Authored by Natalia Villarroel Torres, Ph.D. student in the Latin American, Iberian and Latino Cultures Program and Humanities Alliance Fellow at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
What is a Zine?
When I hear the word “zine”, my first thought is, “we are going to have a great time.” The enjoyment I feel when I create this kind of mini-magazine with my own hands is exactly what I want to achieve every time that I share this technique with others. Zines are a way of creating knowledge that I have introduced to my Spanish students, friends, or anyone who wants to learn through experience.
The first time I made a zine was in 2018 when I attended a feminist zine workshop in Chile, the country I am from. Since then, I have not stopped making zines. I could actually say that I am a bit addicted to the process: the sense of freedom, relaxation, and physical engagement that comes with making something by hand is truly addictive.
Zines are part of the do-it-yourself (DIY) culture, a movement that promotes the idea of self-creation and self-sufficiency. This culture values creativity, independence, and personal expression, emphasizing that anyone can create and learn new skills without extensive resources or prior knowledge. Although the practice of zine-making has its roots in early alternative publications of the early 20th century in the United States, it gained popularity in the 1970s and 1980s. During this period, communities such as punks, feminist movements, leftist activists, queer communities, and other marginalized groups began using zines as key tools to express unconventional ideas, challenge social norms, and share information often ignored by mainstream media. The availability of low-cost technologies, such as photocopiers, allowed these communities to produce and distribute zines independently, making them an essential vehicle for communication, self-expression, and organization within these groups.
Who (Can) make Zines?
I was very motivated because of my first interaction with DIY culture. Starting in 2018, I attended every zine workshop that I could find. I learned different techniques and methodologies for creating these mini-magazines, and until today, I continue learning about them. Then, I started making my own zines on a variety of topics —basically, “whatever I want to say” because the goal was to communicate. Through my zines, I expressed feelings of being tired, sad, happy, and so on. I remember making a zine that told a feminist story called “La Niña” (The Girl). I made several copies of that zine and gave them away in a feminist demonstration on March 8, 2020. La Niña was meant to eventually complete a personal collection of feminist complaints and reflections under the name “Cuentos para organizar tu rebeldía” (Stories to Organize Your Rebellion).
Thanks to those first experiences, I understood firsthand what it means to “self-publish” and how, with few resources, it is possible to create something truly meaningful and accessible. They showed me that anyone, regardless of their background or means, has the potential to create zines, raise their voices, and connect with others.
Why Zines in Education?
Through my involvement, I discovered that zines are excellent pedagogical exercises. The key to this is its active, collective, and motivational components.
The active component lies in the concept of self-publishing one’s ideas. We do not need anyone else to spread our ideas. We are our own editors, writers, curators, and designers. In fact, there are already institutions—such as CUNY— places, and people interested in creating zine archives. This is happening due to the growing relevance of self-publishing, especially from ordinary voices and marginalized communities.
The collective component is closely related to the way zines travel. Specifically, it refers to how people learn to make and consume zines. As I mentioned, we learn about this way of self-publishing through hands-on creation, often in contexts such as workshops, classes, or even via purchasing a zine. The last is very important because zines circulate within an underground culture shaped by groups of people interested in certain topics or independent forms of publication. In this way, the practice of zine-making strengthens the connections between the diverse communities that engage in it.
The motivational component is related to the previous two: active and collective elements generate motivation in those interested in learning about zines and creating them. In the field of education, these types of exercises are often used when we talk about “project-based learning.” In my experience, students reach a high level of concentration during zine-making activities, even those who initially did not believe in their manual skills.
This happens because activities that involve the whole body activate the “intrinsic motivation” (Arnold, 2000), the type of motivation in which a person performs or commits to an action. This type of motivation is not only understood as something positive that provokes a sense of well-being but also as a feeling that drives us to achieve goals or overcome challenges. In other words, intrinsic motivation is also activated when solving a problem, pushing us to strive and give our best (Aleksandrova, 2017).
The reason for this motivational phenomenon lies in the type of activity involved. Hands-on activities, such as zine-making, allow students to experience their social, emotional, intellectual and spatial abilities, and to get to know themselves better. Through these kinds of exercises, they can connect with their emotions and thoughts, especially with the idea of “doing/making in the present.” As a result, they forget everything else and focus on completing a task that seems easy but is not so simple; creating a zine requires putting together several skills, such as reading, listening, writing, drawing, critical thinking, and more, to complete the process.
In my classes, I have observed that students enter what I call the “zine flow.” After overcoming the “wall” of questions (e.g. “What do I do?” “How do I do it?”), they find a starting point and develop their creativity, which takes them to contest preconceptions (e.g. “I’m bad at crafts”). In this way, students find something they want to communicate and materialize it in a zine.
Zine as embodied knowledge?
The “wall” in the zine-making process refers to the “freezing” effect that hands-on and creative activities can have on students. At first glance, doing a zine could seem pretty easy, as it involves revisiting activities we practiced since early childhood, such as drawing, coloring, cutting, gluing images, and more. However, this can be challenging and uncomfortable for many people. Therefore, it is normal for students to feel lost or reluctant to complete the task of creating zines in class. This shows how difficult it can be for many people to connect or fully engage with an activity using their entire body. The good news is that once they pass that “wall,” they realize that it is possible to learn and apply knowledge in different ways.
In this sense, zine-making involves not only an exercise of personal expression but also an invitation to make aesthetic, graphic, and editorial decisions that reflect our identity. Our zine becomes a mirror that reflects who we are, and self-publishing is sharing essentially a part of our identity with others. In this way, when creating a zine, we establish a connection with someone else who will read it.
As Alison Piepmeier mentions in her book Girl Zines: Making Media Doing Feminism, “Zines instigate intimate, affectionate connections between their creators and readers, not just communities but what I am calling embodied communities, made possible by the materiality of the zine medium” (2009, p. 58). Thanks to this quote from Piepmeier, I now understand more clearly why I have employed this technique to connect with my students.
I teach Spanish at CUNY, and zine-making activities have been fundamental in developing the affective component required to learn a new language. In just a few pages, using images, colors, textures, and brief reflections, we can materialize our experiences and share them with the world. Moreover, zines offer fun and creative ways of conveying content. For this reason, I also have used this technique to make the syllabi for my courses or directions for assignments. This also helped me show my students, in practice, that there are multiple ways to understand and approach the teaching and learning process.
References cited
- Aleksandrova, D. (2017). La motivación en clases de ELE. Actas del II Encuentro de Profesores de Español en Sofía, Bulgaria, p. 42-55.
- Arnold, J. (2000). La dimensión afectiva en el aprendizaje de idiomas. Madrid: CUP.
- Piepmeier, A. (2009). Girl Zines. Making Media Doing Feminism. New York University Press.
Recommendations
For those interested in learning more about zine creation or exploring some examples, I recommend the following places, full of inspiration:
Zines in The Classroom Brown University
