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CLASS Reads

How to Use this Guide

This guide is comprised of a variety of resources to guide you through teaching the CLASS reads selection Unflattening by Nick Sousanis. Considering the visual nature of the text, there are resources regarding visual literacy; supplemental readings with guiding questions, various activities to encourage the students to engage with the text, and their general curiosity. 

Feel free to incorporate any of these resources/activities in your syllabus to encourage discussion surrounding Unflattening.
If you want students to turn in their work from the Student Resources page, you'll need to include instructions for students to turn things in.

Unflattening

Visual Literacy and Unflattening

Visual literacy is a set of abilities that enables an individual to effectively find, interpret, evaluate, use, and create images and visual media. Visual literacy skills equip a learner to understand and analyze the contextual, cultural, ethical, aesthetic, intellectual, and technical components involved in the production and use of visual materials. A visually literate individual is both a critical consumer of visual media and a competent contributor to a body of shared knowledge and culture.

In an interdisciplinary, higher education environment, a visually literate individual is able to:

  • Determine the nature and extent of the visual materials needed
  • Find and access needed images and visual media effectively and efficiently
  • Interpret and analyze the meanings of images and visual media
  • Evaluate images and their sources
  • Use images and visual media effectively
  • Design and create meaningful images and visual media
  • Understand many of the ethical, legal, social, and economic issues surrounding the creation and use of images and visual media, and access and use visual materials ethically

-Association of College and Research Libraries Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education

Slow Looking encourages people to look at the same work of art for a long time, sitting in the unknowing, as visuals and information slowly reveal themselves to you.  Check out the Tate's guide to Slow Looking

 

Ways of Seeing, as explained by the author Nick Sousanis

When discussing visual information, we can use elements of visual design and visual design principles to describe what we see.  For examples, see the Interaction Design Foundation page on aesthetics

Elements Principles
Line Unity
Shape Gestalt
Negative Space Hierarchy
Volume Balance
Value Contrast
Color Scale
Texture Dominance

Try it!

Choose a full-page image/panel from the book Unflattening. Describe what you see using all of the terms above, and then explain why you think the artist made those choices.  Are there any visual choices that were made that help you understand or emotionally connect to the information the author is presenting on that page?

Try it!
Choose one page from the book Unflattening and then go through the Library of Congress worksheet on reading images to Observe, Reflect, and Question what you see. 

Try it!

Find a page/spread with a narrative and consider the last panel on that page. Predict what will happen one minute after the scene shown in the image. One hour after? Explain the reasoning behind your predictions. (Examples: Evolution p60; Lockerman the superhero pp92-93; Habits pp111; The puppet pp117-123)

Reading & Making Sequential Art

While comics are considered a "sequential" art, that sequence isn't necessarily strictly chronological.  Read Scott McCloud's explanations of different panel-to-panel transitions.

Try it!

Find an example of each of those 6 panel-to-panel transitions, within Sousanis's Unflattening

Try it!

Open to a random page and try to self-track your eye movements. Do you read the words first? Do you read the images first? Do you take in the whole page and then look at the details, or do you focus in on a detail immediately?  Write out your experience of perceiving, first with where your eye is drawn, and then where you look to gain understanding.

You can convey a lot of story and emotion with just linework.  Read Scott McCloud's excerpt about line and symbol.
The author, Nick Sousanis, developed these related lesson plans:

Try it!

Complete the exercises in that lesson plan, including illustrating a narrative arc from your own life using only a line moving from left to right, across the page.  Then, recreate that same story arc using grids as well as line.
Example:

Related Readings & Activities

Connecting Flatland and Unflattening:

Both texts argue that “flat” ways of thinking—linear, rigid, hierarchical—limit human understanding, and that expanding perspective leads to liberation, creativity, and deeper truth.

  • In Flatland, the Square is literally and intellectually unable to “see” the third dimension at first.

  • In Unflattening, Sousanis uses visual metaphors (like “seeing with two eyes”) to show how multiple perspectives deepen understanding.

  • In Flatland, the Square’s society enforces a strict, unquestioned order.

  • In Unflattening, Sousanis critiques “flat” education systems that emphasize conformity and one way of knowing.

  • The Square resists the idea of the third dimension, just as others resisted the heliocentric model or evolution.

  • Sousanis emphasizes that unflattening is uncomfortable—it means unlearning and re-seeing.

     

Ask yourself these questions: 

How do both texts criticize systems that discourage questioning or creativity? Can you relate this to your own educational experience?

Why is it hard to let go of old frameworks? What does it take to “unflatten” your own thinking?

What does “seeing differently” mean to you?

Have you ever resisted a new way of thinking? Why? 

