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“Is this what you’re afraid of?”: Banned Books Comics Project

Matthew Teutsch
6 min readDec 22, 2024

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Student’s Final Project

Every semester I debate what types of assignments I want to incorporate into my courses. Over the years, I have moved away from strictly written essays, choosing instead to provide students with a space to use their talents and passion in the creation of projects to convey an argument. This usually takes the form of an Unessay Project where students create anything based on the texts and themes we cover in class. Along with this, they must write a craft essay, or an Unessay Paper, where they describe their thoughts and rationale for creating the product that they created. This paper includes scholarly research and serves to drive home the ways that everything we learn and take in comes out in the work that we produce.

This semester, for my “Who Watches Superheroes?” course, I decided to have students complete an Unessay Project and Unessay Paper. My exeprience has shown me that this assignment is hit or miss, with some students embracing the freedom and others not totally understanding the project’s purpose. This semester, I had students who wrote songs, did podcasts, made Tik Tok videos, wrote legislation, devised workout regimens for superheroes, and more. Today, I want to discuss one project from a student who created a short comic about the dangers of book bans.

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Matthew Teutsch
Matthew Teutsch

Written by Matthew Teutsch

Here, you will find reflections on African American, American, and Southern Literature, American popular culture and politics, and pedagogy.

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