Foundations: A Collection of Creative Nonfiction Essays with a Zine and a Case for Creative Nonfiction and Zines as Secondary Language Arts Pedagogy Practices

Abstract

This thesis consists of a manuscript of original Creative Nonfiction essays and a critical forward that makes a case for the use of Zines in secondary language arts pedagogy. The foreword situates Zines as self-published, counter-culture magazines that utilize materiality in order to enhance their rebellious narratives and rhetorical messages. After exploring the history of zines and creative nonfiction, the foreword highlights the use of zines as third spaces that utilize mundanity and personal experiences to create personal/political messaging. From these rebellious spaces, the foreword maintains that creative nonfiction provides a means for exploring and questioning the nebulous structures of genre. The foreword proposes that because zines are self-published and counterculture, their production becomes a liminal practice in the secondary classroom that moves students from personal writing to academic genre study and on to the act of self-publishing. The foreword argues that integrating zines in the secondary language arts pedagogy can enhance engagement, teach the rhetorical use of design, promote co-authorship and co-operation, and enhance ownership in student editing. The original manuscript includes thirteen creative nonfiction essays and a Zine. The concepts of mundanity and rhetorical use of lived experience are demonstrated in the creative nonfiction and Zine, which interrogate the intersectional space of education, family, art, and gender.