Supporting Teachers' Understandings of Fan Fiction as Responsive Writing Pedagogy

• In Event: Understanding, Responding to, and Valuing Student Writers Through Reflective Tools and Practices

Abstract

In typical classrooms and schools, students’ literature responses are often highly structured and mechanical. They often take the form of short answer questions or summaries, and they focus on correct grammar and factual details rather than students’ playful readings (Wilhelm & Smith, 2013) or critical questions (Beers & Probst, 2017), much less students’ own interpretations or culturally valued responses (Johnson & Sullivan, 2020; Kelly, 2020). In short, such writing is evaluative rather than conversational, and it leads students to equate reading and writing with meeting teacher expectations. While some teachers have extended literature response practices to creative genres like character letters, such works are framed as assignments — which are evaluated and thus interpreted by students as class work (Newkirk, 2021) — or extra credit. They are rarely framed as “restorying” (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016), “philosophical inquiry” (Pennell, 2014), or response opportunities for students to think, collaborate, and transact critically around their reading and writing (Beers & Probst, 2017; Rosenblatt, 1978).
Participation in digital spaces around book and media fandoms does offer students such opportunities. These spaces organize learning very differently, however. While much digital literacies research promotes frameworks for collaborative, interest-driven response and learning (e.g. Cope & Kalantzis, 2013; Knobel & Lankshear, 2014), the typical activities (e.g., teacher lectures) and administrative structures (e.g.,. report cards, tests) of most schools are designed around individual evaluations. Such differences create tensions between existing digital literacies research and classroom implementation (Authors, 2017, Authors, 2018; Jones & Storm, 2021). This analysis centers teachers’ perspectives of these tensions and examines possibilities for fan-based literacies as powerful writing instruction.
Here, we examine data from a professional learning (PL) opportunity that we designed during which in-service teachers co-constructed knowledge about fanfiction and fan-based literacies. During the PL, participants completed readings from academic and fan-based perspectives, examined fanfiction sites and responsive practices, wrote and responded to fanfiction stories, and constructed classroom units that leverage these concepts and experiences. The research explores four educators’ thoughts and experiences as they brought what they learned into their ELA classrooms the following school year. Using open coding and thematic analysis of class documents, participant interviews, and participant surveys (Charmaz, 2006), with key tenets of our theoretical framework serving as sensitizing concepts (Blumer, 1954), we interrogate the potential disciplinary connections between online fandoms and ELA classrooms.
Creating fanfiction approaches in classrooms can be challenging for teachers, but doing so creates possibilities for playful and genuine student feedback, response, and dialogue. Our teacher participants, who enacted various fanfiction-inspired practices during the 2019-2020 pandemic school year, reported that engaging fanfiction concepts allowed their students to identify as fans and writers, to extend their writings beyond the classroom into such venues as school literary magazines, and to respond to class reading in creative and original ways. Teachers’ implementations illustrate fan-based literacies’ roles in cultivating creative and authentic literature response, scaffolding students’ writing about their own real questions, and engaging students in more joyful ELA work.

Authors

• Alecia Marie Magnifico, University of New Hampshire
  Presenting Author

• Jayne C. Lammers, Edmentum / University of Pennsylvania
  Presenting Author