My group's final zine page, click to see the process.
My social advocate (Deborah Wesner), click to see my interview with her.
My production group, click to see how we contributed to the production of the CV Zine Fest.
Chula Vista Zine Fest 2018 Final Products
Historically in the education department America has not met the social needs of the students. The social needs are relatedness, fairness, autonomy, certainty and status. The education system isn’t meeting the needs of relatedness and fairness, because education in the US is not equitable, meaning that not all students receive the same quality of learning. My topic that I’m advocating for, Multicultural Education meets the social needs that are not currently being met in America. Multicultural education meets the needs of students in America because it teaches students about acceptance and diversity, creates equitable educational opportunities and drives student growth and achievement. When the basic or social needs of people are not met the U.S. government responds in different ways, for example with the social injustices in the education system the U.S. has tried to implement new standards. These standards are called The Common Core standards, they make learning more equitable for English language learners and students with disabilities. Common Core standards are helping to make education more equitable but there’s still a lot more to be done. As for the inequalities in the quality of education for minorities, the U.S. government has done nothing to change those. Examining my social topic hasn’t really changed my perspective on social advocacy. I was able to research a topic that I was interested in depth, but I don’t really feel like my zine has made a difference. Although many people believe in Multicultural Education I still don’t know how I can cause the education system to change. I’ve learned that research can actually help you understand things a lot more, knowing more can help you think of realistic solutions for the problem. I have gained so much knowledge about my topic throughout this project and I’m going to carry this knowledge with me into my personal life by looking into finding a career where I can cause change in the education system. In my final zine cover the message that my group was trying to get across was how our current education system is broken. We used the symbolism of items you would normally associate with school like the pencil, the book and the apple, and we tried to put more of a dark twist to it by making the apple rotten and the pencil broken. The reason we did the alphabet at the top and the word, “KNOWLEDGE...” written out was because we wanted to show that the whole point of school was to essentially gain knowledge and we wanted to show that there was other ways to do that then the broken system we have now. I think our zine shows how we are advocates for this topic because each of our personal pages relate really well to what we’re talking about as well as match together for the entire theme of our zine. I chose my topic because I really wanted to choose something that I was passionate about and that I had a personal connection to, because I knew I would have to talk about it for a long time. I was born in Ohio, so I was the darkest kid in my area and I would always wonder why I looked different and why I was treated slightly differently by my teachers, I would never really be able to see myself in what I was learning, until I moved to HTHCV where I was exposed to so much more, just by something as simple as not having textbooks. So I chose this topic because I feel that we do a good amount of it at High Tech and I think it should be implemented everywhere to push students to see things from different perspectives and to think more critically. Literature research was probably the most helpful in gaining perspective on my topic, when I did my student social topic proposal the idea of Multicultural Education was a little more abstract to me, but when I started researching I saw that there were so many believers in this type of education and a lot of resources and studies I could look at. I learned that there isn’t truly just one definition for Multicultural Education and that it can be so much more than just getting rid of textbooks, it can affect students self confidence and their comfortability around others that are different. Two quotes that really stuck out to me during my research that I included in my paper are: 1)“Multicultural Education is a progressive approach for transforming education based on educational equality and social justice. The components required in educating a multicultural education are content integrations, prejudice reduction, empowering school culture and social culture” (Lynch). And 2) “By demystifying the cultural complexity of people classified as White, and the hierarchy of groups created by racism, multicultural education will help White students understand their own history, as well as the fact that the current social discourses against diverse racial/ethnic gaps are very similar to the discriminatory discourses and practices that their ancestors experienced in the past. This knowledge should help students become conscious of the social and economic hardships non-white members of the student’s community face today, and discriminative social structures that suppress full participation of racially/ethnic different others in society” (Lehman). My perspective on the topic has changed throughout my research quite a bit because at first my target for my research paper was to convince people that Multicultural Education can help students of color but then when I came across the article that the second quote was from I also realized that this type of education can impact white students in a positive way as well. So really Multicultural Education is relevant to every student regardless of race or socioeconomic background. I’m most proud of everything I contributed to the zine fest, all of the sweat and tears. I’m proud that I actually like all of the things I produced and that I completed them on time. I’d say the one thing that sticks out most to me is that I can completely stand behind everything I created, especially the zine and tell you exactly what the symbolism behind everything that we created was. Now that I know how challenging it is to produce a community event I will take that into consideration when complaining about exhibition, because this is the first time I’ve actually contributed to exhibition, most of the time you just complete your products and show up, but being in the middle of the planning truly showed me just how hard it is for teachers to produce exhibitions all on their own.