Exploring Text Complexity (and Zines!) through Creating a Zine-Based Text Set

 Introduction

    This text set is built around understanding zines and their impact on the communities surrounding them. I curated this text set with my current field students in mind, high school sophomores in American Authors II at Rufus King International High School. These students are currently in the Middle Years Program, which is meant to prepare them to take IB English courses in their junior and senior years at Rufus King. The current students in American Authors II have shown a good amount of interest in reading a young adult novel in our last unit, where we read Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo. To keep the students interested in and connected to the unit about zines, I have chosen another young adult novel, Moxie by Jennifer Mathieu, to be a central text in guiding our unit on zines. This YA novel will hopefully give students more relatable, concrete ideas of how zines impact and create culture; furthermore, this novel was recently adapted into a film in 2021 so students may have some prior knowledge of the film and/or novel. However, since I know students do not have much background information about zines and the culture surrounding them I have included several other texts that will give them more background information. Generally, the demographics of all sections of American Authors II reflect the broader demographics of Rufus King, which is roughly 55% African American, 15% Hispanic, 15% White, 11% Asian, and 4% two or more races. I have noticed students became more engaged with our text in the last unit during more emotionally evocative chapters and when they were given a chance to insert their own opinions about what the character should do. I will be using this knowledge of my students to shape some of the tasks I ask of them when interacting with the text.

Print Texts

Moxie by Jennifer Mathieu

Summary: This text is a young adult novel that follows Vivian Carter, an eleventh grade girl who faces sexist comments and actions from male peers nearly every day at school. Upset with how administrators and teachers dismiss these comments, Vivian seeks to find a way to speak against these comments without publicly speaking out. As the daughter of a former Riot Grrrl zinester, Vivian uses zines to create a movement against this sexist behavior in her school.

Quantitative Complexity: The quantitative complexity of this text is around a 9.1 grade level reading, according to the Story Toolz resource. When initially reading this text, I believed it was around late middle school to early high school in terms of complexity since it does not include many extended sentences or unfamiliar vocabulary. I read through this novel quite quickly because it does not have very complex sentence structure and vocabulary. Considering this text was created for young adult audiences, it is not surprising that it falls at an early high school reading level. 

Qualitative Complexity: The qualitative complexity of this text is generally moderately complex throughout the novel. As I mentioned, the vocabulary is mostly familiar to students and sentence structure is mostly comprised of simple sentences. Furthermore, the purpose of this text is relatively easy to follow as it is advocating for students to use their voices to speak up against inequality. Although this purpose is not explicitly stated, it can be pretty easily inferred through reading the events of the text. There is some intertextual references to Riot Grrrl zines, however the text explains these references as they are brought up so it does not require background knowledge on other texts. Overall, this text is mostly understood through conventional knowledge but does require a bit of connecting ideas together from the reader, which is why I declare this a moderately complex text.

Reader and Task: This text relates to many experiences students encounter as it discusses the high school experience from the perspective of a high school students. It also promotes equality for students and models on method of enacting change that may motivate and inspire students. I have not heard my students discussing topics of gender equality much in class, but I have seen them empower each other and other movements toward equality so I am sure they would be supportive of this movement as well. Furthermore, this text answers "yes" to many of the questions posed in Reading Diversity Lite's tool for selecting diverse texts, which means it is a good fit for diversity. 

Since the text is not exceedingly complex in quantitative or qualitative terms, I would ask students to complete a slightly more complex task with this text. I would probably give students a reading journal related to this text that asks them to evaluate different perspectives in the text and reflect on their own positions in relation to those represented in the text. Tasks related to evaluation fall relatively high on Bloom's Taxonomy scale for task complexity; however, since this text is not very complex students will be able to focus their attention on understanding the task at hand, which will push them toward growth with a comfortable amount of struggle.

Whatcha Mean, What's a Zine? by Marak Todd & Esther Pearl Watson

Summary: This book is written in the style of a zine while covering the basic parts of zines and methods of creating and distributing zines and minicomics. Originally created for teens and young adults looking to learn about zine creating and distributing, this text is very approachable and useful for high school students and beyond.

