In February, Mme. Kelly Weinfurtner of Columbus City Schools’ International High School brought her French 4 and Advanced Placement (AP) French Students for a day-long visit to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. The students did an activity in the Reading Room of the library where they engaged French-language print materials from the 19th-21st centuries as a hands-on introduction to the history of bande dessinée. During the morning of their field trip, the students also toured the Billy Ireland museum galleries with BICLM staZ. After lunch, Prof. Flinn facilitated a conversation session in the Will Eisner seminar room about selected contemporary French- language comics that depict museum spaces. In this discussion, students were able to analyze specific images and handle special, non-standard forms of comic “books,” thinking about how what institutions like museums and objects like bande dessinée mediate our experiences and shape our ideas of what is has aesthetic and cultural value. The visit served as an introduction to a themed unit Mme. Weinfurtner had planned for the spring semester that addressed the AP theme of “beauty,” as well as giving CCS students an opportunity to use French outside of their classroom. Mme. Weinfurtner had attended a professional development workshop on using bande dessinée in 1 of 8K-12 French classrooms that Prof. Flinn had oZered several years ago at the Billy Ireland. The BICLM regularly welcomes field trips from area schools, but giving students a non-English language experience of the collections was a new endeavor that we hope will be repeated with other groups of secondary students in the coming school year.
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