The document discusses using cartoons as a learning strategy in educational contexts. It notes that cartoons can help students understand abstract concepts and facilitate comprehension of graphic messages. Characteristics of educational cartoons include raising curricular topics, using legal and economic concepts, and suggesting didactic reasoning or questions to help students deduce or apply classroom concepts. Activities involving cartoons can help students explain, search for, and relate concepts, as well as discover new meanings and inconsistencies. While some jokes may be difficult, with classroom explanations students can understand references and apply ideas from cartoons in different contexts.

2. USING CARTOONS AS A LEARNING STRATEGY Teresa Plana Vidal

3. Humour is just another defense against the universe. Mel Brooks Humour is also a way of saying something serious. T. S. Eliot Um… I think I ’ ll go home now because the kids will be bathed and ready for bed. I think I ’ ll stay until 10, because if I go home earlier I ’ ll have to take the dog for a walk

4. OBJECTIVES Help to understand abstract contents

5. OBJECTIVES Facilate the comprehension of graphic messages in newspapers.

6. OBJECTIVES Get to know the work place as part of the social environment that the student forms part of as a citizen . Except in Spain, where 90% of the population is allergic … to lack of job security … to professional hate mongers (people who criticise and create bad feeling for the sake of it) … To the cost of housing … To banks … To violence … To anti-social swindlers … To Bush … Yes, and to moustache “ 30% of Europeans suffer from one type of allergy or another … ”

7. They raise curricular contents. CHARACTERISTICS

8. They make use of legal and economic concepts. CHARACTERISTICS

9. They use subjects such as law, economy, business or taxes as some of their main arguments. CHARACTERISTICS

10. They suggest legal and/or socioeconomic questions CHARACTERISTICS

11. CHARACTERISTICS They help us to deduce concepts or induce us to apply concepts explained in class

12. They use rigorous arguments CHARACTERISTICS

13. They suggest didactic reasoning CHARACTERISTICS

14. They discuss them in an educational context. CHARACTERISTICS

15. A) They help us to: explain, search and relate. ¿Can you explain what a mayor, may and may not do? Relate: vote, democracy, people, power and mayor ACTIVITIES

16. ¿ The public are members of a ... society ? ¿ Why does the man hate this situation? ¿ What kind of assembly is this ?

17. B) The students must find the logical inconsistency. 40 years of cursing the income tax I pay and I end up with no pension!

18. C) They discover new concepts and meanings. I don ’ t believe in ” No ” or in abstaining, so the only option is “ well, I suppose so ” 1 ) What does the cartoon refer to? 2) What is the issue? 3) What other possibilities are there?

19. Conclusions 1. These jokes are not funny. Newspaper cartoons often reflect social realities that we don ’ t like.

20. Conclusions 2. Many of these jokes are difficult to understand, they presuppose certain knowledge or attitudes .

21. Conclusions 3. With explanations given in class and applying what they have learnt to the cartoon, students are able to recover specific references and apply them in different contexts. They may even relate them to and interprete quite complex ideas.

22. Thanks! Teresa Plana Vidal