One of my hobbies/obsessions is reading fan fiction, stories written about movies, television shows, other novels, and numerous other sources. I lurk on fanfiction.net, as well as on several livejournal communities that are fiction archives. I also routinely visit livejournals of people who publish stuff I live in the communities. In part, I just find the writing good, and I enjoy reading good stories.
Fanfiction also interests me academically. Many fanfic writers, or at least the ones I read most often, seem to be high school or college students. I don't think they're all English majors. How does what they learn in school influence their fan fiction? Do they see any connections between a writing class and writing fanfiction? Are there connections that exist anyway, without their conscious knowledge? Should there be?
For example, one rule of fan fiction writing seems to be getting a beta. The beta's job is to read the story before it's published and offer revision suggestions. Writers frequently thank their betas in the author notes. Composition pedagogy similarly emphasizes having someone else read an essay to make revision suggestions. In my classes, students exchange drafts for every assignment, sometimes more than once. I call it workshopping, not betaing (think I just made up a word). Do betas do the same thing that workshop groups do? How is the process the same or different?
One of these days, I'll probably interview some of these writers and see if I can get my questions answered. Some fanfiction writers do novels or longer length pieces. They're definitely interested their work, and many are serious about their craft. I wonder what they can teach writing teachers about getting students interested in writing, as well as becoming better writers.
While I can't say much about the decisions university presidents have to make, I feel the ones made in classrooms can be just as thorny. If students write and talk about social issues, there will be a range of opinions. Part of my job is to honor that range, not force them to think or feel a certain way. However, part of my job is to also create a safe place for students to have this exchange, where everyone feels like they can contribute. What, then, should I do when one student's view could make a classmate feel threatened?
Before I go on, I want to clarify my choice of example: it deals with sexuality, and it actually happened. I'd hope my response would be the same regardless of what the student wrote about. I believe discrimination is wrong, regardless of who is discriminated against.
About two years ago, a student turned in a paper arguing against gay marriage. In part, he said that gay people were "disgusting and vile." There were other comments with a similar tone. Essentially, it was a homophobic paper, not a reasoned argument. In my comments, I pointed out places where his argument would not reach members of the audience who found his language offensive (the assignment was for an editorial piece in a newspaper, so he couldn't just preach to the converted). I tried my best to stay neutral, to the point of having a colleague read my final comment to make sure my biases didn't intrude. In a conference, we worked on ways to make the same point with a more reasoned tone that his audience would be more likely to accept. My goal, in other words, was to help the student develop his ideas, not tell him what to think. The students' opinions mattered more than mine.
My response would have been different if he'd used that language in class. I would have made him stop. Outside of his workshop group (who didn't say anything that made me think they were insulted), I was the only one who read his essay. In a class discussion, everyone is exposed to those ideas. I don't think I had a LGBT student in that class, but I've never had a student come out to the entire class. If there was one, the language in that student's paper would have probably been offensive at best to terrifying at worse. As a teacher, I will not have my students feeling that way. I would have curbed one students' free speech rights in order to keep our community open to everyone.
This approach sounds simple: they can say what they want in papers, but they have to be civil in class. It isn't.
I'm human, and my own biases, even if controlled, could cause me to consider something not offensive that a student with different beliefs would consider a threat. As teacher, I have more power to control the conversation in the classroom than my students. While I try to share it, I'm still the only one who can make a student stop talking. I also wonder about how well I control my biases. Poker faces do not run in my family. Students are good at reading teachers, and they're good at playing the pleasing game. I don't want that, but, as I said in the last entry, it takes time for students to realize that. If they only parrot back my views, they aren't using the power rhetoric gives them, the power I want them to have.
One of my favorite lines is to say language is the most powerful weapon God (or whatever term they prefer) has allowed humanity to keep its hands on. I want them to use that weapon responsibility, but it doesn't come with a set of stable rules. We have to figure them out as we go. That makes teaching on social issues hard. The alternative, though, is to not prepare students to be productive citizens. I can't do that. I want them to know they can change the world. Hopefully, it'll be in a good way. It's not my place to tell them what good is. Still, sometimes I wish. . .
Something interesting happened in my class yesterday. The book we're using, Anne Wysocki and Dennis Lynch's Compose, Design, Advocate, asks students to develop design plans for their assignments. These aren't formal outlines but a narrative describing their purpose, audience, context (combined to be the statement of purpose), the major things they're going to do in the essay, their choice of medium, and their plans for producing and testing it. The last few things (after the parentheses in the previous sentence) all have to be justified based on the statement of purpose.
I like the idea behind design plans. They give students a chance to think through the choices they have to make in an informal way. I don't think a narrative feels as formal as an outline. More importantly, they allow students to plan, which makes writing easier. The narrative can be scrapped if the plan doesn't work. Essentially, they're an easy way to tie together all the decisions writers have to make in a form that's not threatening.
My students didn't seem to agree. Three emailed me before class, two stopped me in the halls, and another four told me in class they didn't know what to do. Luckily, I had planned for us to analyze a design plan using a scoring guide. We started with one in the book and took almost half the period to analyze it.
About half way through the analysis, one student said, "Everyone's sitting here like bumps on a log. They aren't saying anything!"
I agreed that many weren't talking (excluding her and a couple others), but I could tell everyone was engaged. I've been in college environments since most of them started nursery school, so I feel like I know most of the signs of a student zoning out (most aren't subtle about it; that takes graduate school experience.) I also said that many of them probably had had classes in the past where saying the wrong answer led to public embarrassment, led by the teacher. I try not to do that. However, they've only known me for a few weeks. I have to prove to them I don't expect them to always be right, that it's all right to make a mistake and learn from it.
Some of the other students nodded to what I said, so I guess it was the right thing to do. And they were more engaged when we started looking at a model design plan that I had written. Overall, it felt like a good class.
Education should be fun, a time for people to explore and realize what they want to learn more about. I wish more classes were like that. I hope mine usually are.
On Tuesday, my students set up their blogs. We are using vox. While I think wordpress is just as useful, I think vox may make more intuitive sense to them. The similarities to livejournal definitely help (yes, I know they're owned by the same company).
So far, they've only had to post one entry, though another is due tomorrow. Many of them have seized on the multimedia possibilities. One included a sound file from an interview she wrote about. Another included three videos to help make their point about changes in music. A third included a picture of the athlete they wrote about. I'm curious to see whether others use the same approach and, if they do, what they do with it. It'll definitely be a chance to talk about how differences in context affect the choices a communicator can make.
I'm going to do my best to do the same assignment as my students: two blog entries a week. To make it completely equal, I'm considering some sort of penalty if I don't do my part. If I decide to do this, I'll put it to the class for a decision.
This is a test on adding videos to a vox post. The sample is "The Rose" by Westlife, one of my favorite groups.
I'm planning to use blogs in one of my classes this semester, and one of my colleagues suggested I check out vox. This is my first post on it. After a couple of days of studying it, I'll decide which one would be best for my students.
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