 

Plato's Republic 

Plato's allegory of the cave is an allegory presented by the Greek philosopher Plato in his work Republic (514a–520a, Book VII) to compare "the effect of education and the lack of it on our nature".

Possible Questions

  • Consider how both works argue that our accepted realities can be highly constrained and prevent us from perceiving deeper truths.

  • In what ways do the "chains" of the cave resonate with the societal and educational structures that Sousanis argues lead to "flattened" understanding?

  • How do both works suggest that true understanding requires more than just passive observation?

  • What are modern-day "shadows" or "caves" that limit our understanding of reality (e.g., social media echo chambers, political polarization, narrow disciplinary silos)?

  • What kind of education is necessary to free the prisoners, and what does this suggest about Plato's views on knowledge acquisition and societal improvement?

  • Sousanis argues for a multi-perspective understanding of the world, moving beyond a single, "flat" viewpoint. How does this compare to the journey of the prisoner in the cave, who must move from a two-dimensional perception (the shadows) to a three-dimensional reality (the objects and the outside world)?

 

In the book Unflattening:

Consider how Sousanis illustrates these concepts Plato discussed in Chapter 3. Reading Plato's ideas might help you understand this chapter better, or seeing the visuals from the book might help you understand Plato better, so try going back and forth!

The Panopticon is a concept derived from the Greek for "all-seeing." The term was first used to describe an architectural design developed by Jeremy Bentham for prisons in 1787, and was later adopted by Michel Foucault to describe modern methods of societal control.

 

Sousanis – Unflattening

 Foucault – Panopticon

Critiques flattened, single-perspective thinking

 Analyzes how surveillance enforces conformity
Advocates for visual, pluralistic modes of knowledge Shows how vision is used to control bodies
Uses form (comics) to embody multiplicity Uses metaphor (Panopticon) to expose control
Resists intellectual conformity through artistic form Resists invisible power by revealing its operation

 

Possible Discussion Questions

  • Foucault argues that visibility is a trap. Sousanis argues that expanding our ways of seeing is liberatory. Can both be true at once? Where do their views of vision align or diverge?

  • Foucault doesn’t offer clear solutions for resisting power; Sousanis does, through multimodal exploration. Do you think aesthetic resistance (like comics, collage, or mixed media) can meaningfully disrupt systems of control? Why or why not?

  • Where do you see “flattened” thinking and Panoptic control operating in your own life (e.g., social media, school, work)? Are these mechanisms always harmful, or can they serve useful functions?

  • How can we cultivate "unflattened" ways of seeing while living within systems that constantly demand discipline, productivity, and conformity?

  • Is it possible to imagine an educational or societal system that fosters Sousanis' pluralism without becoming Panoptic in its own way? What would such a system look like?

Ways of Seeing by John Berger

Based on the 1972 BBC series and comprised of 7 essays, 3 of which are entirely pictoral, Ways of Seeing is a seminal work which examines how we view art.

According to James Bridle, Berger "didn't just help us gain a new perspective on viewing art with his 1972 series Ways of Seeing – he also revealed much about the world in which we live. Whether exploring the history of the female nude or the status of oil paint, his landmark series showed how art revealed the social and political systems in which it was made. He also examined what had changed in our ways of seeing in the time between when the art was made and today."

  • Form as content:
    Both argue that the way information is presented is as important as the information itself. McLuhan and Fiore use collage, visual juxtaposition, and playful typography to perform their thesis that media shape perception. Sousanis uses comics’ visual grammar—panels, flow, perspective shifts—to embody his argument that linear, text-only thinking is limiting.

  • Challenging linearity:
    The Medium is the Massage scrambles text/image order, while Unflattening uses comics’ spatial layout to encourage multiple simultaneous readings. Both force the reader to navigate in a nontraditional, nonlinear way.

  • Reader participation:
    Both works demand active interpretation—you “assemble” meaning from fragments rather than passively absorb a lecture.

Discussion Questions (Open-Ended)

  1. How do The Medium is the Massage and Unflattening each use the relationship between image and text to challenge traditional academic or literary authority?

  2. McLuhan’s work was created in a pre-digital age; Sousanis’ in an era of ubiquitous screens. How does each book’s medium reflect the media environment of its time?

  3. In what ways do these works embody their central arguments rather than merely describe them?

  4. Do you think their non-linear, visually complex structures make their ideas more accessible, or less? Why?

  5. If you reimagined The Medium is the Massage or Unflattening for the 2030s, what changes in medium, structure, or imagery would you make?

