Zines After School

September 2023 - June 2024

Zines After School (ZAS) is an arts education program of Booklyn, Inc., for 2nd – 5th graders (ages 6-11) that will take place Wednesdays, 3−6 pm at Old Stone House at JJ Byrne Playground in Park Slope, Brooklyn (NYC). ZAS teaches zine and bookmaking as a community-centered practice, one that builds social-emotional learning and engages project-based learning to create self-determined stories. 

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We believe that zine-making is a joyful and collective practice with a rich history in activism, feminism, identity, and personal agency. Zine spaces, to us, are safe spaces for wondering and for personal and group exploration. We want to provide young people with safe, authentic opportunities to make decisions and even grapple with discomfort when it arises. Zines After School will support kids to reflect on personal experiences and consider relationships between those experiences and the world around them. 

Zines After School builds on our experiences with Zine Camp and adds a new and expansive curriculum and lesson plans! Some things we’ll do during ZAS are…

  1. Learn about all kinds of zines and techniques like, one-page zines, accordion fold, coil binding, flag books, and more!
  2. Explore collaborative storytelling activities and create group zines.
  3. Enjoy unstructured chill time daily (reading, drawing, or supervised playing on the playground).
  4. Build our own zine collections–each student will have their own Collection Box to keep the zines they make, swap, or collect throughout the session. 
  5. Reuse and recycle household materials for bookmaking.
  6. Create unique approaches to editioning and distributing zines.
  7. Make consensus-based group decisions.
  8. Learn about how paper is made, and create paper sculptures to explore how different papers behave.

Zines After School is rooted in our Booklyn Education Manual, which is a free-to-download manual collectively created by NYC-based teaching artists and public school educators since 2004.

Curriculum and lesson plans were created by Kameelah Janan Rasheed. Lead educators are Jan Descartes and Monica Johnson.

Zine Camp is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the NY City Council.