Curious about our zine project?
Check out the answers to these Frequently Asked Questions below!
Historically, zines have been used by marginalized communities in order to spread information and as a tool among activists.
A recently published article from the Baltimore Beat calls zines "a teaching tool for safety, for survival, for justice". Federal prosecutors have labeled zines as "insurrectionary materials", and have attempted multiple times to jail those involved with distribution and posession of zines.
Zines are used as tools for change, to help people protect themselves, and unite to protect their communities, and to elevate the voice of the voiceless.
Our students need to experience that power.
We've started a zine library at Bret Harte and are slowly introducing our students to zine culture. They might not realize it yet, but zine creation is the creation of history.
As a Title I school, we are also painfully aware of the socio-economic barriers and inequities our students face. Studies have shown that students in lower-income schools are behind their higher-income peers in literacy skills by an average of 5 grade levels.
Our most recent iReady data corroborates this theory: 50% of students at Bret Harte are three or more grade levels behind in their reading skills.
Zine-making encourages students to develop literacy skills through reading, writing, and analysis. Zines also encourage SEL skills by teaching students to be introspective and empathetic.
With all of that information available, who wouldn't want their students to be a part of zine-making culture?
Since our fellowship team consists of the librarian and the Community School Manager (CSM) we are in a unique position to connect with multiple classes and programs during and after the schoolday.
Classes like African American Female Excellence (AAFE) and our reading support class have already participated in zine-making workshops in our library.
We've also partnered with the on-campus afterschool program's existing art class by inviting them to the library once a week to work on zines.
Eventually, we would like to spread the reach of this project to include our wellness and behavioral support teams to use zinemaking as a therapeutic tool for students in their service.
It depends on the type of zine and the student.
We've seen kids make zines in under 10 minutes because they only focused on writing, but we’ve also made collage zines that took a couple of class periods to finish.
The 8-page mini zine format is the easiest to learn and teach, but there are also half-size zines (a.k.a booklet), quarter-size zines and micro-zines .
Because zine-making is about creative freedom of expression (unless it’s a class assignment), students often take their zines home to finish, and we never get to see the end result.
We have a form on our resource board for students to “officially” submit their zines so we can catalog them into our collection, but we’ve also found “rogue” zines placed in our library, which tells me the students want to be included, even if they’re not ready to claim work as their own!
Currently, zines are for library use only.
Zines in the Bret Harte library are tracked on a Google Sheet that contains the following information for each zine: Title, Author, Year of Publication, Description/Summary, Tags, Color & Printing notes, and copyright/permissions.
While we would like to add each zine to OUSD's official library database, we are holding off on this because cataloging across school sites is shared and can be inconsistent.
A long-term goal would be to barcode each zine and include it in our site's library catalog so students can access and borrow them as they would library books, as the Oakland Public Library does with its zine collection.
While we can't loan out zines at this time, we can easily replicate zines for students to take home if they wish.