Bringing Fanfiction Into the Classroom
Fic does something that my traditional English classes cannot: it places the power in the hands of the student.
by Abby Kirby
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The students were fighting. They were trying to keep their voices at a whisper, but halfway across the classroom, their tone was still clear. I quickly peeled away from the student I was working with because the last thing any teacher wants is a fight. It brings tension into the classroom culture, and usually warrants calls home.
Across the room, the girl’s face flushed red, while the boy gripped the edge of the desk preparing to knock it, and her belongings, to the ground. It wasn’t until I got closer that I was able to make out the conversation.
“Yellow is for those who value knowledge and balance,” the girl said.
The boy threw his hands up in exasperation, sending her desk tumbling to the carpeted floor. “I just like purple!” he yelled back.
It was then that the nature of their argument hit me. They were talking about lightsaber colors.
Both of their heads snapped up when I approached them and helped to pull the desk upright.
“Hey, let’s take it easy,” I said, unable to hide my smile—I was happy to see my kids so dedicated to something, even something as unconventional as lightsaber colors. “It’s fanfiction. You can do whatever you want.”
If you had told 20-year-old me my first-ever teaching experience would be a class about fanfiction for middle schoolers, I would have thought it was a joke. How do you explain canon, fanon, and alternate universes in an academic setting? How do you walk the “school-appropriate” tightrope of shipping culture, especially with tweens? How do you grade a student’s writing when there are no rules?
Yet since 2016, I’ve taught a class on fanfiction nearly every summer while continuing to teach high school English during the school year. Teaching fanfiction is no small task—every year I find myself helping students navigate a rapidly changing media landscape, keeping up with the zeitgeist of popular culture, and, yes, occasionally breaking up fights about lightsabers.
Fanfiction does something that my traditional English classes cannot. It teaches students about our role in the creation of media, culture, and history. It invites students not just to analyze the role of a text, but to partake in its deconstruction and recreation on their own terms. It places the power in the hands of the student. After all, what English class asks you to transform a text into something you want to read?
I’d like to say teaching fanfiction was always my plan, but truthfully, it fell into my life by chance. Studying English and Education in college, I got an email from my former high school English teacher who needed a teaching assistant for a summer program. It was for gifted and talented students (no, not like that) and would consist of a three week-long, intensive course.
I wanted to be a teacher, and he promised that the program would be the best way to learn the ropes—but he also needed my help. He had ended up with a fanfiction class dropped into his lap, despite knowing nothing about the subject, and well… I was “the biggest nerd he knew.”
I have to admit that, at the time, I hadn’t spent much time in the fic world. Sure, I loved to write and was in multiple fandoms—but I didn’t quite get fanfiction. I didn’t find the majority of fic to be any good. What I read, I simply didn’t like. I couldn’t get past things like poor spelling and grammar, the popularity of crack as a genre, or egregious choices in characterization. (Though I realize now that my earliest exposures to fic were subpar.)
Still, I agreed to take the position. We spent a few months planning the class, creating materials, and selecting fandoms that would serve as our “case studies,” so that all students would have similar background knowledge. I expected the class would be like the ones I took in middle and high school: most of the students wouldn’t think too critically about their writing, and it would have a lot of room for improvement.
It took roughly one day with our students for my opinions on fanfiction to completely flip. Sure, the kids fell into that “gifted” category, and came eager to learn and participate, but they brought a level of passion and vitality that I hadn’t experienced in any class that I had taken. They debated fan theories from shows they already loved, introduced each other to new things, and rambled on and on to me about their favorite characters. Before we even put pen to paper (or, rather, fingers to keyboard) I saw that fanfiction was going to be different from any previous experiences I’d had as a student.
Teaching fanfiction drew me deeper into both fandom and teaching. I didn’t expect to fall in love with fanfiction as much as I did (to the point where I now sneak writing in between passing periods at school). I had come into the job with the assumption that all fic was on the spectrum of crack or smut, and instead found a community of writers who engage critically and resist the traditional narratives of mass media.
My growing fascination with fic also led me to question how I was taught to engage with students. If my middle schoolers could write some of the best fiction I’d ever read, what could I do with high schoolers?
I decided to pursue my MA immediately after college, so I could officially take over as the instructor in 2021. I brought the practices from my academic career into my classroom and vice versa. I wanted to blend my love of teaching with my newfound love of fanfiction.
Our class is broken down into three week-long segments, each representing different aspects of fandom and fanfiction. In the first week, we discuss the techniques of good storytelling. This is the most “school-like” experience they get in the class. We talk about round versus flat characters, as well as imagery.
My students write scenarios, exploring how a favorite character might react to going on a long journey, or describing the interior of their home. But we also dip our toes into fandom by learning about its history and the generations-long legacy of fanfiction. We read, watch, and write deeply. The first week is a celebration of everyone who came before us.
The second week is all about playing by the rules. OK, fanfiction is technically the Wild West of storytelling; if there are rules, certainly no one is following them. What we do talk about is canon—we warm up our writing muscles by playing to what we know.
We spend the whole week watching movies and TV shows, or listening to podcasts. We explore the lives of the characters off screen, fill in the gaps, or write sequels (that don’t suck). We use evidence to support our claims, and write stories that sometimes feel more like the source material than what the studio might be pushing out. These 12 year olds write with the dedication and passion that Disney’s creatives only wish they could harness. We focus on why we love pop culture to begin with. Our lessons even break away from fanfiction, and open up to the worlds of art, music, gaming, and cosplay.
