Writing activity demonstration using fanfiction

My philosophy for facilitating writing is to activate previous knowledge students already have. By use of previous knowledge and scaffolding, self-correction and peer-review, students and language learners evolve into better, more assured writers.

The writing activity proposed is nurtured by the research done by Rebecca Black (2005), The New London Group (1996) and Kelly Chandler-Olcott and Donna Mahar, among others. These talented people have worked at length to provide research on the way students learn inside and out of today’s classrooms. They address the rise of intertextuality and multimodality that many of our students are so used to, and what the concepts of ‘lifeworlds’ and ‘personal portfolios’ might represent for each individual person.

The learning outcome of this activity is to show that writing doesn’t necessarily have to function inside an academic situation, and may be pleasurable to the writer and reader alike. Students will evaluate each other through a peer-reviewing activity where they exchange papers, and talk about the writing that has taken place.

Writing prompt – Select a partner. Think about a favorite film or story, recent or old, that others in your classroom might know about. Remember the characters and situations. Write a short composition describing an alternate ending, or the unexplored background of a character that wasn’t as fully detailed as the others. After you’re done, exchange papers with your partner and read the composition, analyzing what was written. Is it well-written? Does it fit with the original story? Is it realistic, or fantastic? Does it matter?

Comments:

Works Cited

Black, Rebecca W. “Access and Affiliation: The Literacy and Composition Practices of English-Language Learners in an Online Fanfiction Community.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 49.2 (2005): 118-128.

_____.  “Online Fanfiction: What Technology and Popular Culture Can Teach Us About Writing and Literacy Instruction”.  New Horizons For Learning website. Mar 2005. Active URL  HYPERLINK “http://www.newhorizons.org/strategies/literacy/black.htm” http://www.newhorizons.org/strategies/literacy/black.htm

Chandler-Olcott, Kelly, & Donna Mahar. “Adolescents’ Anime-Inspired “Fanfictions”: An Exploration of Multiliteracies.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 46.7 (2003): 556-566.

Fukunaga, Natsuki. “”Those Anime Students”: Foreign Language Literacy Development Through Japanese Popular Culture.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 50.3 (2006): 206-222.

Gee, James Paul. “Good Video Games and Good Learning.” 2005. Academic Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Lab. 6 October 2008 <www.academiccolab.org/resources/documents/Good_Learning.pdf>.

Gonzalez, Gustavo.  “Talented Young Writer Catapulted by Fanfic on Harry Potter”.  Inter Press Service News Agency.  15 Jan 2005. Retrieved 13 Nov 2008. Active URL  HYPERLINK “http://ipsnews.net/africa/interna.asp?idnews=26980″ http://ipsnews.net/africa/interna.asp?idnews=26980

Teeling, Erin. “Harry Potter, Meet Your Biggest (And Most Famous) Fan”.  The Bivings Report blog.  12 Jan 2007.  Retrieved 13 Nov 2008. Active URL  HYPERLINK “http://www.bivingsreport.com/2007/harry-potter-meet-your-biggest-and-most-famous-fan/” http://www.bivingsreport.com/2007/harry-potter-meet-your-biggest-and-most-famous-fan/

The New London Group. “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures.” Harvard Educational Review 66.1 (1996): 1-30.

 Vosloo, Steve.  “Fan Fiction: Improving Youth Literacy”. Thought Leader blog. 28 Jan 2008. Retrieved 13 Nov 2008. Active URL http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/stevevosloo/2008/01/22/fan-fiction-improving-youth-literacy/

http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/public/sleep/starslp/missionz/comic.swf

http://www.fanfiction.net

http://www.fanfiction.org

Epilogue

            I hope you enjoyed Dani’s tale as much as I enjoyed writing it!

I was always an imaginative child, introverted as I grew up finding more companionship in books, cartoons and games than in other people. Other children alienated me for being a bookworm, and I in turn shunned them by turning to my beloved characters, reading and re-reading my favorite stories and imagining alternate lives for them. My mother would adopt Mowgli, and I would try to teach him how to be a normal boy and go to school, and he would teach me to talk to the bears, lions and tigers I saw at the zoo. I’d wish I could talk to the Princess Peach from the Mario World videogame and talk her out of always being by her stupid self, instead of having a bodyguard to keep her from being kidnapped by the evil dragon, time and time again. I wished I could be an honorary Thundercat.

