Making the Syllabus Zine
Posted by Kate Ozment
As those of you who follow our Twitter have seen (because I have no chill), I dove into an over-the-top art project this semester and made all my syllabi into zine-style booklets. It started with a single class and spiraled outward into a behemoth, so now I’ve decided to write it up and post the files so you, too, can go full behemoth should you so choose.
The Basics
This project is without a doubt more work than just doing a normal syllabus. I am not going to lie and say it was easy or that I was careful with how I spent my time. I wasn’t. If you’re precariously employed, pre-tenure, or a grad student, especially, I don’t think I’d recommend you spend time on this instead of research that will establish you. I’m relatively fortunate in that I’m evaluated for teaching more than anything else, and innovative course design and materials are well rewarded where I am. But this was truly just a personal impulse. I had fun with it, and I wanted to have fun with challenging myself to think differently about syllabi. I’m developing new courses in technologies of writing and digital research, and I needed to start exploring different document designs and course formats to imagine these less traditional spaces.
I also think that making myself truly vulnerable in all my nerdery (you can’t hide the nerd when you hand a class an RPG syllabus), right there on day one when they can just drop the class and bolt, was good for me and them. Because I’m going to ask them to be nerdy and creative. I can’t do that and be professionally polished all the time. I am trying to hold space to just do something creative because it’s wonderful. and because holding space for creativity and play and fun is so radically against the capitalistic impulse that seems to be permeating higher education. I of course want them to be employable, but I just also think that creativity is good for the soul as much as it’s good for the workplace. You should cultivate happiness in spite of every little thing telling you that you can have time for happiness later. I absolutely know how much I sound like a millennial living through late capitalism (because I am), but it’s something that my students articulate themselves as well. As a way to get to know them, I ask them what they are most passionate about, and a full quarter of my students said choosing to be happy, self care, or building good relationships.
Technical Information: I used Adobe InDesign and Illustrator to do most of the work for the zines. If you’re new to page design, it takes a little bit of time to learn the Adobe programs but you will save yourself so much heartache than if you tried to do this with Microsoft Word. I used Illustrator’s brush tools to make really simple illustrations and did the page design in InDesign.
Another option is hand-writing them and xeroxing the original in the true style of zines. I designed the covers separately and had them printed at Staples in color; this was on my own dime, but it made me happy even if it was against my principle of not funding my work with my salary, so it was worth the $30. I exported the files as booklets and had them printed in black and white through the university before putting them all together in our Maker Studio with a paper cutter and saddle stapler.
For accessibility and ease of printing for lost copies, I threw all the same information in a screen-reader-accessible PDF that I also posted on our learning management system.
Women Writers
This is for a lower-division general education course that all students can take. I get a mix of freshmen to seniors, STEM to humanities. I teach the class as early English feminism, and we read from Marie de France to Mary Wollstonecraft. The focus is on how women writers claim authority in complex ways that often challenge our ability to characterize contemporary feminism in historical writing.
The theme of Feminist Fight Club is carried throughout the zine and course assignments. Each writer has “stats” that we cover in PowerPoints including skills and notoriety. We also do an advice guide assignment where they do their own zines on how to live your life or how to get a man or whatever strikes their fancy from our readings during the semester.
British Enlightenment
This upper-level course focuses on mobility and reads the Enlightenment through the lenses of Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic and work within indigenous theory. Students explore the tensions between representations of indigenous peoples and black Africans and the stories we have from these peoples within the same period. We are using contemporary recovery projects to contextualize the legacy of the Enlightenment: the 1619 Project and Mapping Indigenous LA.
The assignments in this class ask students to explore storytelling, the method that many of our diasporic Africans and indigenous peoples used to resist colonial erasure. Students will be able to write short stories, poems, musical scores, etc. that put them as travelers within our stories. They have a lot of freedom with this, and the main goal of the assignment is to give them space to make sense of the trauma of colonialism on their own terms and unique way as contemporary readers just as Nan-ye-hi, Equiano, and Wheatley repurposed colonial language as a means of resistance.
British Victorian
This upper-level course was why the whole thing started, which you will tell by how much fun I clearly had with this zine. Like many a literature nerd, I enjoy telling stories as much as I enjoy reading about them. I play role-playing games (or RPGs) with students and on my own time when I am available. This course was designed as a monster-hunter RPG, riffing off the many Victorian adaptations that my students have consumed: Sherlock, Penny Dreadful, and the litany of steampunk-esque games and media out there.
The game-style course uses XP rather than points and allows students to earn badges that give them nice but not essential boons (or things they would have earned anyway but now it’s a badge instead of something I offer them). The badges are 1 in. pins that I made with a button maker, which cost something like $6 total and about two hours of my time.
About the Author
Kate Ozment is assistant professor of English at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Currently, she is working on a book project on women’s history of bibliography. Look for her work in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Early Modern Women, and Authorship. Contact her at: keozment (at) cpp (dot) edu.
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October 2022
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September 2022
- Sep 24, 2022 Making a Scriptorium, or, Writing with Quills Part Two
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June 2020
- Jun 1, 2020 Black Lives Matter
- May 2020
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April 2020
- Apr 1, 2020 Teaching Materiality with Virtual Instruction
- March 2020
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February 2020
- Feb 1, 2020 Making the Syllabus Zine
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January 2020
- Jan 1, 2020 Teaching Print History with Popular Culture
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December 2019
- Dec 1, 2019 Teaching with Enumerative Bibliography
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November 2019
- Nov 1, 2019 Finding Women in the Historical Record
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October 2019
- Oct 1, 2019 Teaching in the Maker Studio
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September 2019
- Sep 1, 2019 Graduate School: The MLS and the PhD
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August 2019
- Aug 1, 2019 Research Trips: Workflow with Primary Documents
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July 2019
- Jul 1, 2019 Research Trips: A Beginner's Guide
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June 2019
- Jun 1, 2019 Building a Letterpress Reference Library
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May 2019
- May 1, 2019 Teaching Manuscript: Writing with Quills
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April 2019
- Apr 1, 2019 Why It Matters: Teaching Women Bibliographers
- March 2019
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February 2019
- Feb 1, 2019 Roundup of Materials: Teaching Book History
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January 2019
- Jan 1, 2019 Building and Displaying a Teaching Collection
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December 2018
- Dec 1, 2018 Critical Making and Accessibility
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November 2018
- Nov 1, 2018 Teaching Bibliographic Format
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October 2018
- Oct 1, 2018 Teaching Book History Alongside Literary Theory
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September 2018
- Sep 1, 2018 Teaching with Letterpress
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August 2018
- Aug 1, 2018 Teaching Manuscript: Circulation
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July 2018
- Jul 1, 2018 Setting Up a Print Shop
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May 2018
- May 1, 2018 Teaching Manuscript: Commonplace Books
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April 2018
- Apr 1, 2018 Getting a Press
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March 2018
- Mar 1, 2018 Teaching Ephemera: Pamphlet Binding
- February 2018