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For many, the idea of fandom may be most readily associated with the television series Star Trek and the Trekkies who led letter-writing campaigns to extend the series and attended conventions where they met the actors and creators of the series. Fandom, however, might find even earlier origins in the Lisztomania frenzy over the pianist Franz Liszt, the fans of the Sherlock Holmes detective stories, die-hard sports fans, or even the music fandoms of Sinatra, Elvis, or the Beatles.

The internet has allowed fandom to happen almost everywhere - and around anything - and has been driven by blogs, fan forums, archives (sites set up to house fan work), online communities, and Cons (originally comic conventions but used broadly for a range of fan conventions). [ 2] In addition to providing a space for collective admiration of the object of the fandom, these spaces can also offer opportunities for building mutual understanding, analyzing meaning, and celebrating other fans' creations and insights. [ 3] Fandoms can be particularly important for individuals who may be otherwise introverted or focused on very niche cultural interests. Fandoms provide opportunities to connect with other like-minded individuals, and the network of fandoms allows easier discovery from one interest into a whole range of interests.

Originally built around comic books, sci-fi, and fantasy but now a venue for "multi-genre entertainment" (horror, animation, anime, manga, toys, card games, video games, etc.), comic cons have helped demonstrate the growing crowd of fans and the business of fandom. When the San Diego Comic-Con (SDCC) International started (then the Golden State Comic-Con), only 145 attendees participated to help raise funds for the inaugural edition which brought in just 300 people. [ 4] SDCC has had no fewer than 103,000 attendees since 2005 and is approaching venue capacity with attendance at 130,000 in recent years - and provides an estimated $488.4 million dollars of economic impact for the San Diego area from 2013 to 2015. [ 5] Similar events in New York, Seattle (Emerald City Comic-Con), Chicago (C2E2), Denver, Detroit (Motor City Con), and other cities have demonstrated the growth of fandom and the increased demand for fans meeting together around the objects of their fandom. [ 6]

A fandom's growth is important, as they need to attract a constant stream of new, active fans, contributing to the group's vibrancy, inclusiveness, and democratic structure. [ 7]

Fandoms' growth can be challenged by internal and external forces. Externally, there are still perceptions that fandom's mania is strange, at the least, or, at worst, symptom of psychological or social dysfunction. [ 8] Internally, fandoms may struggle with diversity, in terms of race, ethnicity, age, or gender. Complaints about sexual harassment at cons have led to the development and promotion of policies to address the issue. [ 9] Young people's, and especially heavily female, fandoms or their participation in larger fan groups may be dismissed as either faddish or as lacking the critical thinking of older counterparts. [ 10]

Fandoms can also upend what many people consider "normal." The bronie fandom (mostly male and adult fans of My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic) upends entrenched notions about what men and boys can like and feel. [ 11] Other fandoms intentionally subvert straight-white-male worldviews, remixing content to feature diverse subtexts. [ 12]

As cultural institutions that preserve and provide access to books, video, music, and an increasing array of media, fandoms may be obvious partners in promoting literacy, engagement with culture, and media creation.

Fandom increasingly assumes active creation - writing, recording, drawing, remixing, role-playing - rather than just passive consumption of media. [ 13] Fandoms around Game of Thrones, science fiction television series and movies, and superhero franchises may increase interest in table-top games and other non-digital activities that libraries could leverage into tournaments or other face-to-face social activities. [ 14] This could make it an important space for libraries to design programming and instruction around, especially in ways that promote Connected Learning, which is highly social, interest-driven, hands-on, and production oriented.

Because fandom encourages and furthers a "remix" culture, it may be an interesting space for librarians and information professionals observe, especially as it changes the nature of copyright law, derivative and transformative works, and fair use. [ 15]

As a tool for constructing community and identity, fandoms may help further library's goals to be centers of community and engagement. Fandoms may also help libraries bring together diverse individuals around shared culture and/or engage individuals who had not previously participated in the library's services.

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Fandom refers to a community of people who are passionate about something, whether it's a film, a band, a television show, a book, or a sports team. [1] The growing availability of media and social networks have provided individuals more opportunities to discover content and then more easily find groups of like-minded people with whom they can share and exchange proof of their fandom (discussions, writing, art, etc.).