So, when I started writing about other stories, games and shows as warm-up exercises to my academic writing, as something to do when I was bored, I grew to think this was childish, that it was foolish of me to spend so much time and energy writing something no one would ever see. A year ago, you wouldn’t have ever heard me admit to it. I still remember the first fanfiction I ever wrote; a dragon story inspired by the movie ‘DragonHeart’. As much pleasure as I drew from writing it, bringing myself to show it to anyone was another task entirely, and I was embarrassed and overtly critical of my work. I struggled to read even more, learning rhetoric, learning synonyms for the simpler words I used, and I kept writing, until I felt it was good enough to show off, and I began publishing in fanfiction.net. Several people were kind enough to comment, offering suggestions and uttering words of praise I treasured. But it didn’t last much, as university pressure put a cramp on the free time I had.

I still write, but more in my original manner: as means of limbering my ‘writing muscles’, as it were, stretching my capabilities to write lengthy pieces. I still publish, on occasion, mostly on the RPG video game archive under the Final Fantasy 7 game category, and frequently message those who reviewed my work before. Nothing as dramatic or impressive as Francisca Soler, of course.

Although I already knew much about fanfiction, and the way it is intimately related to other such pop culture elements like videogames and anime, what did surprise me was that other people, people with much higher levels of education than myself, also defended it as a valid means of instruction. The intrinsic values of self-correction, peer-editing, and writing strategies learned and employed by people who might not be expertly-trained (or even completely fluent in English!) are explored by such people as Rebecca Black, James Paul Gee, and all the talented people in The New London Group. I learned the proper names, as it were, of all the resources fanfiction writers use, all the strategies we use in creating worlds of fiction based on original works, all of it things I did, or used, without knowing that there are people out there labeling it, defining it, and researching it for use in today’s classrooms.

Therefore, I did what I know best: I wrote an original story, using real-life events and pre-existing stories to flesh out the story of Dani, a character who, like all the other characters in the story, represents different facets of my perception of myself as a writer. I truly hope you enjoyed the news articles, dialogues, and comic strip I used, and I hope you as a reader (and potential fanfiction writer!) learned that it is never childish or simple to write up a paragraph imagining what your favorite character did ten years after the original story ended, or what would their life be like if they existed in our world, or if you yourself were the child, sibling or even spouse of a character in a beloved story.

Chapter 5

It took two days before Dani saw, with trepidation, a blue, hyperlinked number beside the title of her story when she checked. “My first review!!” she thought exultantly, doubt sinking in as she sighed and thought, “Let’s hope it’s a good one . . .” She moved the mouse cursor over the glowing number, and clicked on it.

ParisSky72 has written: WOW!!!! This is so cool! I really like the angle your taking. English is not my first lang, so be prepared to have really awful reviews (not because your any bad, but becasue I cant write english very well!) I look forward to reading another chapter – you’re resolving the cliffhanger ending was really good. One thing – I got confused when people were talking. It wasn;t clear who said what when everyone was at the cave.

Anyway, see you later, and welcome to the page! Bye!

It was much better, more meaningful, somehow, to have someone reply, even if the reply was slightly nonsensical and it made her laugh more than feel instructed. Still, it was a more positive thing than the feedback she was used to. After all, all the writing she did was submitted only to the teacher, who took several days to return her papers, and the corrections were sometimes bland. Observations as “Use of passive voice” and “Subject/Object disagreement” were usually all she got as manner of feedback. Not that she blamed the teacher, of course, as Dani understood that it couldn’t be easy to read and reply to so many papers.

Still, she felt she was part of a community of people that shared values similar to hers, and Dani grinned as she already imagined what the next chapter in her story would be, and if more people would read the story, think it was any good, let her know how she could improve.

After all, if the story was her own, the sky’s the limit, right?

*The End!*

Please Read and Review!!!!

Chapter 4

The rest of the day passed in a blur, as Dani handed in homework, completed some tasks. Ryan had athletic practice that afternoon, and Dani walked home by herself, thinking she’d really look into the fanfiction website. Suddenly, she grinned and slung her backpack around rummaging for her phone. “I’ll talk to Aunt Marisa about it!” she thought, knowing that her aunt was a very creative, free-thinking person who always backed her up. Along with her brother, Marisa was one of Dani’s most treasured people, and she was already smiling as Marisa answered, “Helloooo, Dani-girl! Tell me what’s on your pretty little mind.”

Dani told her everything, about her frustrations with the Goddard saga, the suggestion her brother had made, the information she’d read, the new friends she’d discovered that day, and it was with no surprise that Dani received the following advice from Marisa, “Write something then! You’ll have a pseudonym, a personal space to write in, and an audience of thousands who’ll know exactly what you’re talking about. Hop to, little miss, but don’t forget to do your homework! Tell your mom ‘Hi’ for me, OK?”

