Fandoms in the Classroom: A Social Justice Approach to Transforming Literacy Learning

What is a fandom, and why do fandoms matter for school?

Fandoms are passionate communities dedicated to appreciating and engaging with texts of interest (movies, TV shows, books, bands, brands, sports teams, etc.) via personally and communally meaningful literacy practices. It is increasingly obvious that scripted literacy curricula and standardized tests fall short of meeting meaningful literacy goals and create culturally destructive learning spaces. Fandoms in the Classroom provides an alternative for educators looking to center passion in their classrooms, individualizing their literacy curricula by building from youth’s interests. The book describes how educators in a wide range of secondary learning contexts can build curricula around students’ already-present fandom interests to support literacy growth. This text supports educators in a range of learning contexts with step-by-step processes for building learning spaces that support navigation of fandom and disciplinary literacies, with a particular focus on common obstacles and roadblocks that teachers have shared with us. It addresses how classrooms doing critical fandom work can address social justice issues across both fandom and disciplinary communities.

This book covers relevant topics such as:

• Why Fandoms? We introduce readers to the concept of fandoms and how engaging students’ experiences in fandoms is not an extra or add-on but instead crucial to flipping the script on literacy learning.
• Bring Your Fandom to Class: Critically Putting Communities in Conversation. The book discusses how to shift ideas of literacy learning contexts from teacher-centric instruction to a community learning model.
• Fostering Engagement & Choosing Texts Together: Teachers are often nervous about teaching what they don’t know. The text provides strategies for making learning ecologies and having kids fill it with their own interests, describing specific step-by-step discussion routines that can support youth’s engagement with critical tools on texts of their choice.
• Building Culturally Responsive Assessments Engaging Youth-Centric Audiences: the book describes how educators can design more expansive literacy assessments with examples of culturally responsive objectives and tasks. The authors include a range of fandom genres and audiences that they have seen in their own work.
• Transforming Your Current Curriculum in Conversation with Fandoms: Supporting educators interested in expanding literature units in conversation with fandom texts, the text describes how to design units that put various discourse communities in conversation without deadening or co-opting youth interests.
• Interdisciplinary Applications: there is a discussion about specific examples of how educators the authors have supported in various contexts have applied this kind of work. It includes a focus on cross-disciplinary literacy, with cases highlighting applications for math, science, social studies and music disciplinary learning.

Perfect for courses such as: Foundations of Literacy; Disciplinary Literacy; Literacy Across the Curriculum; Children’s or Young Adult Literature; Writing in the Classroom; Digital Media Literacy; New and Digital Literacies; Teaching Diverse Learners; Theory to Practice; Language, Literacy and Culture; Literacy Policy and Practice; Foundations of Literacy Education; Popular Culture in Literacy Classrooms; History of Literacy Practices; Reading and Language Arts; Critical Theory