Tuesday, November 27, 2012

When the Lit Hits the Fan (Guest Post for the School Library Journal)

This week I was honored to be a guest blogger for the School Library Journal on the topic of fanfiction in education, thanks to the great Peter Gutierrez, who I've been cyber-stalking since I met him at NCTE a few years ago.  Here's the beginning of the entry:

Starting around 2001, friends began to tell me about their children’s fascination with fanfiction—writing, reading, and critiquing it. By the time the fourth person told me how much fanfiction had helped her daughter grow as a confident writer I had already started exploring its role in student writing. Over the last eight years I have used fanfiction in my work as a teacher educator. It is a formal part of a graduate course on “Technology in the English Language Arts” that I teach, and it has worked its way into other work I do as well. In that graduate class, I share my research and encourage teachers to consider using fanfiction in their own teaching. Though the specifics of the project changes, there are a few general stages that we work through.

full post here...When the Lit Hits the Fan, SLJ