The Importance of the School Magazine as an Extra-Curricular Activity in Facilitating Students’ Cross-Curricular Skills and Competences

Abstract

The paper discusses the school magazine as an important extracurricular activity. We first define the characteristics of school magazines, pointing to aims, content focus, types of texts and the organisation of editorial boards. The fact that school magazines present an important platform for young people to formulate their opinions, challenge societal norms and values, pursue their artistic aspirations, and acquire knowledge, skills and competences, as well as form group identity, is emphasised. The objective of the research was to identify how the theoretical underpinnings of the school magazine as a clash of genres are reflected in the selected corpus of 103 issues of the school magazine Izvir, which has been in circulation since 1967. Particular interest is focused on the content, the types of texts, the presence of the zeitgeist and the edition notice. The research is in the form of a case study, applying thematic network analysis. The results show that the researched corpus covers diverse content, relating mainly to curricular and extracurricular activities, embraced in informative and interpretative journalistic texts, entertaining features and a literary section. The extent of politically oriented content engaging with issues that mark the period 1979–1985 is exceptional. The edition notice shows a significant improvement from the first issues, which lacked much of the required data, to the present perfected issues. Lastly, the magazines mirror the zeitgeist, transitioning from socialist and communist ideology to democracy. All in all, school magazines are an important educational pillar, adding to the formation of young people’s minds, but also encouraging teachers to question their roles, didactic methods and approaches. They also play a role in the formation of the school’s recognition in the local community.