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Every month, we deliver the kind of inspiring interviews and exciting news you're looking for. We're chatting with our favourite writers, activists, artists and scholars working in media who encourage us with their extraordinary work, and we want to share those conversations with you! Interviews have featured Orphan Black's Tatiana Maslany, comedian Franchesca Ramsey, and Chvrches' Lauren Mayberry.

Sign up for FREQ to receive exclusive interviews right to your inbox and stay up to date with the latest from Feminist Frequency.

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Every month, we deliver the kind of inspiring interviews and exciting news you're looking for. We're chatting with our favourite writers, activists, artists and scholars working in media who encourage us with their extraordinary work, and we want to share those conversations with you!

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An amazing, three-day Indigenous pop-culture convention will features the best Indigenous creators, illustrators, writers, designers, actors, and producers from the worlds of comic books, games, sci-fi, fantasy, film, tv, and graphic novels. The Indigenous Comic Con seeks to highlight the amazing work that brings understanding about the Indigenous experience to the world of popular culture and unlock the Indigenous imagination!

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Geek and Sundry | Your Daily Dose of Geekiness & etc.

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Interviews with your favorite (or soon-to-be favorite) authors, artists, astronauts and more. From WBEZ.

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The Power of the Picture Book: Aaron Zenz

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The Power of the Picture Book: Aaron Zenz

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Picture books and their creators have had a powerful impact on me in many ways over many years. In the midst of this 30-day-long November celebration of picture books, I thought I would celebrate 30 specific picture books and creators that have influenced my life. As lovers of the format, our family has around 5,000 children's books in our home collection, so I could easily highlight hundreds. The giant challenge for me was to limit myself to only 30. And as an illustrator, I thought I would celebrate these books and their creators in a unique way: through a giant piece of Fan Art... Here goes!

How many characters did you recognize in this Picture Book Tribute? And what feeling hit you when you picked out a familiar face? Giddy? Did it feel like spotting an old friend? Did you smile? Did you make an audible noise or even say something out loud?

That feeling you got? That's the power of picture books.

Here's a guide to the characters I picked and their creators:

Me:

Aaron Zenz /
The Hiccupotamus
I love picture books. I read picture books. I collect picture books. I make picture books. I've illustrated and/or authored 33 picture books, but "The Hiccupotamus" was my first and will always be a significant part of my life.

5 Formative Creators:

Eric Rohman /
The Cinder-Eyed Cats
This is the picture book that had the most profound impact on my life and calling to create. I was in my college library, most likely studying for an exam. I happened to look up, and I saw these cats staring at me from the other side of the room. I looked down. Back up. Down. Up. They were still there. Still staring. Intently. Calling to me. I was physically moved to stand up, cross the room, and dive into the story. The power of that moment - for a single image to move me to action - was striking. And I knew I wanted to do that too. I knew I wanted to make art that would compel people to move ...or laugh ...or think ...or change ...or inspire them to create too.
John Sandford /
The Terrible Hodag
John is the person who had the most profound impact on my calling to create. He was the first real live illustrator I ever met. I was in awe of his art. He befriended and encouraged me. "You're going to do this someday," he'd say sounding as if he really meant it. Years later when he started his own publishing company, he took those words and acted on them, hiring me as the first employee. He got the ball rolling on The Hiccupotamus, and the course of my life was set in motion.

I discovered Glen Keane's behind-the-scenes rough animation my freshman year of highschool, and he has been my favorite artist ever since. He's the artist behind Ariel, the Beast, Aladdin, and Tangled, but he also created fantastic books about Adam Raccoon - the greatest faith-based picture book series out there by leaps and bounds.

Scott Gustafson /
Alphabet Soup
I started collecting samples of Scott's art from catalogs in college (long before the days of Pinterest). I actually crossed paths with him years later, and had a memorable star-struck encounter.
David Macaulay /
Black and White
This has long been my absolute favorite picture book, and most likely always will be.

2 Local Pals:
The writing and illustrating life is, more often than not, a solitary and sometimes lonely endeavor. I'm lucky to live near some other top-notch creators. Laurie and Amy are two local friends, are kindred spirits, and have created many amazing characters.

