What Are We?
“A Zine About Students as Partners” (ZSaP) is a participatory project at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, showcasing the collaborative work of students, faculty, and staff through the biannual publication of a zine. This zine embodies the principles of “students as partners,” promoting collaboration and innovation in teaching, learning, and knowledge production. By highlighting faculty-student and student-student partnerships, ZSaP encourages the campus community to experiment with new models of education that reposition the roles of students and staff, fostering shared responsibility in learning.
As a faculty-student collaboration, the zine is an ideal creative outlet to feature academic and creative work, while inspiring innovative approaches to learning. It consists of “a re-positioning of the roles of students and staff in the learning endeavor, grounded in a values-based ethos…within or outside of curricula; between individuals, small groups, or large cohorts; in courses (also known as modules or units); [and] across entire programs of study” (Mercer-Mapstone et al. 2017). Lessons from the Scholarship Of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) community emphasize the many benefits of faculty-student partnerships in teaching and learning such as this one, including: enhancing student learning outcomes, increasing student motivation and leadership, and transforming faculty and students’ sense of self.
What is a Zine?
A zine is “…a self-published, non-commercial print-work that is typically produced in small, limited batches…Zines can touch on a variety of topics from music and art, to politics, sexuality, humor and personal memoir. Their content may be written, drawn, printed, collaged, or any other form of combining words and imagery—a zine’s structure may be narrative, journalistic, comic-like, or completely abstract” (The Bindery 2020).
Follow these links to see awesome zine examples that spark creativity:
- Compiled by Mimi Nguyen, Evolution of a Race Riot was two compilation zines and a third zine listing projects, zines, and resources for people of color who were/are involved in punk rock and punk culture. The Race Riot comps are crucial and critical documents for POC involved in the subcultural terrain of DIY publishing, music, art, and culture.
- Sustainability and Identity was created at a workshop Migrant Zine Collective hosted at the Central City Library Marketspace in association with New Zealand Fashion Week (NZFW)…Following the NZFW theme of sustainability, contributors were invited to share their messages, thoughts and experiences about sustainability and caring for the environment by collaging, writing, or illustrating.
- QZAP Archive, co-founded by Milo Miller, is a digital archive preserving queer zines for “queers, researchers, historians, punks, and anyone else who has an interest [in]DIY publishing and underground queer communities”. Responding to a Times Magazine report on zines, they created a love letter on the ABC’s of the “Zine World” that shows the features and tenets of a zine that are “influential and enjoyable” to them as a zinestar.
- Molly Young, Eloise Telford, and Michaela Emingeroua, Voices from the Photocopier is a zine on zine-making as a practice of “cultural community development”, and the importance of zine-making as a form of community art.
