Multi is more : towards media-awareness and multiliteracy in the Flemish classroom through Italian comics

This contribution deals with the multiliteracy potential of comics about/from a further-away culture in secondary schools in Flanders, the northern, Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. We present, discuss and evaluate the concrete set-up of three workshops on Italy-related comics conducted within the aesthetics lessons for sixteen-year-olds in a Ghent school (Oct. 2020). The lessons are part of a pilot project, supported by the Embassy of Italy in Brussels and the Società Dante Alighieri of Ghent, that offers a specialized approach to cultural and socio-economic topics. The project aims to encourage the younger generation to question cultural and socio-economic bias and stereotypes; it also focuses the pupils’ attention on the form of comics and on comics as hybrid cultural artefacts that trigger media awareness