Abstract:

Subjects including human physiology in health sciences degrees include a vast amount of concepts that merge cell biology, biophysics, biochemistry and anatomy, among others, posing a challenge for students at their first year in university studies. Physiology is a multidisciplinary topic focused in the study of complex interactions and processes, making emphasis in regulation processes that interact and influence each other. Thus, traditional teaching methodologies based in lectures often fail to mirror this complexity and interdependence between physiological concepts at the organism level; in this regard, modern physiology lectures have benefited by the establishment of ICT tools as a means to widen the scope of the traditional physiology class, providing a frame to contextualize and, importantly, to visualize the functioning of living cells at the organism level.

With this complexity in mind, we have been working for several courses implementing visual tools to be used in the teaching of human physiology in health sciences degrees (Medicine, Physiotherapy, Odontology) testing their impact in student’s motivation. Throughout the development of these projects, we have shifted from a video-based development towards a graphic narrative-based set of exercises that use the potential of comics to represent not only concepts but sequential processes and interactions, finally merging both perspectives to enrich the physiology lectures.

We herein present two different approaches:
i) elaboration of audio-visual materials that combine an oral presentation with a comic-style visual language and metaphoric representations, and
ii) use of a set of exercises based in the analysis and/or critical commentary of comic-book pages from different sources.

Our results are still preliminary but provide an interesting example of how to enrich the teaching-learning process using novel methodologies that combine ICT and more traditional narrative resources for a strongly scientific topic.

Keywords:

Health sciences, physiology, medicine, comics, critical thinking, creativity, graphic narrative, graphic resources.