Why Miranda's Here Today

When I was in the sixth grade, I discovered The Gossamer Project, and the rest (to use a cliche) is history. 


Unlike the 16-year-old Harry Potter fan that told Jenkins that there was a difference between analyzing a short story and his friend's fanfiction, I grew up loving to read everything I could get my hands on. By the second grade, all of my teachers knew I had an affinity for writing and reading, but I resisted pursuing this area because I didn't want to follow in my mother's footsteps. In the late 1990s, though, I found my affinity space. And that was X-Files fanfiction. I would spend hours upon hours on the computer reading and writing fanfiction. And the following note I placed on the first story I wrote (which is still posted on The Gossamer Project) shows that I was definitely thinking like a writer when the thirteen-year-old me penned this story:

Posted October 20, 1999
Spoilers: ReduxII
Summery: A few changes on the scene where Mulder is
crying by Scully's bed.
Feedback: Please!
Author's notes: This is the first story I've posted so
please tell me what you thought my mail is
beside my name!!!(David is Hot!) Sorry, just had to do
that!
Thanx: My best friend Ali for saying it's stupid, but
not badly written.  I is a honerz student!
On with the show...

In just this note, I take a stab at summarizing my work, ask other writers to give me feedback, show that I've already used peer review--I apparently had my friend Ali read the story before I posted it--and show that I care about the writing itself. While I liked what we were doing in my English classes during middle school, I wasn't really motivated to go "above and beyond," to teach myself how to compose. But Fanfiction motivated me, and I wasn't the only one doing it. Instead of circulating notes, my friends and I would circulate fanfiction. Oh, and of those friends, one is now an English teacher and another is a librarian. My experience is proof--pop culture helps kids learn to write, to think, and to engage, even among the geekiest of us!

Jenkins uses the Healther incident to show how fanfiction helps students learn to engage in the writing process--to write, revise, interact with other writers, and even to learn grammar, but I say that fanfiction does something else as well. In the other piece, Jenkins writes that games help students to adopt fictional personalities through which they can learn to write creatively. I say fanfiction writing give skills that are not limited to writing alone. Instead, fanfiction allows students to "become" other people so they see things from other people's perspectives. In the case of X-Files fanfiction, for instance, students must pretend to be one of two FBI agents or an FBI director. This requires a large amount of research. In addition, it requires the writer to think about the character and how their characteristics would shape how they think about a certain issue/would react in a certain situation, etc. These are skills that can be applied to audience analysis, argument, and simply critical thinking. For instance, if a particular show involves two characters who tend to disagree, students can compare the two characters' thoughts and see an issue from multiple perspectives.

Recently, I was in a class where a professor made some negative comments about pop culture. While I do think that many aspects of pop culture can be ridiculous, if pop culture motivates students to become engaged in academic pursuits, it should be used in the classroom. I would not be here today if fanfiction had not been there in the late 1990s. I have it to thank, and that's one reason that I will encourage my students to find their own affinity spaces, whether they be fanfiction, video games, etc.

But encourage your students NOT to put their real names on their fanfictions. That way, 11 years later, when they're "real" writers, they won't cringe when they realize there's no way to take that off the database--a lesson I learned the hard way!