Week three? That’s all about breaking the rules we just established. We crossover our fandoms from the previous week, imagine coffee shop AUs, debate the ethics of RPF, and the validity of Mary Sues. They cap off the course by writing a three-part masterpiece (roughly 15 pages) about anything they want. This is when students have written some of my favorite stories: a crossover between Scooby Doo and My Chemical Romance, an original episode of Welcome to Night Vale, and a love story between Marvel characters Yelena Belova and Xu Xialing.
What makes this week magical isn’t just the culmination of their skills—though they do produce their best writing in these last few days. It comes from watching them take over the narrative and make something uniquely theirs. While much of education focuses on rigid answers and definitions, we bend and twist canon to our will until we are satisfied. I put my kids in control of the story and the class. We break canon and the traditional notion of what it means to be a writer, a fan, and a student.
When I say that fic does something other classes I’ve taught can’t, what I mean is that it gives students a starting place. Instead of having them sit at an empty table and ask them to make a meal from scratch, they arrive at a table that’s already full of food—and I ask them to devour.
For beginning writers like my students, working with established characters and worlds relieves a lot of the pressure to create something unique or impressive—instead, they write something they would enjoy. They prod at the canon until they feel their questions have been answered, or a wrong has been rectified. They’re the ones in charge here, after all.
In place of writing an analytical essay about characterization, they demonstrate what they know. They carefully recreate a character from screen to page, capturing their voice and mannerisms with intentional word choices. They cite textual evidence to each other when they ask why Batman’s voice doesn’t seem quite right, or how to capture the mood of Frozen. They break down the roles of theme and plot as they work through the act structure of a 30-minute TV episode. It doesn’t take long for my kids to end up pages deep in a fandom wiki about a Marvel Comics property, as they work to ensure all of the details are just right in their story.
Of course, teaching fic is not always easy. Fanfiction is also known for its smut and taboo topics, stuff that probably wouldn’t be appropriate for a middle school classroom. I spend much of our early days helping students navigate the internet and curate their own experiences via the Don’t Like, Don’t Read model. At times, I’ve had to be a sex ed teacher—the whole birds-and-the-bees and maybe-you-should-ask-your-mom deal.
We also have hard conversations about fan entitlement and the racism and sexism that runs throughout our fandoms. We discuss the ways we can be active and positive members of our online and IRL fan communities.
It’s taken me years of these conversations to find the right balance between blunt honesty and the pit of despair kids can fall into when confronted with harsh realities. But I’d rather my students learn from me than strangers on the internet, who might be ill-informed or intentionally sewing discord. The fandom experience, much like life, is full of ups and downs. My job as a teacher isn’t just to meet the standards of a curriculum—it’s to create well-rounded and well-adjusted young adults, prepared to tackle anything they may encounter in life.
Teaching fanfiction has been a privilege that I was lucky enough to stumble into. But it has left me at an intersection between secondary and higher education that I find others in my fields rarely think about.
Secondary education has made great strides in the past decade to update its curriculum, providing modern and diverse texts to reach a larger audience and differentiating materials to meet students where they’re at. But there’s still a push against popular culture as worthy of its own curriculum; fandom is intentionally left out of the traditional classroom.
An English teacher might show an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, or a science teacher might make a reference to Jurassic Park during a lesson on DNA. But pop culture is simply a tool in a lot of classrooms, not a subject—and the roles of fans as consumers, creators, and critics are rarely discussed in these contexts. The concept of media fandom is not necessarily understood by teachers; being a fan is mostly viewed as a phase that teens go through, which unfortunately creates the stigma that fandom, like anything associated with teenagers, isn’t worthy of study.
Once a student enters college, they’ll likely have far more opportunity to study pop culture—or to study fandom itself. However, I find that waiting until college may be too late when trying to engage younger generations. In my experience helping students prepare for college, many have forgone taking pop culture classes because they didn’t know they were an option, and by that point, they’ve already committed to a different major with limited flexibility in their schedules.
Our relationships to pop culture inform our worldviews, inspire invention, provide context, and signify our places in history—and yet, secondary education leaves little room for it. Most resources about teaching about pop culture are geared towards scholars working in higher education. Meanwhile, there are few opportunities for secondary and post-secondary educators to collaborate and help bridge this gap in the curriculum.
This often leaves me at a crossroads. But my fanfiction class has given me the space to try something new in education and to bring fan studies to the masses. Maybe I’m alone in my fight for a fandom based education, but hopefully not for long.
After my students’ fight about the meaning of lightsaber colors, I sat back down with my former instructor, who gave me a reassuring speech about how my instincts as a teacher were developing. Then he pointed at the two kids, who were back at their desks and giggling as if the last few minutes hadn’t happened at all.
“That is a fandom moment if I ever saw one,” he said to me. “I think it’s what makes this class so powerful. The kids fall in love with something that drives them to passionate, desk-flipping anger, but at the end of the day, they’re still happy to yap on and on about it. Fandom is weird like that.”
Teaching about fanfiction and fandom not only gave my students texts they wanted to sink their teeth into and argue about until they were red-faced. It gave them a reminder that they had more in common with each other than not. Middle and high school can be rough, and realizing that another kid has the same nerdy interest as you can make all the difference. Providing opportunities for students to evaluate the texts they engage with every day helps them find their place in the world and uncover passions that may have otherwise laid dormant.
This moment of cheesy, 80’s-movie nutshelling from my colleague became one of the moments that stuck with me as an educator—and as a fan. I saw the potential fandom had to change education for the better.
Because fandom, and fanfiction, is about humans. We’ve always been entertained by stories, wanting to make up or own or change the ending. We bond over the mutual love or hatred of a text. We stretch and pull and rip at narratives until we are satisfied with them and ourselves. And we come together, at a full table of media, and devour.
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Abby Kirby is a fan studies scholar and high school English teacher based in Illinois. She has written for The Daily Fandom alongside other scholarly publications.