Context

Eastside Educational Trust is a registered children’s charity and youth arts provider. We provide workshops and programmes for young people across London, who might not normally have access to the arts. Education through the arts can have a positive effect on a young person’s development and we aim to promote numeracy and literacy skills in our creative workshops, offering our young people flexibility and choice to ensure that their individual interests and talents are catered for and nurtured at every stage.

Attitudes towards writing and attainment before the project

At the development stage of Graphic Truths, our aims were to tap into young people’s storytelling skills, using an imaginative approach to this vital skill by combining storyboarding with graphic illustration as well as graphic reportage.

In particular, storytelling is a translatable skill which can be applied to many aspects of life and on creative, academic and professional levels. The journalistic element of this project was concentrated in the reportage stage, which had been designed to show the young people that it is possible for everyone to write, and to draw, in order to express their creativity, and that these two skills can be honed in conjunction with one another.

We found at the start of the project that there were varying degrees of confidence in the ability to write within the group. Some of the young people felt that their strength lay in scripting and therefore recruited their colleagues to illustrate their story, whereas others chose to tell their story primarily through images. We were keen to encourage both of these approaches as a means of storytelling.

Aims & principles

As a project centring on the form of comics and graphic novels, Graphic Truths was devised to explore the various elements of comic art: design, layout, editing and publishing. This particular spectrum serves, in effect, as a microcosm for the profession itself, giving the young people a taste of what it is like in the world of work. This is particularly important in an age where vocational studies and accreditation is increasingly valued and recognised. For the Graphic Truths project, our young people worked towards their Bronze Arts Award.

We also hoped that we could encourage the young people involved in this project to be creative in terms of narrative, and show them that words and pictures can be separated but can also be soldered back together; that telling a story in pictures is telling it in words - it’s simply a matter of fitting them together. We wanted the participants to recognise the validity of everyday experience as subject matter for comics and develop the skills to interview effectively and formulate stories from these interviews.

In Practice

We ran a series of intensive workshops at the beginning of the project in which the young people had a chance to familiarise themselves with one another and start working on their planning. In one workshop, the young people were asked to interview each other, then feed back to the group what they had learned. This produced a retelling of an already established story, which allowed them to experiment in the formulation of narrative.

During this exercise they were encouraged not simply to ask questions and move on, but to investigate the responses they received. This allowed them to start developing the journalistic skills they would later use when creating their pieces of graphic reportage.
In another workshop, the young people were asked to come up with a series of words. Two words were assigned to each pair of young people. Using one word as a starting word and the other as an end word, the groups then had to create storyboards on a series of panels. This exercise allowed them to think imaginatively within a set framework; they had to think how to get from point A to point B in a narrative before beginning the drawing process.

Early on in the project, time was dedicated to deciding on the content of the magazine. Participants researched subject matter on issues that were significant to them. They formulated interview questions and carried out the interviews that formed the basis of their comic pieces.

Partnerships

The project has been funded by Mediabox (http://www.media-box.co.uk) a national organisation that develops projects to engage young people in media-based activities. In the workshops we also worked with speakers who came to us through the MediaTrust (http://www.mediatrust.org) and the Colman Getty PR agency. 

The two mentors on the project were artist and illustrator Christopher Rainbow and writer Anna Selby. Anna produces a monthly publication with and for young people in Hackney called Contrast. The expertise that she brought to the project on behalf of the organisation she works for, Social Spider (http://www.socialspider.com/) was invaluable in giving young people a realistic experience of producing a magazine.

2000 copies of the magazine have been distributed in Hackney and Lambeth through ‘What’s Up Information’ and an article about the project with an interview with the young people has also featured on their website. 


In order to recruit young people for the project we visited schools and colleges to speak to course leaders and students. Tower Hamlets College, Stoke Newington School, New Vic Plaistow and Stratford, Christ the King Sixth Form College and Lambeth College are just a few of the places we visited and where young people participating in the project came from.

Outcomes

The project attracted much interest from a number of media sources and there was an article featured in the Evening Standard. The project was also featured on the Resonance FM show about comics called “Panel Borders”. Young people participating in the project were interviewed for the show, and it was a great chance to air their views about the project and showcase the work that they had been doing. 

The project also offered participants the chance to undertake a Bronze Arts Award accreditation. This was especially valuable to those young people who were under-confident in their abilities as it gave them the opportunity to reflect on their strengths. 18 young people completed their Arts Award portfolios and these will be assessed in January 2010.

The young people’s comics have been put together in the publication Tales of Diversity, which is being distributed London-wide in January 2010.

A link to the Eastside website is here, also containing a link to the PDF copy of the young people’s graphic novel Tales of Diversity

Attitudes and attainment after the project

One young person who attended the course was not in education, employment or training and had a history of finding it hard to commit to and engage in courses. He attended the Graphic Truths project for every day of the half term and commented at the end of the week that he knew concentration was a weak point for him and that he felt he had concentrated a lot throughout the week. 

Another young person commented ‘I thoroughly enjoyed this course because it helped my creativity to excel.’ Others noted that they felt their confidence in creating a story had grown throughout the project.

Legacy

This project has developed Eastside’s portfolio of comic workshops. The positive response from the project has encouraged us to think about ways in which we can incorporate graphic reportage and journalistic skills into future workshops. We found that the approach of encouraging young people to form narratives based upon interviews they had conducted was a great way to practice and develop different styles of writing whilst also enabling them to find their own voice and creative style. 

Resources

Our biggest expenses in terms of resources were the specialist pens that we purchased to ensure that the participants experienced working with high quality materials, but in fact the comics could be made with as much or as little resources as the artist desired.

The biggest overall spend was on the printing of the magazine as we wanted a large enough print run to be able to distribute the magazine widely.

Final thought

The young people were dedicated and committed to the project but they were also at a time in their lives when they had a heavy study workload. A project as large as this would benefit from a slightly longer timescale. The intensity of the initial week helped to form the group interest the young people, and regular sessions after that week were successful and more would have been valuable.

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