Resource Type: Assignment
Instructor: Amanda Torres
Title: Lecturer
Department: English
Course: English 110

I am designing a collaborative half-page zine project intended for First-Year Writing students to complete within the first unit of an English 110 class. Students will be asked to contribute one page to a zine that compiles local and/or campus resources that they feel are necessary for fellow and future FY students to know. Students will be encouraged to seek out resources offline to discover what services are available on/near campus. Of course, students can also seek out resources online, but they will need to verify that information offline – especially for resources on the college website that are outdated, for example. I hope this will motivate students to learn whom or where to ask for help on/near campus and to practice communicating and redistributing that information to their community of QC students.

This project will fulfill learning outcomes such as having students take ownership of their writing for a community audience, designing a multimodal composition for a specific rhetorical situation, and introducing preliminary research steps like identifying a problem/need/question (“what is information/a resource that you think fellow FY students should know?”) and seeking out information to help answer that question. This project engages Queens College and the surrounding area(s) by asking students to seek out and redistribute local resources, to share their own local knowledge and advice, to write intentionally for a QC audience, and to create a sense of community through distribution of the zine.

At first, I imagine the zine will solely be distributed digitally, but as I learn more about zine printing and physical distribution, I would love to be able to have my students share physical copies with their non-110 classmates and the campus at large.

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