This was one of the key questions when the University of South-Eastern Norway (USN) brought together students, researchers and artists for an international workshop.
The workshop is part of the European research project European Comics, Mental Health Teaching and Professional Education (ECEDU). The aim of the project is to build a strong European network for teaching about mental health.
Learning across disciplines
Participants from several countries and disciplines gathered on the Drammen campus to learn more about methods for addressing mental health – both in schools and in healthcare. Together, they explored how comics-based teaching methods can provide deeper understanding and better reflection across professions.
At USN, interdisciplinary collaboration between the teacher education and nursing education was central. Traditionally, there has been little collaboration between the two professional programmes, but here they met with shared issues:
– Both teacher education and nursing education prepare students to meet children and young people in different life situations, and to understand how mental health affects learning, coping and quality of life, says project leader Adriana Margareta Dancus.
Students as co-creators
An important part of the workshop was student-active learning through creative methods of working. The students produced their own comic montages based on cut-outs from a Norwegian comic that addresses mental health.
The montages formed the basis for reflections in groups and discussion in plenary.
– The practical tasks were both useful and fun. For me, this has great value to what I am studying. It was also great to meet other students and hear how they work with this topic, said one of the students who took part in the workshop.
The teacher and nursing students were also able to further develop a comic that had been started by medical students at the University of Bologna. The comic will now be passed on to teacher students at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and language students at Babeș-Bolyai University in Romania.
– Professional and cultural exchange through creative work can open up new perspectives and teaching methods within professional education, says Dancus.
Opens up freer conversations
Ingunn Vatnøy is one of USN's researchers in the project. Inspired by the montage exercise carried out in the workshop, she has further developed a new learning activity in the continuing education programme in team leadership for nurses in specialist healthcare. 
The activity aims to create thought and speech bubbles for the cut-outs and explore what may have happened before and after the fragments shown.
– Our experience is that the comic format opens up a freer and less defensive conversation, where students to a greater extent listen to each other's interpretations and explore alternative perspectives, says Vatnøy.
She explains that the open and ambiguous form of the comic medium can activate what is called «epistemic motivation», that is, a willingness to explore, justify and revise one's own interpretations in encounters with other people's perspectives.
– The activity also highlights an important dimension of mental health, particularly how quick interpretations and labels can shape the understanding of colleagues in demanding work situations, Vatnøy adds.
The work from the workshop and the trial carried out in team leadership are now being continued through research, scientific publications and the development of new teaching methods.
