Co-Design a TrueFiktion Comic Book
Studies show that drawing on learners’ background knowledge shapes comprehension. Allowing students to inform the stories they will learn from promotes higher engagement and helps them find a new sense of agency through authentic representation.
Our process engages your students in the co-design of a comic book that tells a local story with national importance.
Testimonials
— Abigail Henry, history teach at Mastery Charter School
— Molly Mitchell, historian, University of New Orleans
— Abigail Henry, history teach at Mastery Charter School
— Molly Mitchell, historian, University of New Orleans
— Samuel, High School History Teacher
Students get insight into current social issues by following the stories of fictional characters who demonstrate agency in dealing with racial, gender, and socioeconomic challenges in their community.
We collaborate with illustrators to produce engaging, high-quality visuals highlighting the humanity and dignity of marginalized people from your community.
We will consult local sources and subject-matter experts to make the content hyper-relevant to your students.
We create a workbook with inquiry-based exercises designed to help students use primary and secondary sources to dig deeper into their local history.
It's not always easy to bring untold historical narratives to the classroom. Including students and teachers in co-creating a diverse inclusive historical comic book will help foster enthusiasm and buy-in from the broader community.
We will provide professional development on using comics to teach about difficult historical moments. We will use one of our comics as a case study.
We will review your scope and sequence and brainstorm with your team to select a moment of history for production.
We will train teachers to conduct design thinking workshops based on your local story. We will equip them to gather student feedback on historical events for content development purposes.
We will conduct a writing workshop on editing and critiquing content for culturally responsive pedagogy and inquiry.
We will conduct a workshop on how to build an inquiry unit by using a comic book as the key point of engagement.
We will produce a comic book complete with inquiry-based questions. Then we'll send you hard copies of the books for you to use in the classroom.
Inquiry-based education is about actively investigating topics and concepts. Our co-designing workshops encourage your students to seek information, knowledge, and understanding by asking questions and engaging in systematic exploration and research.
Our process identifies local stories of national significance. Your local history will provide the backdrop to a TrueFiktion comic book that will feel highly relevant to your students.
We identify gaps in your history and social studies teaching material to see where our co-design process can make a difference for your school’s or district’s students.
We lead a workshop where students and teachers exercise creativity and empathy while ideating solutions for the lack of representation in their history materials.
We reach out to local historians, subject matter experts, and world-class artists and to make your local history come to life with engaging dialogue and beautiful images.
TrueFiktion focuses on whole child development through storytelling. Our historical comic books help your students develop their sense of empathy and prepare them to solve the problems of the future.
Design thinking is a problem-solving methodology that emphasizes creativity and innovation. It involves empathizing with users, defining problems, ideating solutions, prototyping, and testing, similar to human-centered design.
One TrueFiktion comic book takes six months to produce.
We can produce several comic books simultaneously, but we cannot shorten the process for one comic book and curriculum.
TrueFiktion's expertise lies in historical fiction comic books, specifically historio-metagraphics. It is important to note that we do not do autobiographical stories of well-known historical figures, such as Martin Luther King or Frederick Douglass. While these real people might appear in the comic, the story will focus on fictional characters who bring a local story of national significance to life.
The comic books we create always fulfill the following criteria:
• Stories not yet told in existing textbooks
• Are grounded in local primary sources
• Explain a phenomenon pertinent to U.S. history
• Show historically marginalized characters or communities having agency
• Have themes of resilience
• Are relevant to understanding current social issues
We use our GRR Framework to ensure our stories show people from marginalized groups having agency in history.
The cost depends on how many books we are doing and whether co-creation is part of a more extensive curriculum and professional development project. The cost also depends on how involved we are in the production from a co-design experience. We can provide a quote based on your specific objectives.
We are a design-thinking-led company. Content will be made with our design frameworks derived from interviews with students, teachers, and local community leaders. If we conduct a co-creation pilot, we will use our frameworks and design thinking workshops with participants to guide the design of the comics.
The design of our book follows a specific production methodology. We will work to do a co-designed book custom to your local context. However, the book's structure will be the same as our existing products and is conceived to easily introduce culturally responsive teaching and innovative pedagogy in your classrooms.
At a minimum, we engage in creation projects once there is a scope and sequence audit, a series of professional developments on methods and resources, or a curriculum pilot with a school. There have been a couple of exceptions, but this is on a case-by-case basis.
The sooner you get in touch, the sooner we can evaluate your needs and get you a quote and projected timeline for your comic book.
×