Drawing as Thinking in the Age of AI with Nick Sousanis
AI hands us a polished image or a finished essay in seconds. The struggle it removes is where most of the learning used to happen. This episode of Inside Learning welcomes Nick Sousanis, the Eisner-winning comics author who wrote and drew his doctoral dissertation entirely in comics, to discuss why drawing is a form of thinking and why the slow, scrappy stage of making something deserves more of our time.
Sousanis traces his teaching philosophy back to a semester when the textbooks never arrived and he caught himself apologising to students who had in fact learned a great deal by making things. He draws on his years as a tennis player and coach to argue that skill lives in the body, and explains how Jacques Rancière's The Ignorant Schoolmaster shapes a classroom where students teach themselves inside carefully set constraints. He also explains why he grades on completion, and describes his work since 2020 on making comics accessible to blind and low vision readers.
40 min
Member content
In this episode
The late textbooks that convinced Nick to put play at the start of every course
Why the brain evolved for movement, and what we lose when we treat thinking as something that happens only in the head
Doodling in meetings, and why drawing while listening improves retention even when the drawings are poor
Why nobody can be talked into a forehand, and what hitting balls against a wall for an hour teaches about practice
Rancière’s story of a schoolmaster who taught students whose language he did not speak
The exercise that asks students to tell how they got here twice, once in three panels and once in two pages
How constraints free creative work, from Christian Bök’s single-vowel Eunoia to Matt Madden’s 99 Ways to Tell a Story
Why Nick grades on completion, and the cross country runner who found his voice after semesters of struggle
Tracing over comic pages to slow down and see the choices an artist made
Making comics accessible to blind and low vision readers, and why no single approach suits every reader
Chapters
00:00 Comics PhD Intro 01:51 Textbooks Never Arrived 05:32 Embodied Thinking 08:17 Doodling For Focus 10:38 Struggle And Rancière 15:38 Teaching With Constraints 20:50 Grading For Completion 26:04 Tracing And Copying 29:16 Accessible Comics Project 36:57 Where To Find Nick
About Nick Sousanis
Nick Sousanis is an Eisner-winning comics author who teaches Humanities and Liberal Studies at San Francisco State University, where he started and runs the Comics Studies programme. He wrote and drew his doctoral dissertation at Teachers College, Columbia University entirely in comic form. Harvard University Press published it in 2015 as Unflattening, and it went on to win the 2016 PROSE Award in Humanities and the Lynd Ward Prize for best graphic novel of 2015. Since 2020 he has worked on making comics accessible to blind and low vision readers.
Learnovate’s Inside Learning podcast dives into learning science and the future of work, featuring learning experts from around the world on learning, future skills, AI in education, creativity, leadership and performance. Designed to make you think, question and learn.
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