Drawing with Lynda Barry’s “Syllabus” in a creative ethnographic practices class

A few years ago, my friend Caroline Bennett gave me Lynda Barry’s 2014 book Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor and this term I decided to use some of Barry’s creative drawing and writing prompts in the Creative Ethnographic Practices class I’m teaching at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington.

As I wrote in a previous blog post, in this class I guide students through the process of crafting their own independent ethnographic research projects. Along the way, we discuss how to generate, analyse, and present our ethnographic findings in a variety of creative methods and genres, and Week 9 is about graphic ethnography. In that week’s class I adapted some of the exercises from Barry’s book and invited the class to bring some pens, pencils, and paper to class so we could draw together to think about their data and their final research projects. I am not someone who draws (although I will happily join my kids to do some colouring with them) and was apprehensive about how it would go. To my delight, students embraced the activity and many commented on how useful it was in their weekly reflective research journals, prompting me to share the activity here.

“But I can’t draw!”

Keenly aware of my own hesitancies about drawing, I began the session with a quote from Mark Westmoreland’s 2021 chapter “Graphic anthropology: A foundation for multimodality”:

“When it comes to drawing as a serious activity – as an ethnographic method, for instance – many feel they lack the expertise to perform such a task. In classroom settings, the announcement of a drawing exercise typically provokes a reaction ranging from the defensive “But I can’t draw!” to the confessional “I don’t know how to draw!” Beginning from this place of not knowing, unskilled and uncertain, says less about our innate abilities than it does about the pervasive undervaluing of drawing in our educational systems. But we should not be deterred; as Betty Edwards famously proclaimed, “I have discovered that any person of sound mind can learn to draw; the probability is the same as for learning to read” (2012, 43). While drawing is a favourite pastime for young children, who exhibit a “beguiling freedom and charm” in their depictions, around the age of ten “children confront an artistic crisis” as they become obsessed with producing realistic drawing (Edwards 2012, 66, 64). Without training to cultivate these skills, they become discouraged and possibly ashamed.” 

– Westmoreland 2021, 61

After discussing Westmoreland’s article for a short time, I introduced Lynda Barry’s work and we began the activity I adapted from her book (pages 76-81 and 124).

Step 1. Draw a spiral

You will need: something to draw on, and something to draw with.

• Make a two-page spread (e.g. fold an A4 piece of paper together, or find two clean pages in a drawing book)
• Write today’s date at the top of the left page
• Number the right side from one to ten
• Begin on the left page and make a dot in the middle
• Spiral a line around the dot
• Keep going, making your spiral bigger and trying to keep the lines as close together as possible without letting them touch
• As you make your spiral, think about a memorable moment you had doing fieldwork for your research project (5 mins)

Step 2. Make a list

• Turn to the numbered list you made on the right page
• Write down 10 of the memories that come to mind when you think about your memorable fieldwork moment (2 mins)
• Read over your list and choose a memory that stands out to you
• Circle that memory
• Turn to a clean page and write the memory you circled at the top, as if it were the title of a story
• Draw a big ‘X’ across the page

Step 3. ‘X’ page

• Start by picturing yourself in the memory
• Pretend we’re on the phone. You can see the image but I can’t. I’m going to ask you some questions that will help me ‘see’ it too
• Write or draw your answers anywhere on the ‘X’ page
• You will have 20 seconds to write or draw your answer before I ask the next question
• No detail is too small or unimportant

The questions:

Step 4. Craft an ethnographic story

• Turn to a clean page to write this up into a story
• Write a sentence about each question you responded to
• Draw on all of your senses and use vivid details 
• Freewrite without stopping for 5 minutes
• Use first person (e.g. “I”)
• Use present tense (e.g. “I can hear …”)

Step 5. Make a 4-panel comic

• Take a clean piece of paper and fold it into four quarters
• Draw a border around each panel
• In one of the panels, draw an image related to the story you just crafted
• In the three other panels, draw that image three other times, making any kind of action you like

This activity took us an hour. Barry’s book is full of creative prompts so if you haven’t read it, I highly recommend checking it out!