Literary Production I and II

Purpose: to help other instructors teaching the same course

Common Course ID:  ENG 5430A and ENG 5430B
CSU Instructor Open Textbook Adoption Portrait

Abstract: These low-cost texts are being utilized in an English literature course for undergraduate students by Dr. Kate Simonian at CSUSB. The open resources for this course include an OER textbook, open-access syllabi, and publicly available zine archives. The main motivation to adopt these low-cost materials was to save students money, but the materials turned out to be not only financially, but also ideologically, beneficial. Students accessed the resources through the Canvas course page.

Course Title and Number - ENG 5430 A (Literary Production I) and ENG 5430 B (Literary Production II)

Brief Description of course highlights:  The course catalogue describes the course as follows: “Throughout the semester, students solicit, select, edit, proof-read, and arrange poems, short stories, artwork, and plays for a new issue of a literary journal or similar production. Theories and methods of literary circulation and publication addressing social, political, and aesthetic issues of literary production.” In short, in ENG 5430 A, students make and publish their own zine, and work on the next issue of The Pacific Review, the undergraduate literary journal at CSUSB. In 5430 B, they publish and launch the annual volume of The Pacific Review. Through this group project, they learn about literary publishing, editing, selecting contributors, graphic and literary design, marketing, and event management. 

Student population: Students are usually graduate students and undergraduate English majors. The course is a pre-requisite for English majors doing a creative-writing certification, so these constitute the bulk of the class. These undergraduates are usually in the last or penultimate semester, so the course functions as a capstone. That said, any student with an interested in art, design, publication, editing, writing, or The Pacific Review itself can join. 

Learning or student outcomes: 
- Practice a range of editorial skills, including selecting pieces, content editing, line corrections, and general design
- Make a zine of their own choosing, to connect with campus community
- Fulfill a special role (literary editor, art editor, social media head, etc) to collaboratively produce an issue of The Pacific Review
- Promote and launch an issue of The Pacific Review

OER/Low Cost Adoption Process
Please provide an explanation or what motivated you to use this textbook or OER/Low Cost: I sought to save students money, but I also wanted to use accessible, online resources. Given the digital, community-centered, and free nature of the publications the class made, OER materials also made for philosophical consistency, and made a point about the ideology behind resource-sharing.

How did you find and select the open textbook for this course?  There were very few resources in major OER repositories like Merlot or the OER Commons, so I had to consult Zine syllabi of professors at other institutions and do a general internet search for OER materials to evaluate a range of resources.   

Sharing Best Practices: It’s not easy to find OER resources dealing with traditional literary publishing, so you will likely have to find and synthesize a range of more traditional resources, such as books and articles, to give students that foundational knowledge. There are more resources available for exploring zines, but these are often of a lesser quality, simply because of the recentness with which zines have been taken as a serious subject of study. 

Describe any challenges you experienced, and lessons learned. To reiterate, there aren’t many OER materials on this subject, especially on more traditional literary publishing. Supplementation is necessary. The resources found often need to be checked for professionalism and rigorousness. 

Textbook or OER/Low cost Title: Using Zines in the Classroom and How to Make a Single Page Booklet Zine, by Anne Hays Adkison. (Creative Commons license.)

Brief Description:  This resource is a collection of short essays and guides. It takes a practical approach to pedagogy, emphasizing High-Impact Practices. The platform is CUNY Academic Works, which has fairly basic functionality. The document is presented in a PDF reader. 

Please provide a link to the resource https://academicworks.cuny.edu/si_oers/82/

Authors:  Anne Hays Adkison

Student access:  Students access materials via links on the Canvas course webpage

Supplemental resources:
-  WS 166: The World of Zines, Zine Making and Self-Publishing: Defining Zines Plus Zine Histories and Futures, Professor Silberstein's (Research Guide/Syllabus, PACE university)
- Library of Congress Zine Web Archive
- University of Miami Zine Collection
-  Barnard Zine Library

Provide the cost savings from that of a traditional textbook.  The original texts were 2 books, one was 20 USD and another for 30 USD. That is $50. The new syllabus cost students zero dollars. That’s an individual saving of $50 and a net saving (for fifteen students across two sections) of $1,500 USD.

License*: Creative Commons license. Noncommercial 4.0 License. 