Later that afternoon, Dani opened her computer, turned it on.  The delicious smells of the dinner she’d helped her mother get started wafted to the living room where she sat. Dani decided to start out tentatively: She’d just enter the website as an observer, not as an actual writer. She  was surprised to find an organized, easy to navigate web page where advice was offered, everything categorized in individual sections. Dani clicked on the tab labeled Books, intending to verify for herself just how many Harry Potter fanfics there were, and what other books were represented in the website.

The results page made her gape at the screen, thinking, “Oh, wow, I really HAVE been out of it! This is insane!”

http://www.fanfiction.net/book/

“So many!?” Dani’s mind struggled to comprehend, and clicked ‘Back’, intending to check the tab labeled Games. She squeaked at the result:

http://www.fanfiction.net/game/

Chapter Three

Dani sat at her computer in the Honors English classroom, smiling at Ryan as he arched his eyebrows happily, “She emerges from the clutches of the freaky ones!” Dani replied, “That would make you a freak too. Nick’s a gamer.”Ryan grinned, “I take Phys Ed with him. He’s a cool guy, for hanging out with the demented girls.” Dani grinned, opening the internet browser. She still had a few minutes till Professor Brown began class. She typed in the name Rachel had teased Melanie with, ‘Francisca Solar’, opened the first news article that showed up, and stared in shock at the computer screen as she began to read.

Dani clicked on the following article, one that mentioned Solar’s success as possible inspiration for a writing competition. She read,

Dani skimmed over a few more articles before her attention was ripped from the computer screen, as the professor cleared his throat and began class. However, Dani found it hard to concentrate with the goings-on in the story the teacher was talking about, thinking instead of the articles she’d just read. “Fanfiction isn’t just for kids! A COLLEGE student just made it big, just by writing something she enjoyed doing,” she thought, deeply impressed, remembering another quote of Soler’s, “I wrote it because I like writing and I find it relaxing. I didn’t have any ambition or ideas for the future. The story just began to take off and word started to get around that it was a good story, and it began to grow. It was completely accidental, I would have never thought, never planned that it could have taken on such dimensions.”

She now understood what the ultimate goal was for Melanie, or ‘Lola’, for that matter. And the fact that she’d found people who thought fanfictions were perfectly acceptable and should be rewarded made her decide to check some fanfiction websites, see what they offered.

Yet again, her English teacher snapped her attention away from her current thoughts, as he told his students, “Alright, class. Take a few minutes and write an alternate ending to the story assigned for today.  What could the character have done that would be different?” Dani felt a brief moment of panic before remembering the story under discussion; Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart. She grinned, thinking, “This is fanfiction right here!” Indeed, she recognized now that every time a teacher asked the students to reimagine the ending to a novel, to write a letter to a character, it was fanfiction-type work. “Fanfictions are more familiar than people give them credit for,” she smiled to herself, beginning to write about the main character’s being fascinated rather than repelled with the old man’s eye, ending not with the murder of the old man and the main character’s descent into madness, but with the old man promising to tell the younger man the whole story behind his ocular disfigurement over tea and cake the following morning, to please get the light out of his eyes and go to bed.

Everyone was having fun with the activity, several people actually laughing out loud as they imagined hilarious scenarios. Ryan showed her his notebook; he’d inverted the roles. In Ryan’s reimagination of the story, the old man knew about the younger man’s plan and was pretending to sleep, only to pounce upon the younger man and beat him senseless with his ‘mad kung-fu skills’. Someone else had written that the younger man got away with the old man’s murder, managing to conceal his guilt, and became a psychopathic serial murderer. Yet another person wrote that the older man had managed to escape, but had been so scared his other eye had popped out and become disfigured as well.

Class ended, and everyone tramped outside, still laughing about the writing experiment. However, Dani caught sight of Rachel, who streaked past, looking angry and upset. Melanie told Dani, “Teacher gave back our last essay. Rach got a ‘C’.” Nick sighed, “Man, I feel bad for her. It just doesn’t seem like she’s trying, right?” Dani looked at him, “What do you mean? She doesn’t do her homework or something?” Nick made a shrugging gesture, “She does, but it’s only to say she did it. She doesn’t really make an effort.” Melanie smiled sadly, “Yeah, but if the teacher could only see the way Rachel writes . . . She’d give Rachel all straight ‘A’s.” Nick nodded, “Amen to that. She writes better than you sometimes. How many chapters does her Final Fantasy 7 fic have by now?” Melanie pointed out, “I think she’s at 25 chapters. More than 80,000 words, something like 31 reviews, and she gets a ‘C’ in English.”