5 Classics:
A few favorite books from my childhood:

Ezra Jack Keats / The Snowy Day

Jon Stone and Mike Smollin /
The Monster at the End of this Book

William Steig / Sylvester and the Magic Pebble

17 Contemporary Creators:
I'm closing out with 17 creators that regularly dazzle and amaze me. Again, this list could contain hundreds! But here are a few favorites:

Jon Klassen / I Want My Hat Back

David Wiesner / Tuesday

Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith / The Stinky Cheese Man

Tony DiTerlizzi / Ted

Mo Willems / Elephant and Piggie

Jarrett J Krosoczka / Baghead

Viviane Schwarz / There Are Cats in this Book

John Hendrix / John Brown

Julia Denos / Swatch

Ben Hatke / Nobody Likes A Goblin
I suspect some of these are your favorite picture books too. And as for any books or creators that are unfamiliar to you - why not hunt them down? You may find some powerful, new, life-long friends!

Aaron Zenz lives in Spring Lake, MI with his lovely wife and six creative kids. He has participated in the creation of 33 children's books, 9 of which he authored. He loves Author Visits and travels around the country all year long, getting kids excited about reading, writing, and creating. Just last month, his newest book "Little Iffy Learns to Fly" swooped into the world. You can find Aaron on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

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The Power of the Picture Book: Aaron Zenz

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Picture books and their creators have had a powerful impact on me in many ways over many years. In the midst of this 30-day-long November celebration of picture books, I thought I would celebrate 30 specific picture books and creators that have influenced my life.

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Earlier this year, the New York Times turned heads by asking whether the hit Broadway musical Hamilton 's historical fudging on certain points is, well, good for us. It's an excellent piece of concern trolling, giving several historians an opportunity to hand-wring about the musical's overglorification of Alexander Hamilton, the immigrant revolutionary who authored the Federalist Papers and founded the US Treasury.

Several historians interviewed in the piece were quick to emphasize the liberties Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda has taken with regard to the show's historical timeline, geographic location, and political context, which Miranda himself has been upfront about time and again. But Miranda's blatant over-identification with his subject - he also stars in the title role - seems to have pushed many of them over the edge, leading to questions of whether Miranda's celebration of Hamilton may be misleading students of history.

"Alexander Hamilton 'was more a man for the 1 percent than the 99 percent,'" Princeton's Sean Wilentz explains. Another historian, Lyra D. Monteiro, argues - while pointing out what she views as Hamilton's erasure of black Revolutionary history - that "the founders really didn't want to create the country we actually live in today."

The author of the piece, the Times's Jennifer Schuessler, comments: "It's an odd moment for the public to embrace an unabashed elitist who liked big banks, mistrusted the masses and at one point called for a monarchal presidency and a Senate that served for life."

This criticism of how Hamilton places its title character in context might be legitimate if Hamilton weren't, well, what it is. In essence, Hamilton is a postmodern metatextual piece of fanfic, functioning in precisely the way that most fanfics do: It reclaims the canon for the fan.

In this case, Hamilton 's canon is history, and the fan, Miranda, is doing a lot more than simply adapting it. Like the best fanfic writers, he's not just selectivelyretelling history - he's transforming it.

Hamilton historians are viewing Hamilton as part of the "Founders Chic" movement - but the musical doesn't really fit into that trend

Alexander Hamilton has long been a divisive figure in the annals of historical study, but in recent years he's become a focal point of a historical trend many academics and history enthusiasts refer to as "Founders Chic." Founders Chic first appeared as a term in a July 2001 issue of Newsweek and quickly caught on to describethe sudden millennial trend of lauding the forefathers.

A year later, in a now-offline essay for Common-Place, Jeffrey Pasley observed that "Founders" really meant "Federalist," as most of the acclaim was centered on David McCullough's dazzling biography of John Adams, with plenty going to fellow Federalist Hamilton on the side.

This criticism of how Hamilton places its title character in context might be legitimate if Hamilton weren't, well, what it is

Numerous other biographies of the Founding Fathers soon followed, as did a 2008 biopic based on McCullough's Adams biography. Soon after that, Miranda famously conceived the ideafor the musical while reading Ron Chernow's 2004 biography, Alexander Hamilton, which focuses on Hamilton's early life as a bastard orphan on the tiny Caribbean island of Nevis, and emphasizes the way his formative years shaped his relationship to the US.

