Cartoons in the Classroom

POLITICAL CARTOONS are great teaching tools. They are abundant; there are plenty scattered across the Internet. They are provocative; they present strong opinions on emotive subjects. They are accessible; students enjoy decoding their hidden messages. I teach history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). In the Fall 2012 semester, I was given the unique opportunity to teach a freshman seminar of my own design entitled “Great Migrations in Modern Human History.” Feeling brave, I decided to do something different that semester: to integrate digitized political cartoons—freely available on the Internet— into our study of migration. I had done my own research on caricatures in the Irish American weekly press but struggled with how to successfully incorporate the medium into a course designed for freshmen. In the end, I decided to give the students free rein. Over the course of the semester, they selected, researched, and analyzed any cartoon on the subject of immigration published before 1925. On the last day of classes, they presented their findings to the university community at a poster session on the ground floor of our main university library. I had privately predicted that the students and I would enjoy working with cartoons, but by the end of the semester, I realized that these digital resources had enhanced our course in four important ways. Digitized cartoons (and the electronic databases of newspapers the students used to research them) fostered an intellectual environment where active, rather than passive, learning took precedence and where the students honed a wide range of research skills. Working with these cartoons also encouraged the students to understand the transnational dimensions of American history while inviting them to reconsider the complexities of the current immigration debate in their own lives. As such, digitized cartoons uniquely enhanced our study of migration and ethnicity. Its diversity renders the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, a great place to teach migration. Beyond the wide range of over two hundred undergraduate

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