Reading Between the Lines: Zines and Object-Oriented Learning

  • Leila Kassir: Academic Support Librarian, LCC
  • Monica Sajeva: Assistant Academic Support Librarian, LCC

This Poster session starts at 12:40 in the Upper Street Gallery. Back to Poster Sessions

Brief description of session and activities

The LCC Library Zine Collection contains over 1000 zines and fanzines dating from the 1970s onwards and covering a wide range of styles and subjects. The collection is a teaching collection, created to support the teaching of courses across UAL. Over the last few years we’ve built links with many courses, and the collection’s been used to support zine briefs from Foundation to Postgraduate level. The sessions usually involve librarians providing introductory context about the zines and students then spending time handling the publications.

In May 2014, in collaboration with Graham Barton (Academic Support Coordinator), Camilla Lyon (CCW Academic Support) and Pauline Moon (CSM Academic Support), we developed and ran a different kind of zine session, using them to help the students develop their research skills and critical thinking around objects.   This pilot session, ‘Keeping Your Thinking Going Over the Summer’, was run with Foundation students. The session’s aim was twofold: to provide students with access to a special collection to demonstrate how these can help with learning, and to expose them to object-oriented learning. The students were encouraged to respond to the zines without any information from the librarians; they were asked to describe what they reacted to and why. After this discussion we provided the context so that students could compare their instinctive reactions and engage critically with the objects.   The students engaged fully with the session and the feedback was positive. Some comments received include:

“it completely inspired me”

“it was time to review/reflect my previous ideas”

“inspired me to keep researching over the Summer”

“It gave me a lot of ideas about context of work”

“New ideas for my future project”

Based on this we are developing further sessions for students on all levels which will incorporate further elements, such as Q&As with zine creators. We’d bring examples of the way the pilot session was run and organised. We could also discuss our plans for future sessions.

Will students be involved in the session? If so how?

No

What will participants take away from the session?

An understanding of the role special collections can play to support theoretical and workshop teaching.