Leslie Haas and Jill T. Tussey Fanfiction as a Support for Writing Engagement and Development There are a variety of academic literacy levels within individual classrooms (Bippert, 2017). This diversity offers opportunities to support students by understanding and incorporating individual schema, interests, and motivation into literacy instruction, allowing engagement to be the catalyst for learning (Bippert, 2017; Haas & Tussey, 2021; Posey 2019). Student “goals for reading and writing may not be directly connected with school achievement, so educators need to tap into these existing skills in order to make literacy meaningful to the students” (Bippert, 2017, p. 19-20). Therefore, it becomes crucial for educators to think outside the box when considering how to engage and develop students as writers. Fanfiction Popular culture offers opportunities to support academic literacy through student interest (Bahoric & Swaggerty, 2015; Jennings et al, 2021). Fandoms based on popular culture and their embedded literacies, often consist of shared interests and/or activities such as comics, movies, television, and video games. When teachers capitalize on these fandom narratives as a model or inspiration for writing, students have opportunities to create fanfiction. According to Jamison (2013), “today we largely understand fanfiction as writing that continues, interrupts, reimages, or just riffs on stories and characters other people have already written about” (p. 17). It allows students to explore an original work and then alter it by changing one or more aspects such as characters, conflict, plot, point of view, and/or setting (Jamison, 2013). Examples of fanfiction across through the ages include the following: ● Paradise Lost by John Milton ○ based on the Bible ○ creates a whole new perspective on an existing story ○ turns Satan into a tragic hero ● The Aeneid by Virgil ○ based on The Odyssey and The Iliad ○ new epic based on Aeneas, a minor character from The Illiad ● A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain ○ based on Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory ○ changed to a comedy about time travel ● Wicked by Gregory Maguire ○ based on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum ○ creates a whole new perspective ○ offers a more sympathetic portrait of an iconic villain Other fanfiction examples include Clueless based on Jane Austen’s Emma, 10 Things I Hate About You based on Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, and the Fifty Shades of Grey series based on Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series.
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