Balancing accessibility and creativity in the classroom: The case of zines

Authors

  • Katharine Terrell

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.56433/tz36p460

Keywords:

zines, disability, creativity, accessibility, inclusion

Abstract

Improving the accessibility of teaching materials and activities in higher education can include a process of standardising texts (e.g. their format and font), while also providing a range of options for students to engage with information and express themselves. Zines have the potential for creative teaching, but it is unclear what aspects of zine-reading and zine-making are accessible to a wide range of students. Zines are typically hand-written or typed, hand-drawn booklets, photocopied and distributed at low cost. As well as being resources to learn from, zines can also be used as a creative activity and/or assessment in the higher education classroom. Used in this way, zines engage students’ ‘head, heart and hands’: supporting the development of higher order critical and analytical skills; connecting emotionally to the content; and with tactile engagement in the creative process. Yet despite the possibilities of zines to support creative teaching and learning practice, little is currently known about the specific ways that zines are used in an accessible way. This work aims to fill this gap by searching academic databases, zine databases and ‘grey’ literature. The early findings of this literature review bring to attention two contrasting ways of creating accessible zines. The first approach is an online ezine, which has a variety of modes of expression (written, visual and audio) and meets the requirements of digital accessibility through inclusive practice such as transcripts for audio tracks and descriptions of images. The second approach is creating traditional paper zines with tactile elements that can engage a range of people in different ways but might be harder to standardise and to make accessible. This offers a starting point to consider how to approach the problem of standardisation and creativity and brings up questions to investigate further regarding the accessibility of zines in higher education teaching and learning.

 

 

References

Barnes, C. (2019). Understanding the social model of disability. In N. Watson, A. Roulstone, C. Thomas (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies, 2nd ed. (pp. 14-31). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429430817

Center for Applied Special Technology (2024a). Support multiple ways to perceive information. https://udlguidelines.cast.org/representation/perception/ways-perceive-information/

Center for Applied Special Technology (2024b). The Goal of UDL: Learner Agency. https://udlguidelines.cast.org/more/udl-goal/

Center for Applied Special Technology (2024c). Use multiple media for communication. https://udlguidelines.cast.org/action-expression/expression-communication/multiple-media/

Congdon, K. G., & Blandy, D. (2003). Zinesters in the classroom: Using zines to teach about postmodernism and the communication of ideas. Art Education, 56(3), 44-55. https://doi.org/10.1080/00043125.2003.11653501

Creasap, K. (2014). Zine-making as feminist pedagogy. Feminist Teacher, 24(3), 155-168. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/femteacher.24.3.0155

Galvin, T. and McParland., J. (2019) Digital Accessibility Blog Post: THRIVES poster. Centre for Education Development, Queen's University Belfast. https://blogs.qub.ac.uk/digitallearning/staff/digital-teaching/teaching-practice/digital-accessibility/

Godbold, N., Irving-Bell, D., McSweeney-Flaherty, J. M., Prusko, P. T., Schlesselman, L. S., & Smith, H. (2021). The Courage to SoTL. Teaching & Learning Inquiry, 9(1), 380-394. https://doi.org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.9.1.25

Liasidou, A. (2014). Social justice in higher education. British Journal of Special Education, 41, 120-135. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8578.12063

McElroy, K., & Jackson, K. (2021). Material matters: Embodied community and embodied pedagogy. Zines, 2, 58-69. https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/downloads/7h149x622

McMaster Disability Zine Team (Ed.) (2021). Dis/orientation: Navigating accessibility in teaching and learning. [Ezine]. https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/macdisabilityzine/

Radway, J. (2012). Zines then and now: What are they? What do you do with them? How do they work? In A. Lang (Ed.), From codex to hypertext: Reading at the turn of the twenty-first century (pp. 27-47). University of Massachusetts Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/gla/detail.action?docID=4533124

Ross, D. G., & Pears, K. (2022). Zines as empowerment. In M. Trice, D. J. Sackey & C. Welhausen (Eds.), Proceedings of the 40th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication (SIGDOC '22) (pp. 117-120). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3513130.3558987

Terrell, K., & Pugh, C. (2024). Personal, political, participatory: Zines as active learning and assessment. [Presentation slides]. https://doi.org/10.25416/NTR.27159315.v1

Downloads

Published

2025-03-20