Analyzing the Founders Chic trend in 2003, theAtlantic wrote critically of it: "In revering the Founders we undervalue ourselves and sabotage our own efforts to make improvements - necessary improvements - in the republican experiment they began. Our love for the Founders leads us to abandon, and even to betray, the very principles they fought for."

But although Hamilton stems from one of the trend's byproducts, its function as a text is to do exactly what the Atlantic calls for and critique the history the founders began. The real-life Hamilton's experience, passion, and ambition resonated deeply with Miranda, who is deeply concerned with the American immigrant experience. Miranda immediately recognized a fellow hip-hop artist in Hamilton, in that the founder had all the earmarks of a Tupac or a Biggie Smalls: innate intellect, brashness, unrelenting ambition, and a grand tendency to start drama. (A much-admired piece of recent Hamilton fan art notes he will "fight anyone, including himself.")

As the first Treasury secretary of the United States, Hamilton lacked all the stature and privilege of his fellow Founding Fathers, many of whom resented him for being a low-class upstart and possibly mixed-race. (John Adams, among other contemporaries referred to Hamilton as a "creole bastard.") This dynamic, with all its incumbent social, class, and racial tensions, is crucial to the narrative of Hamilton, a musical in which nearly the entire cast is made up of people of color.

Putting himself and people like him at the center of musical theater has long been one of Miranda's central concerns. The son of native Puerto Ricans, Miranda was brought up on a diet of rap and show tunes. Writing about his first musical, 2007's Latino Washington Heights homage In the Heights, Miranda noted, "I put in all the things I'd always wanted to see onstage ... propulsive freestyle rap scenes outside of bodegas, salsa numbers that also revealed character and story. I tried to write the kind of show I'd want to be in."

In the Heights, which went on to sweep the Tony Awards, was essentially a trial run for Miranda's proclivity for self-insertion and vision of the musical as an interactive space in which different genres speak to one another onstage. Hamilton goes one step further: As musical influences, fans, creators, and a multiplicity of identities interact with one another, Miranda's manipulation of time allows distinct historical moments to magically overlap through the power of allegory. In essence, Hamilton is a liminal space in which fans and performers talk back to historicity itself.

And talking back to the canon is what fanfic does best.

Hamilton is fanfic, which means its function is partly to argue with its canon, not to simply celebrate it

Miranda's musical is fanfic - that is, it's literally a creative text written by a fan that reinterprets or expands upon a previously existing source material, or canon. More specifically, Hamilton is a fanfic of Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton, and more generally of US history itself. Here are a few structural elements that Miranda uses in order to create the uniqueness of Hamilton that are crucial, common elements of much contemporary fanfic:

Alternate Universe (AU) - a type of fanfic that changes something crucial about the original story or source material

Racebending - the act of changing a character's race or ethnicity to make the character part of an underrepresented cultural community, in turn creating a role for an actor from that community

The Modern AU - an AU that removes characters and/or plots from their original context in the past and brings them into the present

The Political AU - an AU that puts the original characters and/or plots into a different or new political context

The Crossover - a fanfic that combines elements of two or more fandoms

In many ways, Hamilton is an extremely typical fanfic. It's simultaneously an alternate version of American history and a modern political AU in which none of the Founding Fathers are white and everything happens in a blurred temporality that could be modern-day America.

This is one reason why the question of historical authenticity is a derailment of the argument Hamilton is making. The musical isn't about what Hamilton, the historical figure, was or was not; any critique that views it from this angle is missing the entire point.

Indeed, Hamilton the musical has as much to do with Hamilton the dead white Founding Father as Hamilton the dead white Founding Father has to do with Eminem and Sweeney Todd - the two characters on which Miranda explicitly bases his version of Hamilton. Here's a Tumblr post celebrating the musical theater characters and hip-hop legends that Miranda combined in order to create the characters from Hamilton, according to Miranda's descriptions of them in his now-famous original casting notices:

In fandom terms, these amalgams are known as a "crossover," the union of unlikely story elements or character traits that work surprisingly well together. Hamilton is also a racebent text, meaning it takes preexisting characters - real people, in this case - and swaps either their racial identities or their ethnic backgrounds so they can be played by people of color.

Racebending is a concept that has existed in fandom since long before Hamilton, in both a pejorative sense, as when roles are whitewashed, and a positive sense, as when they're reclaimed for marginalized identities. Racebending most often occurs in fan art, as fandom's most immediately visual medium, but it's often found in fanfic too. It's usually an intentionally political statement, but just as often it becomes political without meaning to be.

