Activity Rationale This activity came toward the end of Unit 1 and followed a PowerPoint presentation that discussed

the Four Elements of Design from Robin Williams The Non-Designers Design Book. The main goals for this lesson had to do with teaching students to recognize the relationship between images and text, and the ways the two combine to create meaning. I taught this lesson to try to help the students begin to envision the ways they could combine text and image in their zine to make it more than a pamphlet or a newsletter, but into a designed work that made purposeful connections between mode of delivery and subject. Beginning with the PowerPoint allowed me to give professional and personal examples of ways that text and image combine to help reinforce the communicative purpose of a text. I used an example from the students textbook reading for the day, by screen capturing the TED homepage and discussing the ways that it uses font and color to reinforce its message and to foreground areas of interest to viewers. From there, I moved to examples of the different font types from the Purdue Owl website. This was helpful because it allowed me to demonstrate the visual contrast between fonts and to help the students learn the difference between serif and san serif fonts. Although this portion of the lesson was less important than the overview of contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity that was my focus, it was successful in cementing the idea of text as an aesthetic mode as well as a verbal one. Through my PowerPoint, I introduced new concepts to the students, and then modeled the kind of analysis of design features that I wanted them to consider. This modeling was a key to preparing the students for the activity because it emphasized the ways that I wanted them to consider the relationship between verbal and visual communication. As for the activity, I found it to be successful because all of the students engaged with connecting pictures to texts analytically. They made connections between the different comics and the degree of complexity with which the artists communicated. In both my classes, groups engaged

fully with the questions on the assignment, examined the comic strips carefully, and made specific claims about why the interpreted the comics the way they did in their analysis of the contrast between the text and the image, the repeated elements, and the unified nature of the comic. For me, the best aspect of this assignment was that when students established their stance toward each of the comic strips, they all came up with different conclusions and had stances to defend. Because of their investment in the assignment, students had a stake to protect when explaining their conclusions about the comics. While many of the students did not engage with the elements of design as fully as I would have liked in their zines, they demonstrated their ability to recognize and analyze those elements in the work of others. As I believe such analytical ability is critical to college success, I was happy that my design workshop fostered not only an understanding of the ways that texts and images connect to each other, but also encouraged students to take on the position of critical viewer, aware of the mechanisms at work in the object they studied.