By Abby Van Selous (COM`24)
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a character in a story? To flip open to a page in a book and find a cartoon version of yourself?
Joanna Lee (CAS`17, GRS`24), a Boston University Marine Program PhD candidate, knows what it’s like.
Lee worked with the WGBH Educational Foundation and the New England Public Media to create Exploring a Tidepool, an interactive graphic novel that brings second language learning and science exploration together.
“It’s very thrilling,” Lee said. “It’s very special to look at the book and see myself there.”
Published by GBH, Exploring a Tidepool is the second 2Gen Science Story about Alberto “Beto,” Zoё, Daniela, and Valentina “Abuela” Pérez, a family of four that moved to the United States from Mexico.
“The 2Gen approach is unique because a lot of second language learning often focuses solely on the children and often ignores the parent aspect at home,” Lee said. “Parents have just as much influence on their children as their teachers. Exploring a Tidepool shows that two generations can work together, which is a positive experience for everyone to see.”
In every story, the Pérez family practices their English and Spanish and learns about a scientific topic with the help of an expert from the field. In Exploring a Tidepool, this help comes from Lee.
In Exploring a Tidepool, the Pérez family is spending a day at the beach when Zoё decides to search for magical creatures. Daniela joins her and together they walk by the ocean, looking for creatures in the water and in the sand. This is how they meet Joanna, a marine biology student, who teaches them about the animals that live in tidepools and how to make observations.
Joanna tells Zoё and Daniela about hermit crabs, explaining why they retract into their shells and how to appropriately observe them. Daniela builds on this, remembering the times in Mexico when she and her brothers would watch animals and try to figure out what they were. This then reminds Zoё of a trip to the aquarium where she saw hermit crabs and decided to draw a picture of one.
This is an instance of 2Gen at work: first an expert explains a topic, then both generations relate the topic to their personal experiences and share their experiences with each other, which then grows their understandings of the subject.
Exploring a Tidepool takes an interactive approach to storytelling, including buttons throughout the story for the reader to click, which may lead to a short video elaborating on something
happening in the story or an audio clip stating the definition and pronunciation of a Spanish word or phrase.
“Initially, there were a lot of ideas thrown around about how to engage readers,” Lee said. “I had thrown around ideas of what activities kids could do on their iPads, like look at the same objects but sort them by animal or shape or color.”
Lee hoped using iPads would help kids explain to adults their thoughts and show the wide range of ideas they come up with, but the team was unable to pursue her idea and instead opted for the interactive buttons.
While Lee’s idea for the iPads was not used, engagement between the story and readers is not absent—Exploring a Tidepool uses real people instead of made-up characters to create a relationship that could not exist if all of the characters were fictional.
“When you can see someone and something in real life rather than something made up, it feels different,” Lee said. “It feels like there is someone you can talk with because you know there are real people behind the story.”
In Exploring a Tidepool, it is Lee who is this real person, this link between the reader and the story that enhances and encourages learning.