Objective:

Students will read Shaun Tan’s book. The Arrival, discuss the themes. The discussion will begin with a forum style conversation about the book.

Students will learn about Guttenburg’s invention of movable type and make their own nonsenseical moveable type letters for a collagraph printing process.

Resouces:

• The Arrival by Shaun Tan
• The New Post-Literate
• Johann Gutenberg and the Amazing Printing Press
• Wordless (Poems) by Rosaire Appel

Activities:

Discussion:

1. What are some similarities and differences between the image from The Arrival and the photograph of the Great Hall in Ellis Island?
2. What has Tan changed to make us feel like outsiders?
3. Let’s look at how Max Ernst used asmeic writing (surreal, nonsensical writing) in his book, Maximillana. How does looking at a document like this or The Arrival make you feel?
4. How can you still decipher meaning if you cannot read the words?

• Students will discuss Gutenberg’s invention of movable type and how this allowed literacy to be more accessible to common people.
• Students will view examples of Asemic Writing and discuss how these images are similar and different than the images in The Arrival.
• Using a worksheet, students will create their own alphabet.
• Using collagraph techniques, students will create their own asemic movable type and print our several pages of nonsense text.

Here's a few examples of how this project turned out: