by Esdian Boyadjian, teacher of Primary Education with postgraduate training in Literacy for Inclusion (CePA) and in Writing and Literacy from the Universidad Nacional de La Plata. She completed the University Training in Publishing of Children’s and Young People’s Literature Books at the School of Philosophy and Literature at the University of Buenos Aires and is currently studying Publishing there. She is a member of the Language team of the Teacher Training School of the Ministry of Education of Buenos Aires City. She develops independent publishing projects, makes fanzines and collaborates with the British magazine La Tundra Revista and with femiñetas, a transoceanic newspaper of feminism in cartoons. She wrote for children in the popular science magazine Intrépidas and is the author of the calendars Crónicas Meteorológicas, Un mapa del fin del mundo (with Maximiliano Amici) and Año del Dragón de Madera, published by Ediciones Hora Mágica. She published her first children’s comic, Filomena y Clotilde, with the illustrator Lucía Ruiz and the publishing house Muchas Nueces. | esdian@gmail.com
CLCP team introductory note: In contexts of precarity, there isn’t always a library or a cultural space for gathering readers; however, there is usually a school. This blog provides an example of how dissident reading proposals from teachers can re-signify what is read, written and published within challenging contexts.
When does a text cease to be just a school production and become a cultural object with real opportunities to begin to circulate?
Along these lines, I will try to recover three experiences of school publishing initiatives developed in different educational contexts over the last ten years, with the aim of reflecting on publishing as a pedagogical practice and as a central instance in the construction of meaning in the classrooms where reading and writing are taught. In all cases, publishing made possible the resignification of the practices of reading and writing and broadened the horizon of what is possible within the school, affirming that good books can also come out of school.
1. Planeta Cortázar: Other stories of Cronopios y de Famas.
You were always my mirror. I mean that to see me, I had to look at you
Julio Cortázar
My first editing experience was exactly ten years ago. In 2016, I was a 6th-grade language teacher in an elementary school located in the neighbourhood of Villa del Parque, a few blocks from where Julio Cortázar, the renowned Argentinian author, had lived.
The book that marked one of the work sequences was Historias de cronopios y de famas. The choice of this text responded to the desire to bring the group closer to a literature that would challenge traditional narrative forms and allow us to enter the author’s universe. From the shared reading, it was possible to discuss the characters, the absurd situations, and the breaking of expectations. Thanks to invaluable audiovisual material, we shared some classes listening to Cortázar through the screen, an act which enhanced the bond we were building.
The final proposal was to write in the author’s style. This initiative was not proposed as an imitation but as an appropriation of procedures that had been progressively developed through previous readings and writings: the invention of characters, the exploration of the everyday, the personification of famas and cronopios, and games with logic and language. The process included planning, individual writing, collective re-readings, and successive revisions, aimed at reaching a final version with its own aesthetics, in dialogue with the sections of the original book.
The decision to edit and publish these texts arose as a natural consequence of the work done. Thinking about the book implied discussing which texts would make up the publication, in what order they would appear, what the title should be, what the design would be like, and what the materiality of the final object would be. These decisions transformed the link with texts: they ceased to be school productions and became writings intended for real readers.
Ten years later, this experience was foundational to my teaching career: understanding that school can be a legitimate space for quality literary production.
2. Poetic spells at school: The assembly of fanzines as a pact between links in the publishing world.
Over the years, my link with the edition of school publications was transformed.
In 2023, in my role as an advisor in the area of Language, I accompanied the work of the 2nd grade at School No. 22 D.E. 19 Juana Azurduy, located in the south of the City of Buenos Aires. In this context, the axis of work of the first part of the year was the reading and writing of versified texts, with special emphasis on poetry.
The sustained encounters with poetic texts enabled a singular aesthetic experience. From this approach, we built reading itineraries that put diverse voices in dialogue and enabled instances of rewriting, memorization and literary conversation.
In the morning shift, together with the teacher Eugenio Ariza and the grade teacher Cecilia Insaurralde, we elaborated a poetic journey with a common axis: the moon. Based on a selection of poems by Alfonsina Storni, Federico García Lorca, Antonio Machado, and other authors, the classroom was transformed into a space for sensitive exploration: texts were circulated on the walls, well-known fragments were rewritten, and the school calendar incorporated observing the sky as part of the literary work. Observing the full moon had been a source of inspiration for several of the authors we were reading. The poem chosen for the final publication was Canción para la luna by Federico García Lorca, and the writing proposal consisted of elaborating a prologue that invited its reading.
During the afternoon shift, teachers Sol Boccardo and Mara Matto worked with the limerick genre from the book Zoo Loco by María Elena Walsh. The reading and writing journey allowed the group to produce their own text: a limerick starring a jaguar, an animal that does not appear in Walsh’s book. In both cases, the writings were planned, textualized and reviewed among students and teachers, considering decisions typical of a real editorial process.
