Talent in the classroom

The Ooligan Press at Portland State will be celebrating the release of the second edition of Classroom Publishing: A Practical Guide for Teachers. The first edition was released in 1992 and was co-authored by Laurie King and Dennis Stovall. Stovall later founded the Ooligan Press in 2001.

Now, graduate students and members of the Ooligan Press are proud to present a revised resource for teachers to utilize in their own lesson plans. Ideas from elementary school zines to blogs done by high schoolers are included and many have been shown to be beneficial for teachers and students.

“It’s good for any educator,” said project manager Marianna Wiles. “It’s not a how-to guide in the sense that it has lesson plans, it’s more like an idea book that’s easily adaptable. It presents ideas of integrating publishing in the classroom.”

For the format of the book, graduate students and Ooligan Press members interviewed over 100 teachers in states all over the country. In the end result, 26 states represent 60 featured educators, according to Wiles.

“A couple of pages [were dedicated] on each educator talking about the projects they did,” Wiles said. “And that kind of material came for a template for showing what works, but also presented the overarching ideas.”

The idea of getting classroom work published isn’t just exciting for the teachers, either—it’s a great motivational tool for the students.

“What we’ve heard over and over again is that it’s really exciting for the kids,” Wiles said. “As soon as they realize they have an audience, whether it’s their parents, kids in their school, people on the Internet, just the idea that more than their teacher [will be] reading it.”

The book contains most of the same underlying concepts and ideas of the first installment, but with upgrades that make the content more applicable today.

“The term ‘second edition’ isn’t quite right because the content has completely changed,” Wiles said. “Even the ability of making color photocopies have increased exponentially, just look at what was available then to what’s available today.”

The book isn’t just for teachers either. It can be useful for anyone who wants to get their work published. Inside, there’s a section devoted to breaking down the baffling process of getting published. In this section, the steps to getting a project out to an audience are clearly outlined for the reader.

“If you take a look at the book, the first section is devoted to taking that publishing process we use at Ooligan, and throughout the industry,” Wiles said. “[We show] those five steps and say: this is how we do them in the industry.”

In addition to the upgrades apparent in the content, technology and accessibility, the second edition is a part of Ooligan Press’s OpenBook series, a project that aims for sustainability in publishing and production of books.

In the first few pages of the book, you can find the audit of the choices made to achieve a sustainable product. For example, the staff chose a printer in Canada that was located fewer than 500 miles away from the distributor, saving on the amount of gas needed to transport materials.

“One of the newer challenges is letting the customers know why we made the decisions we made,” Wiles said. “You can tell the book is on card stock, it’s not on bright, white paper. It’s kind of a badge of honor [for us]. That’s why we made that choice—to show the readers.”

Along with the release of the book on the first of March, the blog will appear online. The blog will be a tool that teachers can use in addition to the book to share ideas, and successes.

“The idea isn’t new, it’s just that teachers aren’t really talking to each other and sharing those ideas” Wiles said.