Multimedia Texts

Zines as the Rebellion Against the Cultural Dominance of Digital Self-Publishing

Summary:  This resource is a blog by Stony Brook University that provides an introduction to the underground world of zines and explores the intimate, cultural interaction that exchanging zines create. There are multiple pages to this blog that explore different aspects on zines, from an introduction to today's context for zines to their role in facilitating interaction. If used as a multimodal text in class, I would have all students read the "Introduction" page of this blog and then allow them to explore other pages that discuss different topics about zines. 

Quantitative Complexity: A quantitative analysis of the "Introduction" page on this blog places it at an average of a 14.2 grade level reading. When I initially read through this page, I believed it would be around a 12th grade reading level because of the long sentences and the complicated use of punctuation. However, upon seeing the analytical assessment of the reading being around a college sophomore level I reviewed the text and noticed that much of the vocabulary and sentence structure is not easily understood by a high schooler.

 Qualitative Complexity: When using the Text Complexity: Qualitative Measures of Text for Informational Texts, I found this reading to be "Exceedingly Complex." One of the most complex areas of this text falls in the "Knowledge Demands" section of the text complexity rubric because many of the references made in the text assume readers have a background knowledge that is specific to the zine discipline. There is also a lot of intertextual references to other movements in zines that are frequently mentioned in the article, which would be hard to understand for a novice to zines. Other categories of measuring text complexity, such as "Language Features" and "Text Structure," are also exceedingly complex due to intricate sentence patterns that string together multiple ideas and a variety of ideas being strung together throughout the introduction. The organization of this piece is exceedingly complex due to it jumping from the goals of making zines to the idea that blogs may begin replacing zines and then back to why the goals of making zines negates blogs taking over their relevance. A combination of these features reasserts the grade level of this piece at an early college level.

Reader and Task: This text would not be an appropriate first-introduction to understanding the world of zines since it calls on many other movements in the zine culture. Therefore, this text would need to be scaffolded with other pieces that have less complex features and far less demands for prior knowledge. As far as diversity in this text, which I assessed through Reading Diversity Lite's checklist, I found this text to be very relevant in the students' related academic work although it does not describe many events that relate to the students personal life. Although this text does not reference things related to the students' identities, I believe it should still be used in order to understand other zines that are directly related to their identities. 

The task I would pair with this text would fall relatively low on Bloom's Taxonomy in the "Understand" category of the pyramid. Since the text is so complex, I would likely pair it with the task of summarizing the text. Specifically, I would ask students to summarize the text with a one-sentence summary of each section. I would divide the text into three sections that describe the varying topics of the introduction so that students are able to follow the "Exceedingly Complex" structure of the text. In pairing this task with the text, I would hopefully scaffold the text while students are reading. 

Vivian's Speech from Moxie the Film

Summary: In this brief clip from Moxie, the Netflix film adaptation of Jennifer Mathieu's young adult novel, the protagonist speaks up to other girls at her high school about finding her voice and speaking out for girls at their school who have been oppressed by sexist comments and actions. This clip would be used while reading to allow students to differentiate between how the scene unfolded in the book versus in the movie. 

Culturally Relevant Texts

Riot Grrrl Manifesto

Summary: This text is a page from Bikini Kill's "Riot Grrrl Manifesto" zine that includes a list of statements answering "What is Riot Grrrl?" The statements are all in the form of "Because..." and give various reasons behind the need for female encouragement through the creating and sharing of zines. This text tackles many things that suppress women, such as sexual violence, silencing female voices, and turning women against each other.

Quantitative Complexity: The quantitative assessment of complexity for this text places it at a 7.3 grade level reading. As I initially read through this text, I found it fairly simple to understand so I was not surprised by this assessment of the text. However, the content of this text is not appropriate for a middle school reading so I would use it in a high school classroom and give students a more complex task to pair with this text since is more accessible.