In Hamilton's case, the intent is overtly political. The musical announces its aim to destroy: "I'm passionately smashing every expectation / every action's an act of creation." In other words, like all good fanfic, Hamilton is confident that far from being illegal plagiarism, a charge constantly leveled at its amateur fellows, it's quite the opposite: It knows it's not a tawdry, derivative copy, but rather a transformative work.

In many ways, Hamilton is an extremely typical fanfic

Like countless fanfic writers before him, Miranda clearly loves his canon, but he expresses that love by tearing the canon to pieces. Like countless fanfic writers before him, he remains as close to the letter of authenticity as possible while also completely deconstructing the worldview he's been given. Miranda uses his text to not only have fun with and celebrate US history but to critique everything about that history - something his perspective as the son of American immigrants writing about another American immigrant puts him in a unique position to do.

Miranda's fanfic interrogates the mythos of the American dream, tearing down the idea that "America" emerged from a single cultural identity that belongs only to white European immigrants and their descendants. This is something Hamilton's fan base seems to grasp innately. "Do you understand what it's like to live in a nation where you are made marginal and inconsequential in the historical narrative that you are taught from your first day of school?" writes Tumblr user thequintessentialqueer in a brilliant explication of Hamilton 's function as a text:

Whose rebellion is valued? Who is allowed to be heroic through defiance? ... Violence is only acceptable in the hands of white people; revolution is only okay when the people leading the charge are white ... Hamilton is not really about the founding fathers. It's not really about the American Revolution. The revolution, and Hamilton's life are the narrative subject, but its purpose is not to romanticize real American history: rather, it is to reclaim the narrative of America for people of colour ... If you're watching/listening to Hamilton and then going out and romanticizing the real founding fathers/American revolutionaries, you're missing the entire point.

Again and again, Miranda emphasizes that this version of US history is being told by those other immigrants - the ones who, as the show notes, "get the job done," and the ones who had no choice about whether to immigrate at all.

And just as he emphasizes that "you have no control ... who tells your story," he reminds us that he's telling the story of American history now - and he's telling it his way.

It's blatantly hypocritical of the Times to call Hamilton historically inaccurate

The criticism of being historically inaccurate is onethe New York Times has never thought it necessary to apply throughout the many decades in which it has reviewed and analyzed Hamilton's revolutionary musical forefather, the typically all-white legacy musical 1776. That is significant. You'd think a rosy, shamelessly optimistic musical about the Founding Fathers would, at some point in the 50 years since it was written, come under scrutiny for delivering a perhaps naive take on American history to a skeptical postmodern audience.

Instead, the Times's history with 1776 is every bit as glowing as the American dream itself. In 1982, the Times saw 1776 as "a stage crowded with living men concerned with freedom." In 1993, the production's "efforts to be accurate about historical intent [made] 1776 a musical docudrama in the best sense." A 1997 review couldn't gush enough about it: 1776 is "ingenious," "rich" with "historical detail," a "crazy definition of democracy, celebrated."

That same year, in a critique of how 1776 's historical characters and their reputations have withstood historical "battering" and "revisionism," the Times managed to blame Thomas Jefferson's critics for sullying him with since-proven accusations of keeping a slave mistress. It also blamed modern audiences for "follow[ing] lesser men" while faintly praising the musical, both for "its obvious show-biz ploy to humanize an oracle" in Jefferson, and for keeping the historical accuracy of Abigail Adams's hotness: "Writing so pungent had to be quoted, and a man with a wife that attractive couldn't be all bad."

The fundamental objective of fanfic is to insert yourself, aggressively and brazenly, into stories that are not about and were never intended to be about or represent you

Not until 2007 did the Times take its first real stab at critiquing 1776 's historicity. Sylviane Gold writes:

The letter, like the rest of "1776," hews closely but not exactly to the facts. Peter Stone's book has Adams sending for Martha Jefferson (Teal Wicks) so that her husband (Edward Watts) can concentrate on writing the Declaration of Independence. Didn't happen. Mr. Stone has the delegates signing it one by one in the chamber where they voted on it. Didn't happen. He compresses time and characters and, naturally, leaves out a lot. But if he were writing the book today, it seems unlikely that he would fail to include the real Abigail's wry observation to John that although the great men gathered in Philadelphia were clamoring for freedom, they were perfectly content to deny its benefits to their wives.