Instructor Name - Dr. Kate Osana Simonian 
I am an assistant English professor at California State University, San Bernardino 

Please provide a link to your university page.
https://www.csusb.edu/profile/kate.simonian

Please describe the courses/course numbers that you teach.
ENG 2500--Introduction to Creative Writing
ENG 3030--Analysis of Fiction and Nonfiction Prose
ENG 3500--Literary Movements: Aesthetics and Craft
ENG 4180--Intermediate Fiction Workshop
ENG 5130--Advanced Creative Writing in Specialized Genres
ENG 5190--Creative Writing Thesis
ENG 6210--Teaching Imaginative Writing

Describe your teaching philosophy and any research interests related to your discipline or teaching.  How we see the world is often how we teach. My younger brother has an intellectual disability. In 2005, my mom, desperate to prop up his grades, asked me to tutor him. At first, the scenario played out badly. Close-reading, however “fun” the texts were, repelled him. Imaginative prompts yielded blank pages. So, what did I, a budding fiction writer, do? I turned to story.  Good stories move before they instruct, so I won him over emotionally. We wrote about his passion: cars. He was a visual learner, so we used diagrams to learn essay structures. We spoke of the mental “story” that an essay told and used anecdotes as mnemonic tools. He learned to not only re-frame his attitude into a growth-based model, but to stop seeing himself as defined by a perceived deficiency. Today, my pedagogy clusters around these same principles of storytelling, with the goal of re-writing how students see themselves. 

Win Hearts, then Minds. Learning happens best in a safe space. In my Introduction to Creative Writing, I create this environment on the first day. Through a humorous confession of my own errors, I dispel some ideas that first-time writers might harbor; model the “critical kindness” with which I want students to approach their own work; and establish a norm whereby incorrectness is a corollary of brave writing. I then distribute a survey asking about past experiences and preferred learning styles, which springboards us into a discussion of how we’d like the class to be conducted. By giving students buy-in, I establish that the relationship between us will be two-way, not top-down. One of my objectives in any class is to show students that their interests are valuable. To get my creative writing students in this frame of mind, we have “Glimmer Days” throughout the semester, in which students share a moment, image, idea or situation from the preceding week that has stood out to them. This increases trust between group members; is a low-stakes way of getting reticent students talking; and establishes the habit of active noticing. When the primary focus of a class is on academic writing, my approach is different. In my ENG 110 composition class, for example, we discuss critical arguments for the “worth” of art—aesthetic, political, intellectual, canonical. The capstone essay is a defense of a student’s most beloved artist. Given the range of lenses we’ve discussed, why might we consider their work “art?” Being able to close-read friendship bracelets, The Wu-Tang Klan, or Deadpool shows students that art exists in their daily lives. Their wealth of knowledge on the chosen subject leads to a more nuanced discussion of socio-historical contexts. In sum, writing their passions lets students learn better, and leaves them empowered. 

Show, Don’t Tell. I use active learning in the classroom, including field-work, transcribing overheard conversations, pair performance, games, collaborative stories, storyboarding, and cognitive mapping. One of my favorite exercises to use is debate. During my The Great Books Course, students studied The Odyssey. I assigned roles to each student (prosecution, defense, judge, witnesses) for a criminal case trying Telemachus for his murder of the maids. Quite apart from this being one of the most passionate teaching moments of my life, with students wanting to stay long after the period had ended, the exercise showed students how cultural values of a text may be received differently over time. 

Everything Is a Story. In class, I make content memorable through narrative. I often start class with an open-ended question; like a good introduction, this hooks the class and primes them to look out for certain information. As a group, we may move through a provisional answer to the posed question, and then problematize it through Socratic questioning. We might split into four groups and re-define the question, then have each group report back. We may do a collective brainstorm on as-yet-unconsidered assumptions within the question and concretize our understanding with a “minute paper” that elaborates upon what we’ve discussed. Finally, we’ll return to the question that opened the class. Such structuring does more than let students know they need to think critically; it shows them how to. It shows them that the conclusions to which we come, not unlike a final story draft, are often only arrived at through a process of interrogation. Even then, the answers we reach are only provisional. 

Revision Makes the Story. Revision is one of the hardest things to teach. I open the subject of revision with George Saunders’s video, “On Story,” in which he explains revision as a process of “active love” whereby we urge a work to higher, more complex, ground. To supplement this, workshops and critiques are a standard part of my classes. After a first assignment has been handed in, I hold an ongoing in-class “reading series” in which I have students read excerpts of their changed versions aloud. This normalizes the process of revision and, because I always choose students who have made substantial structural changes, lets students know that they should be making large-scale changes to their drafts.  Revision is also built into my teaching. Reflecting after each lesson; watching footage of myself teaching; harvesting ideas from literature, conferences, and peers; re-working assignments; and revising syllabi lends me the wisdom of multiple iterations of myself. Direct feedback is also invaluable. For example, this semester, in my Introduction to Creative Writing Class, students were asked to do a mid-semester course evaluation. When students said that they sometimes didn’t know what a given lesson was going to be about or what skills they were meant to have learned, I more directly identified objectives before and after classes, instituted “muddiest” point index cards for gauging confusion, and made more comprehensive rubrics. Through metacognitively discussing my teaching practice with students, I increased transparency, and showed them that learning is a never-ending process for me, too. My teaching has changed since I tutored my brother, but my focus on narrative remains. A good lesson, like a good story, wins the student over emotionally, shows before telling, offers provisional closure, and stresses the importance of revision. In my classes, teacher and student are co-authors. We strike out in a direction, but end in no predetermined place. For me, that is the joy. That is what keeps me reading.