Dani sighed, walking with them to where Rachel was stuffing items inside her locker. Melanie and Nick were talking animatedly to each other about the teacher’s similar reaction to Melanie’s ransom note, giving her until the next day to rewrite the creative writing assignment. “Hey,” Dani began, “You OK?” Rachel shut her locker door, giving Dani a tight-lipped smile, “Yeah, I’m fine.” Dani helpfully suggested,  “Hey, I’m a total scatterbrain. I zoned out so bad in English class, that when the teacher asked us to write an alternate ending to The Tell-Tale Heart, I wrote this really awful piece.”

Rachel looked at her, “What did you write?” Dani told her, and Rachel burst out laughing, “Tea and cake!? Tea and cake, are you serious?!” Dani defended herself; after all, she hadn’t gotten a ‘C’ in English class, had she? “Hey, there were worse things, Rachel,” she said sourly. Rachel still giggled and asked, “What could be worse than Poe characters having tea and cake?” Dani scoffed, “Ryan wrote that the old guy knew kung-fu and kicked the killer-wannabe’s butt.” Rachel chortled happily, finally looking happier than before.

Dani asked, “Any suggestion for us feeble-minded authors?” Rachel nodded, “OK, first of all, Poe’s character are more like illustrations. They’re short stories, so the characters aren’t usually well-developed. All you have is a snapshot. You could have written about the guy’s background, like why does he want to kill the old guy, just because he’s obsessed with the creepy eye, or because he has some repressed memory about someone with a face disfigurement? What about the old guy himself, how come he’s got that nasty eye?” Dani defended herself again, “Hey, my alternate ending was almost getting there!” Rachel nodded, “Yeah. I think you got potential for fanfic writing.”

The girls walked down the school corridor, Rachel again gleefully snorting something about making ‘tea and cake’ the official breakfast of her characters in the upcoming chapter of her fanfiction. Dani wondered how exactly someone whose mind worked as fast and cleverly as Rachel’s could still do average on English class. She asked her, and Rachel gave a careless shrug, “Eh, I like fic writing better than essay writing. I will write you 25 chapters of Final Fantasy 7, but don’t ask me to write a 500 word essay! It destroys my creativity!”

Chapter 2

It had dawned cold and damp:  a rainy day. Dani groaned; days like these were her favorite to spend with her aunt Marisa. She remembered the previous year, when her parents had gone to a funeral and left her with Marisa. There had been a rainy day, and Marisa hadn’t gone to work. Neither had she woken Dani and make her go to school. She said the day was meant for ‘hibernating’: sleeping in, eating and watching scary movies. When Anne had found out that Marisa and Dani were being truant from their responsibilities, Marisa’s defense was that everybody needed a ‘mental-health day’.

Anne claimed that Marisa needed a ‘mental-health month’ and hung up.

Dani went to school, smiling at the memory of her free-spirited aunt. As students milled about the school’s main hall, Dani sat with her friends: Eric, Denise, Dylan and Rachel. Eric was in a youth athletic league and was dating Denise, a lovely girl with a sweet disposition: she was Dani’s childhood friend. Dylan had been previously interested in Dani last semester, but had since given up, seeing she was with Ryan. He was happy to be her friend, as he was also good friends with Ryan. And finally, Rachel was the most creative of them all with her strange sense of fashion and love of everything Japanese. Sometimes she’d hang out with other students, but today she sat with them.

Ryan got there a few minutes later, and Dani greeted him. As the friends’ conversation circled around what they had done the previous afternoon and evening, Dani found herself retelling her frustrations about the new Lillian Goddard book. Denise groaned as well; she was an avid fan as well, and had gotten Eric to start reading them . “I know, it’s awful. But what can we do until the next one’s out?” Denise shrugged, and Dani thought of broaching the other interesting subject from the previous night.

She pointed at Ryan and teased him, “See, we could read some fanfics, but Ryan says fanfics are for geeks.” Rachel gave him a scathing look, “They are not! I love fanfics.”

Silence as everyone looked at Rachel, surprised. Nobody knew she liked fanfiction.

Rachel testily asked, “What?”

Everyone made a different murmur of excuse and looked at their companion or their breakfast. Ryan sniggered and teased back at Rachel, “Well, if it’s not for weirdos, why do you get all upset when we look at you?” Rachel pointed her fork at Ryan, “Because you guys looked at me like it was weird to like something so much you would think of alternate plotlines or try to add a new character to live in that original setting and write it out.” Ryan opened his mouth to say something to that, but the sight of Rachel’s fork pointing straight at him made him fall silent.