The chief issue here - that Peter Stone, who wrote 1776's book, compresses time and characters - is exactly the same technique that Miranda uses to accomplish similar aims in his musical. Except in this review of 1776, the technique is seen not as a detraction or a flaw but as an asset: Immediately after the paragraph cited above, Gold adds, "The beauty of history is that we can keep rewriting it."

It's not until the Times sets out to explicitly compare Hamilton and 1776 to one another, in 2016, that the phrase "historical inaccuracies" is associated with 1776 - perhaps, primarily, so that it can be associated with Hamilton. TheTimes sees fit to point out that the "founding fathers did not engage in rap battles," as if that somehow makes Hamilton more historically inauthentic than a 1776 that has the Continental Congress singing and dancing and rhyming words with "Connecticut."

Never mind that Hamilton on the whole hews extremely carefully to the facts; Hamilton's biographer Chernow was the first person to see the musical once it was written, and edited and spot-checked Hamilton for historical accuracy, serving as what we in fandom call a beta reader. Many lines from the musical come to us direct from the mouths of the Founding Fathers themselves.

If we rush to defend Hamilton in this instance, we can be forgiven: History is littered with examples of women and writers of color having their work subjected to a higher standard of inquiry and criticism than the work of their white male counterparts. And that is preciselywhy Hamilton exists as a text: to elevate and celebrate the dismissed and devalued.

As fanfic, Hamilton interrogates the text of American history from the "wrong" perspective to reclaim that narrative for those who were left out of it

Ultimately, critiquing Hamilton for historical accuracy regarding Alexander Hamilton's actual place in history is a fundamental misunderstanding of what Hamilton is doing as a modern metatext and as fanfic. The entire point of Hamilton is that the real Alexander Hamilton was a man for the 1 percent, not the 99 percent. The act of presenting Hamilton as a man for the people allows Miranda - and by extension, the audience - to feel as though they are actively shaping the future by making the past all about themselves.

The fundamental objective of fanfic, especially when it is written by women, queer and genderqueer people, and people of color, is to insert yourself, aggressively and brazenly, into stories that are not about and were never intended to be about or represent you.

In this way, Miranda's aggressive over-identification and use of a Federalist Founding Father to represent modern hip-hop and immigrant culture is precisely as subversive, and for many of the same reasons, as the woman-authored fic I read last week about a white male TV character who gets pregnant and gives birth to were-kittens.

Hamilton unites the story of American independence with black, Latino, and Asian actors who were excluded from it, and in doing so allows these excluded citizens to put themselves back into the narrative. Hamilton is not just a story of history - it is the story of the ongoing struggle to make sure that people of color, immigrants, women, and other marginalized citizens are included in the sequel.

Fans of Hamilton don't flock to the musical because of the way it transforms the Founding Fathers.

They flock to Hamilton because of everything the Founding Fathers never were.

Correction: A mention of Lin-Manuel Miranda's immigrant status has been updated for clarity.

How the robot dance took over the world

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Hamilton is fanfic, and its historical critics are totally missing the point

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Earlier this year, the New York Times turned heads by asking whether the hit Broadway musical Hamilton 's historical fudging on certain points is, well, good for us. It's an excellent piece of concern trolling, giving several historians an opportunity to hand-wring about the musical's overglorification of Alexander Hamilton, the immigrant revolutionary who authored the Federalist Papers and founded the US Treasury.

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From the Odyssey, to Robinson Crusoe, to Star Wars - why are we drawn to stories about heroes? And what do they tell us about ourselves? This hour, TED speakers explore what makes a hero's journey.

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The Pop Culture Of Education (ft. CrashCourse)

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We Need Diverse Comics. 2,626 likes · 77 talking about this. Celebrating & promoting diversity in all forms of comics along with their creators and...

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The Harry Potter Alliance turns fans into heroes. We're changing the world by making activism accessible through the power of story.

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A family of artists painted 1,000 rocks for ArtPrize 2016 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. 500 rocks will be on display at the Grand Rapids Children's Museum. 500 matching rocks will be spread around Grand Rapids for a giant game of "I Spy." Keep your eyes open during ArtPrize!

