Balancing accessibility and creativity in the classroom: The case of zines

Improving the accessibility of teaching materials and activities in higher education can include a process of standardising texts (e.g. their format and font), while also providing a range of options for students to engage with information and express themselves. Zines have the potential for creative teaching, but it is unclear what aspects of zine-reading and zine-making are accessible to a wide range of students. Zines are typically hand-written or typed, hand-drawn booklets, photocopied and distributed at low cost. As well as being resources to learn from, zines can also be used as a creative activity and/or assessment in the higher education classroom. Used in this way, zines engage students’ ‘head, heart and hands’: supporting the development of higher order critical and analytical skills; connecting emotionally to the content; and with tactile engagement in the creative process. Yet despite the possibilities of zines to support creative teaching and learning practice, little is currently known about the specific ways that zines are used in an accessible way. This work aims to fill this gap by searching academic databases, zine databases and ‘grey’ literature. The early findings of this literature review bring to attention two contrasting ways of creating accessible zines. The first approach is an online ezine, which has a variety of modes of expression (written, visual and audio) and meets the requirements of digital accessibility through inclusive practice such as transcripts for audio tracks and descriptions of images. The second approach is creating traditional paper zines with tactile elements that can engage a range of people in different ways but might be harder to standardise and to make accessible. This offers a starting point to consider how to approach the problem of standardisation and creativity and brings up questions to investigate further regarding the accessibility of zines in higher education teaching and learning.