The illustrated epic

Abstract

This article presents the work carried out in the project "The Illustrated Epic," which, in the 2024/25 school year, was developed by 9th-grade students at Grande Colégio Universal in their Portuguese and Visual Education classes. The didactic initiative focused on creating images representing different moments from Luís de Camões's Os Lusíadas, as a strategy for studying the epic poem. The students' drawings revealed a clear understanding of passages from the poem and allowed them to develop creativity and critical thinking. Thus, in addition to describing the methodology and the various steps of the project, the article explains the objectives and theoretical assumptions of the approach followed. In a second part of the text, the products generated by this initiative (a digital book, an exhibition, and a presentation) are indicated, and some of the drawings created by the students are reproduced, in addition to presenting the results of a questionnaire answered by the students about the relevance of the activities to the study of Os Lusíadas.