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Making our "Where the Mountain Meets the Moon" video

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Making our "Where the Mountain Meets the Moon" video

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First, the kids' current ages:
Isaac = 12
Gracie = 10
Lily = 8
Elijah = 5

In the beginning of February, I ( Dad) told the kids about the 90-Second Newbery video challenge that had just been issued. They were extremely excited to make our first video review for our blog Bookie Woogie. An important element of our book review blog is the accompanying art the kids create. So I told the kids that maybe we could create our video with a series of pictures. It might even be easy enough to work in some moving parts or puppets.

At this point Isaac said, "Noooooooo... We have to do Shadow Puppets!!!" And our lives were changed forever. He had been playing around with some shadow puppets of his own, and it seemed like a good enough excuse to work some up with a purpose. Little did we know this endeavor would span a solid 3 months!

I drew up a shortlist of Newbery books that I thought had good visual potential. From the first time I had heard about it, I'd wanted to read "Where the Mountain Meets the Moon" by Grace Lin. Once we had the book in hand, we knew it would be the perfect choice for shadow puppets. Even many of the interior illustrations are done in a silhouette-style. We read the book together as a family. LOVED it. And we set about to make our video...

STEP ONE:
First we made a list of our favorite parts in the story.

Then the kids came up with a single statement that they thought captured the MAIN point of the book: "Minli's journey to find the Old Man in the Moon in order to change their fortune."

Because we only had 90 seconds to work with, anything on our list that directly supported that statement got circled, and anything that didn't advance that single idea got set aside.

STEP TWO:
We combined all our favorite parts into a series of scenes. Seven scenes in all.

STEP THREE:
Since video is a visual medium, our next step actually was not writing a script, but rather creating thumbnails to depict each of the seven scenes. We wanted the eventual script to support what we could portray visually. So the kids went scene by scene working up thumbnail suggestions.

Through trial and error, the kids learned some things along the way. We talked about how in visual storytelling, the action moves from left to right. We talked about making the best use of space to support the main action. We talked about clear shapes. We talked about not letting secondary elements distract from the main action. We talked about how composition can lead the eye and focus attention. We talked about alternating perspectives for visual interest.

Here's a peek at some of the thumbnail sketches they worked through:

Isaac:

Gracie:

STEP FOUR:
Looking at our final thumbnail choices, we then composed the script around them. The kids worked out the text while I transcribed their ideas.

STEP FIVE:
Around this time I started thinking about music. After poking around online to see what was available for purchase, I decided to contact my college friend Victor Lams. The kids already love his crazy wacky music:

I asked Victor if he had ever composed anything with an Asian feel. He said he hadn't, but that he would be happy to write some new music for our video. What he came up with was PERFECT! I never could have dreamed the music would fit so well. Thanks Victor!

STEP SIX:
While Victor was writing music, the kids and I recorded the dialog - and had a lot of fun doing it!

STEP SEVEN:
Next the kids set about to do some visual development. Isaac would be making all the puppets, but we wanted everyone to feed him ideas for inspiration. We have pages and pages of sketches, but here are a few:

Minli by Lily:

Minli by Gracie:

Minli by Isaac:

Twins by Lily:

Tiger by Elijah:

Talking Fish by Isaac:

STEP EIGHT:
Using the sketches for inspiration, Isaac worked diligently making all the puppets and backgrounds single-handedly. They are awesome! Many of them have great moving parts. And he came up with lots of clever mechanics to create the visual tricks we'd need.

Here are some of his wonderful puppets:

Dragon and Minli:

A second dragon puppet with lots of fun moving parts:

And look closely... Isaac even added some fun elements into the details on the dragon! If you can make it out, there's a little scene depicting two dragons setting fire to some houses:

The Old Man in the Moon:

The Buffalo Boy:

The Green Tiger:

Adorable Twins:

STEP NINE:
We practiced the puppet show... assigning parts and working on timing.

STEP TEN:
Finally the day came to film our efforts. We rigged up our screen horizontally/flat with the light source above and the camera shooting from below. That way we could lay the puppets on the screen like a tabletop. We matched our performance to the previously recorded audio we had playing in the background. It took us seven takes before we made it through the whole thing without a mistake. We then made it all the way through 3 more times so that we could pick the best performance. Isaac and I then combined all the elements together in iMovie, and we had ourselves a show!