Qualitative Complexity: The qualitative complexity of this text is mainly assessed by the content-matter of this text, which discusses topics of oppression and violence toward oppressed groups. The sentence structure of the text is not very complex and there are not many unfamiliar vocabulary words. However, this text is moderately complex in its use of graphics as they are integral to receiving the message of the piece. Furthermore, the content of this text is not appropriate for a middle school audience since it covers topics of sexual abuse and violence. While these ideas are not delivered in complex writing or formatting, they are complex ideas for readers to grapple with and understand. Therefore, I believe this text is best used for a high school level reader or higher because although the text features and writing are not exceedingly complex, the ideas within the text are quite complex.

Reader and Task: This text answers "yes" to many features of Reading Diversity Lite's Tool for Selecting Diverse Texts. As part of completing the checklist for assessing diversity, I was prompted to consider how this text could motivate and engage my students. Since I know these students have enjoyed tasks that allow them to create their own version of something they read in the text in past units, I was inspired to create a similar task to pair with this text. It is important to recognize that asking students to "create" new and original pieces in response to a text is the most complex task on Bloom's Taxonomy Scale. However, since this text is fairly simple to understand and at the grade level complexity of 7th grade, I believe students will be able to complete this task. Therefore, I would prompt students to create their own "Because.." statement for the reason behind their actions. The text itself provides lots of examples for this type of statement and engaging with the text in this way will also encourage students to create their own reasons for activism.

Cartoneras: a documentary on cardboard publishing in Latin America

Summary: This short documentary follows several people in Latin America along the process of creating and distributing cartoneras, a style of zine, from cardboard scraps sometimes found in landfills. This documentary gives great context behind the often "underground" and "unseen" people that use zines to get their voices out and explores the impact creating cartoneras has made on these communities.

Putting it All Together

Now that we've introduced all the texts I will be including in this text set and assessed the complexity of a few texts in this set, I will explain how I plan to use them together. As I mentioned, these students are coming to this text set with almost know prior knowledge of what zines are. Therefore, I would use excerpts from Whatcha Mean, What's a Zine? to introduce students to the basic components behind zines and how they are distributed. Once I feel students have a good understanding of what zines are, I would want them to be introduced to the sense of community that is created by distributing zines in person. To demonstrate the community zines can create, I would show them the short documentary "Cartoneras: a documentary on cardboard publishing in Latin America." Now that students are a bit more nuanced on the "what" or zines and the "how" behind creating community, I would allow them to explore our most complex text of the set, which is the Zines as the Rebellion Against the Cultural Dominance of Self-Publishing blog. As I mentioned in my analysis of the text, this blog requires background knowledge from the students and I hope including it at this point in our text set will prepare students to understand some of the intertextual references to zine movements. After sufficient introduction to what zines are through the first three texts, I would begin reading Moxie! by Jennifer Mathieu that will guide the rest of our zine text set. Toward the beginning of Moxie! the Riot Grrrl Manifesto is mentioned and it is one thing that inspires the protagonist of the story, Vivian. When this is mentioned in Moxie!, I would pause reading from the novel to take some class time to explore our next text in the text set, which is the Riot Grrrl Manifesto. As we continue reading, I would incorporate scenes from "Moxie," the Netflix film adaptation of our class novel, to break up our reading focused days and allow students to see another adaptation of our text. That is how I would incorporate the final text, which is a clip from the film that shows Vivian's speech toward the end of the novel. I hope this text set gives students a good introduction to zines and the culture they create through a variety of complexity levels in the texts and tasks expected of students in the unit.

Works Cited

Brant, Isadora, director. Cartoneras: A Documentary on Cardboard Publishing in Latin America. Cartonera Publishing, 29 Jan. 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzZESHygabI. Accessed 2022.

Hanna, Kathleen. “Riot Grrrl Manifesto.” Bikini Kill: Girl Power, Kathleen Hanna, New York, NY, 1991.

Mathieu, Jennifer. Moxie! Square Fish/Roaring Brook Press, 2021.

Poehler, Amy, director. Moxie. Netflix, Netflix, 2021, netflix.com. Accessed 2022.

Todd, Mark, and Esther Watson. Whatcha Mean, What's a Zine?: The Art of Making Zines and Minicomics. Graphia, 2006.

“Zines as Rebellion Against the Cultural Dominance of Digital Self-Publishing.” https://you.stonybrook.edu/zines/the-state-of-zines/. Accessed 2022.