Zines: Mediating Situated Learning through Popular Culture
Abstract
Through the lens of situated learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991), I examine the ways in which zines, self-published magazines (Allen & Swistak, 2004; Guzetti, 2004), scaffolded 84 preservice teachers' legitimate peripheral participation in four sections of an introductory education course for elementary education majors at a state college serving nontraditional students. As a popular culture medium, zines provided students with a multimodal, multigenre means to represent their developing beliefs and understandings of the purposes of education, with a focus on social justice. Zines afforded students an opportunity to augment class discussions and readings with insider perspectives garnered through interviews and/or surveys. Furthermore, students utilized a range of semiotic resources (Kress, 2004) to express their developing philosophies; these included visual metaphors and creative forms of expression, such as self-composed music, poetry, and theatrical scripts. This presentation focuses on how zines mediated students' learning and supported a final philosophy of education essay in which preservice teachers appropriated academic and professional language, as part of a college-designed benchmark assessment for the external teacher education accreditation process.
Location
Atrium/Concourse
Recommended Citation
Horan, Deborah, "Zines: Mediating Situated Learning through Popular Culture " (2012). SoTL Commons Conference. 77.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/sotlcommons/SoTL/2012/77
Zines: Mediating Situated Learning through Popular Culture
Atrium/Concourse
Through the lens of situated learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991), I examine the ways in which zines, self-published magazines (Allen & Swistak, 2004; Guzetti, 2004), scaffolded 84 preservice teachers' legitimate peripheral participation in four sections of an introductory education course for elementary education majors at a state college serving nontraditional students. As a popular culture medium, zines provided students with a multimodal, multigenre means to represent their developing beliefs and understandings of the purposes of education, with a focus on social justice. Zines afforded students an opportunity to augment class discussions and readings with insider perspectives garnered through interviews and/or surveys. Furthermore, students utilized a range of semiotic resources (Kress, 2004) to express their developing philosophies; these included visual metaphors and creative forms of expression, such as self-composed music, poetry, and theatrical scripts. This presentation focuses on how zines mediated students' learning and supported a final philosophy of education essay in which preservice teachers appropriated academic and professional language, as part of a college-designed benchmark assessment for the external teacher education accreditation process.
