{"id":5379,"date":"2018-02-21T10:31:25","date_gmt":"2018-02-21T16:31:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/?p=5379"},"modified":"2018-02-21T10:48:57","modified_gmt":"2018-02-21T16:48:57","slug":"fanzines-the-roots-of-sf-and-the-dual-enrollment-classroom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/2018\/02\/21\/fanzines-the-roots-of-sf-and-the-dual-enrollment-classroom\/","title":{"rendered":"Fanzines, the Roots of SF, and the Dual Enrollment Classroom"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio proudly shares this guest blog post from Russell Aaronson<\/strong> of Coral Springs High School, Coral Springs, Florida, detailing his and his students use of the Hevelin Fanzine Collection in DIY History.<\/em><\/p>\n

*\u00a0 *\u00a0 *<\/p>\n

Clicking through The University of Iowa\u2019s DIY History Hevelin Fanzines archive<\/a> sent me back to everything that drew me to SF in the first place. Alternately measured and freewheeling, scientific and psychotronic, the Hevelin zines reminded me of what Science Fiction was like before Lucas and Spielberg legitimized the genre with blockbuster summer films and action figures hiding under the Christmas tree.<\/p>\n

Or, perhaps more accurately, the Hevelin Archives reminded me of the books I read in between<\/em> the blockbusters. After Vader froze Han and blew Luke\u2019s mind at the end of Empire<\/em>, I had to do something during the three-year wait for closure. I started with dusty, library-sale collections of Wells and Verne. For Halloween I wanted to be Dune<\/em>\u2019s Duncan Idaho, but settled for a more recognizable Captain America. My friends and I passed around Douglas Adams books until they disintegrated, and I spent far too much time trying to get the Babel Fish in the Hitchhikers\u2019 <\/em>text-adventure video game (or, more aptly, failing<\/em> to get the Babel Fish, just to read the precious, extra lines of text written by the author himself).<\/p>\n

Too many years later, in graduate school, I bumbled into a Speculative Fiction course delivered by Dr. Bob Collins. His course was great \u2013 but the impromptu discussions over heaping plates of curry and biryani (which he\u2019d never let us grad students pay for \u2013 he was equally generous with his time and his money) got me past my \u201cserious\u201d literature phase. Bob told me to read PKD\u2019s Ubik <\/em>and I was as stunned as I had been in the theater watching Empire<\/em> years before.<\/p>\n

Recently, the good folks at Coral Springs High School and Broward College offered me the chance to teach a Dual Enrollment elective, and I dove headlong into building a Speculative Fiction course for kids who needed a break from AP exams without losing the challenge of university-grade content. For this course, the Hevelin Fanzines seemed like a perfect fit \u2013 taking part in the University of Iowa\u2019s DIY History project would give students a taste of scholarly research while also rounding out their knowledge of the history of Speculative Fiction.<\/p>\n

But there was one particularly challenging issue \u2013 the nature of the Hevelin content itself. How do you set the table for teens to meaningfully respond to the wonderfully thoughtful and utterly bizarre content found in the zines? Fortunately, IDEAL<\/a> (Iowa Digital Learning and Engagement) had an excellent \u201cArchives Alive!\u201d lesson<\/a> as part of their DIY History project, and after a few nips and tucks to accommodate the nature of the Hevelin Fanzines, I unleashed the project on an unsuspecting class.<\/p>\n

The response was beyond my highest expectations. As a foundation, the students learned the importance of doing careful, thoughtful transcriptions with an end-product that would be part of a larger body of real-world research, and not just another disposable assignment to be completed tonight and forgotten tomorrow.<\/p>\n