In Unflattening Chapter 4, Sousanis discusses how Rudolf Arnheim says that "to see means to see in relation".  This is based on the gestalt, or the rejection of the idea that an object can be defined by the sum of each individual part. Arnheim argues that it's more complicated than that, because it's also about the relationship of each separate part to each other:

"By contrast, the Gestalt psychologists, referring among other things to the arts, emphasized that there are common connections in human nature, in nature generally, in which the whole is made up of an interrelationship of its parts and no sum of the parts equals the whole." -Arnheim in an interview

Try it!

Open the book Unflattening to any image you're drawn to.  Is the image just a combination of it's individual parts? Or is there meaning you get from the relationship of the parts with each other?

Read more about Arnheim's ideas about the visual world for a more detailed explanation.

Chapter 2 has a lot of references Sousanis makes in passing.

Here is a compiled list of references that Sousanis makes in Chapter 2

Erathosthenes: How an Ancient Greek polymath calculated the size of the earth. (p. 32)

Wiki

Nicolaus Copernicus' Heliocentric model of the solar system (p. 33)

Wiki

Francis Bacon and Scientific Inquiry--The Baconian Method (p. 34)

Wiki

Phrenology -- Image Reference (p. 35)

Wiki

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (p. 36)

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CP Snow "The Two Cultures" (p. 38)

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Metaphors We Live By--George Lakoff (p. 38)

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A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia -- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (p. 39)

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Flatland A Romance in Many Dimensions -- Edwin Abbott Abbott (p. 39)

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Finite and Infinite Games -- James Carse (p. 42)

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Ithaka - Cavafy (p. 42)

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"What Pragmatism Means" -- William James (p. 42)

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Ulysses- James Joyce (p. 45)

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Exploration/Encouraging Curiosity Activity

Nearly all the referenced texts/ authors/ persons have a Wikipedia page. Have your students do the following: 

  • Have the students pick one of the above referenced texts and look at their wikipedia pages (linked underneath the authoritative source)
  • The students should read/skim the Wikipedia page that they selected, click on at least 2-3 links that pique their interest
  • Write/document their exploration, what pages they clicked on, something new that they learned, and any thoughts as to why they clicked on those specific pages
  • Look back at the original subject that they selected, have them go into @LLsearch and find an authoritative source (book, journal article, research starter, etc.) on the topic, and have them write the citation/source down with their exploration

The goal of this activity is to have the students embrace unknowing and tap into their natural curiosity and what their interests are, while having them look at a good research starting point (wikipedia), digging deeper into what interests them, and then introducing them to the library discovery layer/catalog. 

 

AI and Unflattening

"With today's wide adoption of LLM products like ChatGPT from OpenAI, humans and businesses engage and use LLMs on a daily basis. Like any other tool, it carries its own set of advantages and limitations. This study focuses on finding out the cognitive cost of using an LLM in the educational context of writing an essay."

MIT Media Lab

AI Is Homogenizing Our Thoughts - The New Yorker

For Faculty: Navigating the AI Conversation - The University of Chicago

Discussion Questions: 

  • What is AI? What is a Large Language Model (LLM)? 
  • How does AI work? 

Try this exercise with Microsoft CoPilot AI either as a class or individually:

Step One:

Step Two:

  • Now, ask Copilot for another description of the image using this prompt: Describe the image using Elements of Visual Design: Line Shape Negative/White Space Volume Value Colour Texture and elements of Visual Design Principles: Unity Gestalt Hierarchy Balance Contrast Scale Dominance
  • Discuss: Did Copilot miss any pieces of your visual analysis? Notice how much more detailed of an answer you get when you provide a detailed prompt

Step Three:

  • Next, pick one of the concepts from the book that you weren't familiar with and had to research more about to understand.  Ask the AI tool to create a visual or diagram to help you understand.
    • Example Prompt:

      Arnheim said "Gestalt psychologists, referring among other things to the arts, emphasized that there are common connections in human nature, in nature generally, in which the whole is made up of an interrelationship of its parts and no sum of the parts equals the whole." 
      I'm having trouble understanding this concept. 
      Can you illustrate it with images or diagrams?

    • Notice the prompt starts with detailed context/background, makes it clear what I need, and asks for something specific from the AI in response.  Read some more tips for writing prompts and try tweaking your prompt to get different results.

  • Discuss: How do the AI images compare to Sousanis's images from the book? Who was better at using visuals to help you understand a concept?  Do you think that artists with well-developed visual literacy will always be better at illustrating than generative AI?
    Were there any obvious errors, like the example below where the AI tool describes parts of the image that were not there at all?  What happens when you point out these inaccuracies to the AI tool? Can we train the AI tool to be better at creating images without teaching it using copyrighted images?