Dani smiled at her friend, “You seem to really know a lot about fanfics.” Rachel shrugged, “Eh. I like ‘em. Sometimes they’re actually more interesting or better-developed than the original. I mean, remember those movies with the princesses? The animated ones?” Dani nodded and Rachel grinned, “There are fics of those princesses getting out of their fairy kingdoms and actually living here in the real world. They have to get jobs, the little annoying woodland creatures that always tag along are gone, and the princesses are realizing that the dating scene is much harder without the Fairy Godmother. It’s ‘Sex and the City’ with nicer clothes!” Rachel cackled gleefully.

But the bell rang, and the group of friends dispersed.

At lunch break, however, Rachel had gone with her other friends. Dani gave Ryan a nasty look, “See!? You called her a geek and now she’s hanging out with them!” Ryan frowned, “I’m sorry!” She smiled, “It’s OK. You’re sweet. She’ll figure out you weren’t serious. Right?” Ryan shrugged, “I dunno. I mean, I don’t really understand the whole mechanism of writing from a character’s perspective. I mean, I hate writing! It’s always the same: compare and contrast this, argument or persuade about that, summarize and restate, use the rubric, use the guidelines. And then Rach says she writes a million words a day, and that, to me, is just freaky.”

Dani saw Rachel look at her, motioning her to join the other knot of friends. Ryan snickered, “Oh, no! Don’t join the dark side!” Dani poked him in the ribs and went to join Rachel’s group. It was a much smaller group; only Rachel, Nick and Melanie. Nick was a gamer like Ryan, but while Ryan liked games that were more about puzzle-solving and fighting, Nick’s favorite games were Role Playing Games, games in which the player designed a character and developed the character throughout the game. Melanie, on the other hand, was a person who was even stranger and more unique than Rachel. Melanie was a Goth, one of those girls that dressed in strange, black and somehow funereal clothes, wore bizarre makeup and was secretly both feared and admired by others.

Rachel did the introductions, and Nick smiled knowingly, “So you like the Chronicles of Illyria series, huh?” Dani grinned as Melanie widened her kohl-rimmed eyes and scoffed, “Who doesn’t?”  Nick grinned and nodded, “True, true. Everyone loves those. I’ve talked to jocks on the athletic team that read those.”

Melanie went on, however, and gave Dani a pointed look, “Rachel told us you’re interested in fanfics about Illyria?” Dani made a face at Rachel, and finally blushed and stammered, “It’s just a guilty pleasure I had as a kid, you know. Fanfictions. I grew out of it.” Rachel shrugged, “It’s OK, man, don’t worry about it. Who’s your favorite character?” Dani admitted, “The vampire. Thane. The chapter where they found him in a crypt and he’s all about the ‘It’s my fault my lover died, I need to atone for my sins. It’s better if you leave me with all the dangerous stuff; I am of the damned undead.’ I love the angst with that character.”

Melanie seemed more alert and she actually chirped, “Really?! He’s my favorite character too!” Rachel rolled her eyes, “Yeah, as if we couldn’t guess that the Goth-girl likes the vampire.” Melanie shrugged, her black-lipsticked mouth curling in a smile. Nick teased, “Hey, Mel, show her the note you made for Christmas.”

Everyone but Dani laughed at the private joke, and Melanie began rummaging through her bag. Dani looked at Rachel, asking, “What is it?” Nick was the one to explain, though, and he told her, “You know those other vampire books out there, the Stephenie Meyer ones that have more teens running for the bookstore since the ‘Harry Potter’ phenomenon ended last year?” Dani asked, “The ‘Twilight’ series?” Nick nodded, “Yeah. Well, Melanie is a desperate fangirl of one of the vampires there, and she kinda wrote a letter for Santa, as a joke.”

Melanie produced the note with a small fanfare, and tossed it before Dani.

 Dear Santa,

Please leave the sexy vampire Edward Cullen under my Christmas tree and Rudolph won’t get hurt.

Love,

Lola

Dani read in silence for a few seconds, and burst out laughing. “Oh, my God! You wrote Santa Claus a ransom letter for a vampire!?” Melanie snickered, “That’ll give my English teacher a fit. She told us to do some creative writing about something we liked. I like Edward Cullen, so there.” Dani shook her head slowly, and asked, “But why sign it ‘Lola’, though?” Melanie blushed a bit as she confessed, “It’s my pseudonym, down at fanfiction.net.” Before Dani could say anything, Nick blurted, “Melanie’s a kickass writer!” The girls all looked at Nick, who coughed into his hand weakly and acknowledged, “I really like how she writes. I like Stephenie Meyer’s books just fine, but there’s only four of them, and there’s so much she never wrote about. Stuff like the werewolves, how those first battles with the vampires were, stuff like how the vampires that are dating each other, how did that happen, you know?”

