Cartoon interpretation and production are teaching strategies that can assist students in a deeper understanding of concepts and practice of higher level thinking skills while motivating them through humor. This article presents an extended example of graduate students in an introductory course in gifted education creating humorous cartoons to explore major ideas and different types of perfectionism. General concepts of adaptive (positive) and maladaptive (negative) perfectionism, along with causes and mitigations, are discussed and illustrated with student-made cartoons. Students reported that creating cartoons was intrinsically motivating, promoted deeper levels of content learning, facilitated application of concepts, and aided self- and overall reflection on the topic. The process of the cartoon project and examples of student-generated cartoons are provided to promote practicing educators and teacher educators with ways of adapting this teaching strategy.
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