Blog Post #11: Zine

Let me just first start out by saying that, there wasn't a single hero chosen by me because it wasn't just a single person making an impact. The community I live in has many people who are struggling mentally, physically, or whatever else may come with a pandemic like Covid19. I think most of us could feel that people in general were down in the dumps. Then SIRE and many of our local businesses posted all over social media that this was happening. It was just one of those "we can do this all together" moments. It made my heart happy to know people in my community weren't going to let our small businesses struggle and that we can all come together when we need to. It doesn't matter what school you go to, what part of town you live in.. We are all Council Bluffs strong. I chose to make my zine thanking our local ethanol plant for recently making the decision to halt production momentarily and making "SIREtizer" a hand sanitizer for people in our community. This decision was made at a time where hand sanitizers, disinfectants, cleaners, etc. were all out in majority if not all of our stores. Let me tell ya, this stuff is strong like 80% alcohol antiseptic strong. There was a couple different ways to obtain your own one quart bottle. One that I found really amazing was purchasing a meal from many of the local restaurants you got a bottle for $10, all profit went straight to the local businesses because SIRE donated them to the businesses to sell. I don't even think the businesses made it a week before they were out of bottles. Our community came together during a tough time with hand sanitizer and it makes me proud to come from one that continues to support local.
I'm just going to post a small video going through my zine, I feel like I've touched on most of the important aspects that I'd like to highlight.

I can totally see myself implementing zines into my curriculum in the future. I really love to collage. Zines are a good way to reach your students that are drawers and the ones that aren't. I could even see zines becoming a collaborative project with partners because it's easy to make copies. I think that zines are an outlet to talk about many different topics. I could see myself implementing it in a lot of different ways. Zines are also something you can make a lot of so they could even end up being a whole class project. I think they're also something that could be done by a majority of ages of students, but probably middle school and high school would be where I would prefer to implement them. Zines have a way of exploring ideas and raising awareness on subjects that can sometimes be hard to talk about in a creative and understanding way.