The girls nodded in agreement, and Nick grinned as he added, “And violence! Lola writes stuff with violence and . . . and sexiness! Those books are PG-13, but Lola writes it all nice and gory.” Melanie laughed, “I know! The vampires don’t even have fangs in the originals, and the author never actually shows anyone actually killing a human for their blood in there.”

Dani asked, “Are there a lot of fics at that fanfiction website? ‘cause when I used to read them, fanfics were kinda a personal thing, you know. People would print them out and show them to others, or host them at their own website.” Nick smiled, “Wow, you’ve really been out of touch. Fanfiction.net had hundreds of thousands of fanfictions. About everything you could ever imagine an alternate ending or a storyline before: TV shows, books, videogames, even.” Dani gaped, “But don’t the authors mind you using their stuff?”

Rachel shrugged and made a seesawing gesture with her hand, “It depends. Some authors claim copyright infringement, others say it’s awesome. Lola here would like to be the next Francisca Solar, huh, Lola?” Melanie blushed, tucking the note back inside her book bag and getting up, “Don’t be ridiculous. Look, gotta go hand this in. Bell’s gonna ring any minute now.” Melanie walked away, Rachel looking after her quizzically. Nick grinned, “You’re so mean, Rachel . . .” Rachel blinked innocently, “What’d I do? Anyway, let’s go follow Lola.” Nick, Rachel and Melanie all took regular English class together, whereas Dani was in Honors English with Eric, Dylan and Ryan. Every other class, she took with her best friend Denise.

Annotated Bibliography

The New London Group. “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures.” Harvard Educational Review 66.1 (1996): 1-30.

            This work is key in situating my research interests for this project. It explains many of the scenarios and ideas explored to greater degree below, themes such as hybridization, intertextuality, and multiliteracy. This is a collaborative work undertaken by many educators in several different institutions in English-speaking nations in the United States, Great Britain and Australia, who all gathered at a meeting to discuss literacy and what it meant to their area of expertise, as some were experts in linguistics, cultural diversity, literature and discourse.

Among the issues discussed, NLG mentions,

“We decided that the outcomes of our discussions could be encapsulated in one word – multiliteracies – a word we chose to describe two important arguments we might have with the emerging cultural, institutional, and global order: the multiplicity of communications channels and media, and the increasing saliency of cultural and linguistic diversity.”(4)

            The article goes on to examine various characteristics of all that is encompassed in the word ‘multiliteracy’: cultural relevance, the emergence of hypertexts, the creation of personal portfolios of shared experiences and affiliations, and the adaptation of information in audio and visual multimodalities. A term that emerges in this article that is alluded to but otherwise not quite developed by the other sources mentioned below is the concept of a ‘lifeworld’; that is, the private circle that encompasses the experiences and preferences of an individual. A community, then, is the intersection of several individuals who share some, but not all, of the values in his or her ‘lifeworld’.(11)

Another salient feature in this article is just how complete it is: it offers the “What?” “Why?” and “How?” of multimodality and multiliteracy. The authors all collaboratively explain what all the terms mean and the relation they hold to our pedagogical environment, developing paradigms as to why it is so important we educators know this in order to better relate to students and indeed, make class a more beneficial and pleasurable learning experience for all involved. Finally, the authors explore several ways in which an educator might incorporate the theory of multiliteracy in a classroom, resulting in a richer learning environment in which both students and teacher are all learners, each integrating new knowledge at the same time they provide feedback and new information.

Black, Rebecca W. “Access and Affiliation: The Literacy and Composition Practices of English-Language Learners in an Online Fanfiction Community.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 49.2 (2005): 118-128.

            This is a very unique introduction to what a fanfiction is. The author explains: “After reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels as a child, I had a difficult time leaving Middle Earth behind. There were so many plotlines and characters left unexplored that I began to write new stories using the characters and settings from Tolkien’s universe.” (118) This, then, is a fanfiction: pieces of writing done by non-professional authors parting from premises established by an actual, published story, movie, series, or other original work. For instance, a person might write about the adventures Spiderman would have in the space between the movies, answering questions like “Does Spiderman have nightmares about Doctor Octopus?” “What are Spiderman’s favorite foods?” or even something more mature as “How does he really feel about the love triangle between him, Mary Jane and the girl he was dating in the third film?”

