ten laptops with mice for the students as well as one teachers laptop for me. The software used was Photoshop Elements. A120 gigabyte external hard-drive was bought by the KuBiM team, in order to collect the data and back it up. In order to illustrate the work processes as well as for the end presentation, the schools data projector was also available.

In the logbook, I already extensively described how the students dealt with the medium respectively, how their different abilties were promoted and which taskes and roles that they assumed, therefore I will not go into them more here. I would much rather like to make clear the distribution of the tasks with the constellation of the teacher, artist and students:

The child undertook the creative part of the project. After a brief introduction, the children thought up their own stories and independently transcibed them graphically. Even the editing on the computer was conducted, through their own direction.
Torsten Braunsdorf and I adopted two different roles:

Torsten Braunsdorf was „the pedagogue“, also in the sense, that as a teacher he represented a person to respect, and he reprimanded them when neccessary. In making decisions and judgements during the course of the project he considered pedagogical criteria. Thus for example it was important to integrate language support into the stories. His role was the organisation relating to the (he suggested the procedure and structure for the lessons). Group disccussions also predominantly occured under his moderation.

In contrast, I worked as “the artist”. I saw my job as explaining to the children, the individual procedural steps as well as, in the beginning, to formulate what the illustrative specifics of the comic genre were. It was very important to me, to raise an awareness of the illustrative and narrative possibilities of comics. After presenting a short overview in front of the whole class, I worked primarily with individual conversations. Because of the small size of the group this was easily done. In direct conversations, it was easy for me to individually approach the strengths and weaknesses of the children regarding theory and graphical implementation. As can be seen in the details of the logbook, this method proved to be very effective.
At the same time it was important to me to leave the children creative freedom. Through questions and suggestions I motivated the children in their work with the stories and drawings.

I felt neither limted or influenced in my work, to the contrary, I felt the collaboration with Torsten Braunsdorf was very fruitful. When there were differences of opinions, they could always be solved in discussion.

The students themselves, who we had partially underestimated, were a surprise in the project. On the project day, that we had inserted the balloons and text, for example, we had calculated with a rather slower progression of the students. But instead the opposite arose, in that the posed task was much easier for them as thought.

A further surprise was the enthusiasm of the children in the discovery of the stories (refer to „"scare“ in the logbook).

Torsten Braunsdorf was surprised by the limited endurance of the children working at the PC. He leaves the project with the experience, that the children should not work any longer than three teaching hours, if the work is to be effective.
The results were a lot of fun for me, and also impressed the friends to whom I showed them on the PC.

I did not observe noticeable „power relationships“ within the group. But I could determine how the student Burak Ü. who was quick to perceive things and very competent and who at the same time demonstrated a readiness to help those who were not such strong learners won a sort of prestige from both the teachers and the students.

The relations between the students were also very balanced, because they had different strengths and weaknesses. Some were better drawers and others were better with technology. Burak, for example required help with drawing but later helped his classmates with the computer.

In addition the students themselves had creative autonomy. This prevented the emergence of hierarchical or power structures within the project. Each of them was the boss of their own comic.

At the beginning, there was more distance between the genders. In the first seating plan, which the students chose themselves, the boy and girls placed themselves apart from one another. When we “mixed-up” this seating plan (refer to the logbook above) we had good experiences in working with the boys and girls and with collaborations between them.

The result of the project is a forty-page comic book, with ten different stories.

The children and the teacher have collected experiences with the use creative use of image design software. For me personally, the most important result was the realisation of the sequel project – portraying the children on large canvases.

The printed comics display a very good quality in their illustrations, their narrations, and their colour compositions, which was recognized by all those participating. The children were very proud of their finished comics.

They were also strongly integrated in the development process. We proceeded step by step and changed our plans if necessary, when we noticed that the students were overwhelmed or under stimulated.

During the entire project we used three different pedagogical approaches: on the one hand with individual or group supervision by the teacher and artist and on the other hand the students were to help each other (which above all was the case at the end of the project).

The individual supervision was important when it had to do with problems related to the image editing software or with the graphic transformation at the beginning of the project. The Photoshop program functions like a small labyrinth, in that one can easily go astray without help with orienting. With each student though very different questions arose, which could be answered most effectively and quickly, individually. The contact person for such questions was the artist.

At the beginning of the project, the group supervision stood mostly in the foreground, which was logical as the students still faced similar tasks and problem areas. The more individual and independent the work was in the course of the project, the more important the individual supervision was. And the more confident the students were in their work, the more frequently they could help each other out.

With both approaches we tried to promote a large degree of independence, self-responsibility and decisiveness. It was important to us, to manage room for the children to move in, in which they could try things out independently from the teacher and artist. We merely gave them a few aids (flowcharts, in order to be able to retrieve buried knowledge) and then left them alone.

In retrospect, one has to concede, that with the demanding and intensive work, that we wanted to incite the children too, we should have built more time to relax into the process. Some of the students were partially overwhelmed. It would make sense to choose the contents and t allow group work. In this way the stronger and weaker students could work together. Vital to the group dynamics within the entire class, it would be important that enough hardware was available for all of the students and that really all of the children are involved in the project.