In Pete Hansen and Mark Pangilinan’s Visual Storytelling class, Academy students are learning to read without words. Their text is Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, a wordless graphic novel that tells the story of an immigrant who leaves his family behind to start over in a strange new land. With no written language, readers must rely on Tan’s detailed illustrations – full of surreal landscapes, unfamiliar creatures and recurring motifs – to make sense of the story.
Instead of starting with definitions, students build their own vocabulary from these motifs: birds for freedom, orbs for hope and sunbursts for light and renewal. Each class becomes an experiment in observation, interpretation and collaboration.
Every session, a group of three students designs and leads activities for the rest of the class. A recent presenting group chose to focus on the sunburst. First, they asked classmates to log into menti.com, which is an interactive polling tool to engage their audiences in real-time using their laptops. This creates a live word cloud of their associations – bright, light, hot, annoyance. The exercise sparked discussion on how personal and cultural experiences shape meaning.
Next came a scavenger hunt through Tan’s illustrations. Teams flipped through the book to count every sunburst – 85 in total. The task revealed just how deliberately the symbol is woven into the story.
Finally, in small groups, students analyzed context. Suns appeared often in cityscapes but rarely in countrysides, suggesting new beginnings, moments of progress or the height of life. Yet the conversations didn’t stop there. Students questioned whether the city’s artificial suns represented authentic hope or misleading beacons that masked hardship.At Punahou, where critical thinking and collaboration are core learning outcomes, The Arrival becomes more than a book. It is a shared language of images and ideas – one that encourages students to uncover meaning, challenge assumptions and see both story and self in a new light.
Photos by Kathleen Connelly