The closing proposal of both projects was the edition of fanzines. Writing to publish meant, for children, taking on other writing tasks: writing knowing there would be real readers. For those of us who were in charge of the edition, it meant finding the most economical and possible way to do it so that each child would have their copy without losing quality.
The illustrators Isol Misenta and Mariana Ruiz Johnson joined us in this adventure.
Isol illustrated the fanzine of the morning class, taking up the lunar theme in dialogue with the poem by García Lorca, while Mariana Ruiz Johnson made the illustration of the limerick of the jaguar for the afternoon class. The fanzines were titled Escucha y Merienda de yaguareté.
The printing was done in a risograph, which allowed a sufficient print run for each student to have a copy and for some to be available in the school library. The presentation of the fanzines at the school was experienced as an encounter that condensed a collective process.
Subsequently, the cooperative publishing house “Muchas Nueces” proposed a new printing, which allowed us to present and distribute the fanzines at the Buenos Aires Publishers’ Fair. In this way, the productions conceived in the classroom crossed the school’s walls and circulated in another public space for reading, editing, and meeting.
3. An Alice in Wonderland ABC
In 2024, I served as an advisor in the Language Practices area at School No. 3 D.E. 7 First Board. There, I began to work with Carla Andrea Lopez. In the second part of the year, together with the teacher, we developed a new editorial proposal: the edition of An Alphabet of Alice in Wonderland.
The choice of Lewis Carroll’s novel was in charge of the teacher and responded to the purpose of expanding the reading trajectory through the reading of a novel of greater length and complexity. The alternating reading moments between the teacher and the students were complemented by spaces for literary conversation, in which the reconstruction of the plot, the location of relevant information, the elaboration of inferences and the identification of the author’s marks were promoted. The reading itinerary was also enriched by the incorporation of other versions of the work, including Alice’s Underground Adventures, with the original illustrations by Lewis Carroll, which enabled comparisons and new conversations around the story.
In this context of sustained reading, the publishing project began to take shape: building a literary alphabet to recover significant words and fragments from the novel. The first editorial decision was to create a bank of words typical of the Alice universe. Completing the alphabet involved discussing selection criteria, resolving letter absences and, in some cases, opting for words that included the letter sought within, decisions that were the subject of debate between the teacher and the group.
Once the list was defined, the children selected fragments of the text for each letter, transcribed them and recorded the corresponding reference. This instance demanded multiple re-readings, underlining, and discussions about the relevance of each passage to history. In this way, textual selection became a complex and reflective reading practice, closely linked to the book’s construction.
The work on the illustrations was carried out in parallel with the textual selection. Collectively, it was agreed that these would accompany the chosen fragments with the aim of sustaining a visual unity. Based on these agreements, Maximiliano Amici sent the cover illustration, and together with the designer Carolina Declerk, we selected a colour palette and decided on the articulation among the text, chosen typographies, and the image. These decisions allowed the children to be introduced to discussions about editorial design and the need to think of the book as an integral project, in which the different languages dialogue with each other so that the book emerges as a beautiful object.
In addition to the text prepared collectively in the classroom, the back cover included brief reviews written by different actors in the educational and editorial fields. The incorporation of these voices sought to offer the teacher and children the experience of seeing their work read, commented on and valued by readers outside the school environment.
Thinking about publication also implied making decisions about the materiality of the book: format, dimensions, type of paper, and binding. The editorial process was organized emulating the stages of the book world – pre-press, press and post-press – and each of them was shared with the group. These instances made visible the times, the comings and goings and the revisions necessary for a work to become an object destined for reading and circulation.
In the final stretch of the production, the style and correction work was incorporated by Sol Bulacio Martínez, from the National University of Córdoba, who accompanied the process by attending to the decisions made in the classroom.
In the first encounter with the book already printed, one of the children said: “In the end, it is difficult to be an editor, because you have to take care that the book is not so expensive, but that it is beautiful.” This sentence, formulated from the amazement of the first contact with the finished work, condenses one of the most significant learnings of the project and accounts for the complexity of the decisions involved in editing for real readers.
Echoes of creation: the paths and forms which publications take
Editing at school is not an obligation or a goal to be achieved in all projects. Many texts need to remain in the privacy of the classroom, circulate among peers, exhaust themselves in everyday conversation, or remain in notebooks or folders. However, when the desire to publish appears, when a text asks to be published, editing becomes an interesting possibility: it allows us to extend the work of reading and writing for another purpose, to open new conversations and to enable other ways of encountering literature. Some of the publishing experiences I accompanied continue to expand, making their way into different spaces and merging the school with the publishing world.
The proposals for teaching reading and writing are enriched when, at some point in the school journey, the experience of publishing appears and when that experience transforms those who accompany the teaching. As Julieta Roffo wrote and Martín Felipe Castagnet rewrote:
Two things that change your life:
—a good grandmother
—a good editor
Photo credits
Gonda, Roxana (2023). Poetic fanzines [Photograph of fanzines published by the publishing house Muchas Nueces for the 12th Publishers’ Fair].