            Like James Paul Gee does with videogames below, Black recognizes several key factors in fanfiction writing; the implicit consent the author gives once they submit their writings to a public forum, allowing readers to critique or applaud their stories, the feeling of agency and interactivity, and the sense of affiliation and community as authors post their work in websites destined for their peers, people who will understand the story and offer valuable feedback.

Another aspect of fanfiction writing Black examines is how “Fan authors often construct hybridized identities that are enacted through their texts. It is not uncommon for authors to insert themselves into their fictions as characters that possess a mixture of idealized and authentic personality traits.”(123) This supposes a degree of hybridization as writer either insert themselves into the story, or they might also insert facts about the world as they see it, raising issues never discussed in the original, often “safe” source. For instance, someone writing about, say, any of the Disney princesses mentioned above, might write about hypocrisy, infidelity, or actually envision the princess escaping the fantasy world and trying to live in our world, being faced with the difficulties of life as a single woman with bills to pay.

Chandler-Olcott, Kelly, & Donna Mahar. “Adolescents’ Anime-Inspired “Fanfictions”: An Exploration of Multiliteracies.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 46.7 (2003): 556-566.

            As I myself have expressed previously, there is much interest about what students use and read when not in class. Natsuki Fukunaga (cited below) mentions a very curious thing students sometimes do: write fanfictions. Fanfics suppose a bigger challenge than videogames (featured more in-depth below), since to understand a fanfic, the reader must be familiar with the names, settings, characters and situations in the original work in order to understand the fanfic. In the article, the researchers first encountered a fanfic as it was printed in the English classroom by a student. She was initially shocked and embarrassed at knowing the researchers had been reading this material, but quickly warmed to it and acknowledged and explained her story. Fanfiction writing, then, seems to be a more personal, sophisticated form of creative writing, as an author would typically write the material and post it online using a pseudonym. The fanfiction authors examined by the researchers mentioned how “Writing was seen as a way to have fun, exercise one’s imagination, and avoid boredom.” (560)

Chandler-Olcott and Mahar focus also on the multimodality of such texts: they are posted online, which supposes a degree of internet interactivity, and many of these fanfics are supplemented with fan-art illustrating the characters and situations. Another important topic was the intertextuality exhibited by fanfiction writers: the way a text they produced relates to the original source, and indeed, to others once an author was creative enough to actually mix characters from different sources (think of the Disney Princess collection – several princesses from the Disney films all mingling and dispensing “wisdom” on beauty.) This is a topic that bears looking into, as far more students than we might guess either read or write fanfiction, with some actually combining both.

Fukunaga, Natsuki. “”Those Anime Students”: Foreign Language Literacy Development Through Japanese Popular Culture.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 50.3 (2006): 206-222.

            In this article, Fukunaga (a Japanese-language instructor) describes how his students have learned more Japanese through watching cartoons (anime) than by using the stiff models used in the textbooks commonly offered in class. While it is more directly related to foreign language learning, the article is still essentially about the importance popular culture has in our students’ lives, and how we’d do well to try to include it somehow into our course syllabi. Fukunaga relies on the analysis done by James Paul Gee (cited below) on how students, particularly the so-called “millenials” or those born between 1982 and 1998, build, revise and actively use a ‘portfolio’ of acquired experiences and skills. This ‘portfolio’ of skills is a perpetual work in progress, and having been born late in 1982, I can personally relate to this notion of a living, breathing collection of skills, attributes, that are employed every day to make sense of the world and construct new mental schemas.

            Another idea Fukunaga relies on for support is The New London Group’s notion of ‘multiliteracies’, or different ways of acquiring knowledge, be it through hybrid texts, music, inclusion of pop culture, anything that reaches out of strictly academic sources. The multiliteracy framework uses the concept of an ‘affinity group’ as means of constructing a social group of individuals who all share similar tastes and help each other in the acquisition of language, culture awareness, and any other subject at hand within the group.

Gee, James Paul. “Good Video Games and Good Learning.” 2005. Academic Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Lab. 6 October 2008.  <www.academiccolab.org/resources/documents/Good_Learning.pdf>.

