THE Compassionate Comics Project

Compassionate comics

CoED's compassionate comics project, was originally conceived by children's writer, illustrator and publisher, Fiona Scoble, and CoED's CEO Maurice Irfan Coles.

The project involved thirty five 10-11 year old pupils from two UK Birmingham schools, Colebourne Primary; a local authority maintained school with a predominantly Muslim heritage intake, and Nishkam Primary school, a 'free school' with a Sikh ethos. Working initially in discrete school settings over four Saturday mornings they were helped to understand the nature of compassion and then to construct story boards with a compassionate narrative. Collaborating in self-selected groups of approximately four they chose their own themes and were taught about character development, how to construct the narrative, use the text boxes and how to draw their characters.

The development of values, of literary skills, and artistic expression were fundamental general aims. In addition, the more particular aim was to help dispel any misconceptions of the 'other' that might exist historically between adherents of these two great faiths, partly by visiting the temple but also by working together.
Read the full report (pdf)

Resources

We have put together some materials and suggestions for Lesson Plans to help you create your own Compassionate Comics project.
This includes:

“I have learnt to be compassionate; you chose it because compassion is inside everyone”

“To tell each other we wanted to be treated equally”

“I learnt that you can make friends in one day from different backgrounds”

Pupils responses to the Compassionate Comic workshop

This selection of pdfs, word documents and videos will help you put together your own project. Please note these are distributed through a Creative Commons licence and must not be sold commercially.