About the Story:

It is a story of an Afghan refugee girl, Gol Noor, who came to Canada when she was a grade 3 student. I created the character of Gol Noor as a protagonist in the digital illustrations. She used to go to school in Afghanistan. Following the invasion of the Taliban, Gol Noor and her family had to flee Afghanistan, and they sought refuge in Canada. Gol Noor had to repeat her grade three in Canada. In Afghanistan, she had an interest in her studies and enjoyed attending school. In contrast to her previous experiences in Afghanistan related to education, Gol Noor’s journey to her new school in Canada took a different turn as she became a target of bullying. Unfortunately, Gol Noor became a subject of verbal bullying in her school in Canada due to her physical appearance, her English accent, and her identity as a refugee girl from Afghanistan. However, a contrasting depiction of Gol Noor emerges in her mathematics classroom. Her knowledge and experiences as an Afghan refugee girl were acknowledged and recognized and she began to exercise her agency.

The Process of Illustrating:

The digital illustrations that are presented here, are the product of an iterative process that involved active collaboration of Shima with participants of her PhD study. In her PhD studies, Shima, an Iranian artist/researcher, explored how the co-creation of visual stories as a process evoked conversation around social norms and equity in the school context, particularly mathematics classrooms with Afghan refugee/forced migrant families. Participants communicated their own experiences related to the school context in the form of drawings, through workshops mediated by an illustrated storybook. During the visual analysis of these drawings, Shima discovered that participants visually communicated their bodily experiences in relation to the sense of agency they were exercising.

Then, participants and I started co-creating digital stories collaboratively in an iterative process. The design of the digital illustrations was guided by the visual analysis of the participants’ drawings, the narratives shared by participants, the visual field notes by Shima, Shima’s interpretation as an artist/researcher, and feedback from participants in an iterative cycle. Sharing the important part of the findings of her PhD research visually in the form of digital illustrations allowed her to go beyond disciplinary boundaries, embrace diversity, and potentially broaden audiences beyond academic boundaries.

Gol Noor illustrated by Dadkhahfard, S. is licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0