Fan Spaces as Third Spaces: Tapping into the Creative Community of Fandom (original) (raw)
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Pedagogically mediating engagement in the wild: Trajectories of fandom-based curricular innovation
Pop culture in language education: Theory, research, practice, 2020
Digitally mediated life activity has become ubiquitous across a range of social classes and world regions. Among the many professional, social, and recreational phenomena that digital tools have transformed and/or made possible is the amplification and rapid expansion of popular (hereafter pop) culture fandom communities that are often transnational, transcultural, and plurilingual. This intervention project explores the possibilities that pedagogically structured participation in a fan fiction community might offer for second language learning. These learning potentials are examined and illustrated through the six-year implementation and iterative redesign of a pedagogical project rooted in task-based language teaching, fan practices, and fanfiction activities that takes place in an English teacher education course at a Swedish university. Positive outcomes from the project include identifiable linguistic gains and augmented levels of student engagement, both of which were enabled by the inspiration that sprang from participation in culturally relevant fandom communities. In conclusion, we underscore that pedagogical innovation in pop culture contexts requires agility and the willingness to iteratively adapt to emerging cultural conditions and practices.
ProQuest, 2021
Traditional educational contexts often silence the literacies of vulnerable BIPOC youth (Kirkland, 2013; Paris, 2012) and our English classrooms must be reconceptualized to interrupt the cycle of deficit-framed literacy instruction and disproportionate referral to remedial or special education services leading to unjust systems such as the “school-to-prison” pipeline (Sealey-Ruiz, 2011). One asset-based direction is to recognize and center youths’ cultural literacies, specifically their recreational fan activities (Emdin & Adjapong, 2018; Magnifico et al., 2018). In this study, I conducted a social design experiment (K. D. Gutiérrez, 2018) around a high school course with the goal of creating space for “conscious reflective struggle” (Beach, 1999, p. 130) for youth regarding their identities in and across discourses. This course centered participation in and contributions to multiple fandom discourses, supporting youth in developing and navigating complex literacy practices through a disciplinary and metadiscursive lens. My first article is an overview of our social design experiment with a focus on how I collaboratively followed “equity trails” (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010) in the design. This paper uses empirical data from this study to systematically describe the ways social design experiments disrupt and transform each stage of the research process. My second article is a portrait of Alex—a Puerto Rican cis-female artist and focal student—her meaningful learning trajectories in this acafandom context across activity systems. In this paper I trace form-function shifts in classroom interactions to trace ways that Alex made sense of syncretic literacies (Gutiérrez et al., 2013) and followed trajectories of collateral, encompassing, and mediational transitions (Beach, 1999). Finally, my third article is a nonrepresentational account of the "affective resonances" (Phillips & Killian Lund, 2019) of BIPOC focal youth’s embodied experiences in the classroom. In this paper I listen for ways these youth’s passions were sustained or dampened as they engaged with certain textual communities throughout the semester. These papers show how is possible to design learning ecologies in diverse public school spaces that not only center youth interests but support them extending their passion and navigating critically across conversations that are meaningful to them.
Fanfiction: Exploring in- and out-of-school literacy practices
This article introduces the reader to the world of fanfiction and explores motivations for engaging in participatory culture, alignment with 21st century academic literacy skills, and reading and writing possibilities of fan fiction both in and outside of classroom walls.
Fan fiction, remix culture, and The Potter Games
Teaching with Harry Potter, 2013
This chapter draws on my ethnographic research of adolescent literacy, online affinity spaces, and young adult literature. Affinity space ethnography is a powerful methodology that can shed light on the culture of physical, virtual, and blended spheres that adolescents inhabit. In particular, affinity space ethnography affords access to participants around the world, a readily available web-based historical record of the affinity space’s practices, and a way to trace adolescent literacy practices across sites, texts, and discourses. As part of an affinity space ethnography, I explored how youth, ages 11 to 17, in the United States, Canada, and Australia engaged with The Hunger Games. Cassie was one participant in the study, and this chapter analyzes her experience with writing fan fiction based on Harry Potter and The Hunger Games.
Fanfiction Writing and the Construction of Space
E-learning, 2007
In this article, a spatial lens is used to look at a popular online culture-based writing website as a means of understanding how fan authors' literacy practices and the design features of the site interact to shape a writing space that engenders affiliation with and facilitates access to literacy and language learning. Discussion also focuses on how the site, conceptualized as an affinity space, provides English-language-learning youth with multiple means of displaying expertise in and affiliating around popular culture, as well as of positioning themselves as capable and accomplished users of multiple social languages.