            In this article produced for the University of Wisconsin – Madison, Gee examines the trepidation he once felt when encountering videogames for the first time as an observant and later, as a participant. He describes how he recognized his young son’s game as much more than a simple, passive pastime, and once he decided to try it for himself (with a game based on H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, no less) he discovered  that: “It was hard, long, and complex. I failed many times and had to engage in a virtual research project via the Internet to learn some of things I needed to know. All my Baby-Boomer ways of learning and thinking didn’t work. I felt myself using learning muscles that hadn’t had this much of a workout since my graduate school days in theoretical linguistics.” (3)

He recognizes then the potential such games might have, not just for avid gamers, but for everyone in a learning environment. Gee is eloquent in explaining the several key elements every good game must possess to maximize the learning potential: Identity (a deep commitment to the character and the setting in which a game develops), Interactivity (books don’t talk back to the reader, but everything in a videogame responds to the player’s actions), Risk Taking (a player might face the same battle over and over again, and losing in this case is favorable, as the player can explore better and recognize patterns, something school is less lenient with), and Cross-Functioning Teams (Many games feature groups of carefully selected players that each know a different type of gameplay – something very applicable to school, where students might choose their workmates based on covering the areas they may not be so proficient at) among others.

Gee finishes, then, with a question we should all consider carefully, given that many of us do not have the facilities to bring games into the classroom: “How can we make learning in and out of school, with or without using games, more game-like in the sense of using the sorts of learning principles young people see in good games every day . . ?” (11)

Introduction

A subject about which I am very passionate about is the literacy exhibited and indeed acquired by language learners through the fusion of popular culture and technology. For instance, students might enjoy videogames or watching Japanese cartoons (anime), and these are all entertainment venues that, for the most part, are offered in English first and foremost. Students might also enjoy reading and writing fan-fictions derived from their favorite games or shows. The bottom line is that students are reading and writing in English, employing acquired literacy skills to understand and build their own meanings. Maybe it’s not Shakespeare, but just the fact that students are using English to learn and entertain themselves promotes further learning, and this is something we as educators might connect into, as it were.

Fanfiction, as previously mentioned, is the creative product of authors who, based on a pre-existing story, game, film, character, or even a real-life person, writes an original piece covering storylines not explored in the original context. The author does not get paid to do this (and it is illegal for them to try – they are usually asked to include a disclaimer that specifies the actual ownership of the characters, settings, and official names), but rather they do it as an act of creativity, of exploring an imaginary world, situation or experience they have become deeply committed to. A dramatic example is the case of Francesca Soler, which, as Dani will discover later on, might serve as inspiration to aspiring young authors.

Fanfiction is not a recent phenomenon. It exists in the manner we know it today (as material published for other fans) as early as the 8th century, with fans commenting and adding to already established stories of King Arthur, the Arabian fables, and there has even been recorded evidence of creative works supplementing the writings of Homer himself. Other examples include unauthorized sequels to such best-sellers like Don Quixote that have been published and made available to the public nonetheless. Author response to fanfiction is varied: some authors like and promote it, claiming to be flattered by all the imitation and the commitment fans develop for the characters, whereas other authors hate it, issuing statements for the discouragement of such writings, citing creative rights infringement.

The two sides of the coin, as it were, is the cooperation and interactivity between what the students learn in class about writing techniques and rhetorical strategies, and how they apply it in their lives, be it on a personal or academic level. We have, then, two different aspects that affect pedagogy and literacy, and we as educators must integrate all we can about this. Times change, and so do students. In order to make education more accessible and useful to students, we have to use the tools that arise from shifting educational views. Teachers should be able to breach the gap between the academic and the everyday, allowing students a more free selection of the materials they will study (say, for a long-term project, like the discussion of a novel). Educators must not simply assume that comics, movies, cartoons, fanfiction and videogames rot a student’s intelligence.

Far from it: In the article “Adolescents’ Anime-Inspired “Fanfictions”: An Exploration of Multiliteracies.”, Kelly Chandler-Olcott and Donna Mahar explain how several students confess to spending much more time and effort writing ‘fanfics’ than their own school assignments, noting that “their personal writing was more important to them and higher in quality than the work they completed for class.”(561) The students’ teacher notes (with mild chagrin) that the level of students’ written output in ‘academic’ matters was far outstripped by the complexity, length and considerable dedication to the latest apocryphal adventures of Spider Man or Harry Potter. I consider this research to be pertinent since, as an active pop-culture and fanfiction enthusiast, I have witnessed firsthand just how many people are actually involved in these sites.

Another article I will be referring to and using to aid and guide my research is The New London Group’s “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures.” The article explains several key ideas I understand are vital for understanding the students entering our classrooms today, such as the hybridization of texts, the inclusion of several skills outside what is normally considered ‘academic’ into a student’s personal portfolio of life experience, and the deeply bonding participation in affinity groups, in which people with similar or overlapping interests form liaisons of trust and mutual guidance. This is directly related as the general, unspoken rule of fanfiction hosting pages like Fanfiction.net is “Read and review my story, and I’ll read and review yours.”