Zines are self-published booklets of original or appropriated text and images, increasingly present in higher education, where they are used as an exploratory pedagogical tool for the development of student voice, self-awareness, creativity, and authority, outside of the strict parameters of scholarly communication and mainstream media.
"Zines can offer students a sense of ownership that other types of writing, especially
classroom writing, do not provide. Zines also introduce students to multimodal,
or multigenre composing, within a single document. Including zines as part of the
curriculum also models for students a variety of vehicles for meaning-making, and can
provide a more broad spectrum of identities and experiences with which students can
relate. These benefits challenge the status quo in terms of authority, revealing the process
by which a writer attains credibility on a particular topic." Chelsea Lonsdale [1]
[1] Chelsea Lonsdale, “Engaging the ‘Othered’: Using Zines to Support Student Identities,”
Language Arts Journal of Michigan 30, 2 (2015): 12
Here's a great undated blog post by Liz Mayorga, People of Color Zine Project (POCZP) West Coast Coordinator: "Let's Talk About Zines in the Classroom, Pros and Cons"
Women & Film Past & Present: Asynchronous, Pandemic-Era Class taught by Elodie Silberstein. This slide shows two images from student zines uploaded in VoiceThread in Classes as well as some comments from a student survey.