We had a blast making this video. We hope you all enjoy it! We are especially thankful to Grace Lin for writing such a marvelous book, and we hope our little video brings her a bit of the happiness which her book certainly has brought to us!

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Making our "Where the Mountain Meets the Moon" video

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First, the kids' current ages: Isaac = 12 Gracie = 10 Lily = 8 Elijah = 5 In the beginning of February, I ( Dad) told the kids about the 90-Second Newbery video challenge that had just been issued. They were extremely excited to make our first video review for our blog Bookie Woogie.

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Behind the Scenes of Charlotte's Web/Spider-Man mashup

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Behind the Scenes of Charlotte's Web/Spider-Man mashup

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Behind the Scenes of our Charlotte's Web / Spider-Man mashup video

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See the completed video project here: http://youtu.be/ixunHOnscuE Made for the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival

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James Kennedy on All the Wonders Podcast

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James Kennedy on All the Wonders Podcast

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James Kennedy (@iamjameskennedy), author of The Order of Odd-Fish and founder of the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival (@90secondnewbery), stops by the podcast to talk about the stink of worthiness, blood-thirsty monsters, and the most frequently adapted Newbery winner.

About the Author

Matthew Winner

Matthew Winner is an elementary library media specialist in Elkridge, Maryland. He is is the co-founder and content director of All The Wonders, a children's literature website and more, and host of the Let's Get Busy podcast, a weekly podcast where Matthew talks to authors, illustrators, award winners, up-and-comers, and everyone in between. In 2013 Matthew was named a Library Journal Mover & Shaker and was invited to the White House as part of the Champions of Change program. For more information, connect with Matthew on Twitter at @MatthewWinner .

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James Kennedy: Let's Get Busy, Episode 234

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James Kennedy (@iamjameskennedy), author of The Order of Odd-Fish and founder of the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival (@90secondnewbery), stops by the podcast to talk about the stink of worthiness, blood-thirsty monsters, and the most frequently adapted Newbery winner. About the Author Matthew Winner Matthew Winner is an elementary library media specialist in Elkridge, Maryland.

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90-Second Newbery Film Festival in NYC! 

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90-Second Newbery Film Festival in NYC! 

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www.kidlit.tv 90-Sec Newbery Film Festival at the NY Public Library! Hosted by James Kennedy and Ame Dyckman. The 90-Second Newbery Film Festival, founded by James Kennedy, is a video contest held annually for kid filmmakers who create 90-second films to portray and tell the story of a Newbery award-winning book.

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Introducing the 90-Second Newbery (Fuse #8)

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Introducing the 90-Second Newbery (Fuse #8)

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How it all began is anybody's guess, but it probably started with YA author James Kennedy. On a day like any other I received an email from him with a proposal: Why not have a contest where kids created videos of their favorite Newbery books. The catch? All the videos must be 90 seconds or less.

What would that look like? Well, James made a sample video of his own. I bring you . . . The 90-second version of A Wrinkle In Time:

And before you say it, yes Meg isn't wearing glasses in this video. Aside from that, you have to admit it's a lot of fun.

Well, obviously I was gonna be on board with James and his plan. So we put our heads together and came up with a plan. Why not have an honest-to-goodness film festival of the kids' films here at the main branch of New York Public Library as well? Obviously kids from around the country wouldn't be able to necessarily attend, but maybe some of them would. And certainly the kids here in New York would like to see other kids doing their thing. Heck, James and I could even put up a website with the various submissions! He's always been good at displaying the art of his book's fans, after all.

And so it shall be! This fall (date to be determined very soon) we will present the 90-second Film Festival. Know some kids (or a class) interested in participating? In that case, pilfered from James, here are the rules in brief:
1. Your video should be 90 seconds or less. (Okay, okay: if it's three minutes long but absolute genius, we'll bend the rules for you. But let's try to keep them short.) 2. Your video has to be about a Newbery award-winning (or Newbery honor-winning) book. Here's a list of all the winners. 3. Your video must condense the plot of the book in 90 seconds or less. Again, exceptions will be made for something really ingeniously bonkers, but it has to be related to a Newbery winning book. 4. Upload your videos to YouTube or Vimeo or whatever and send me the link at kennedyjames [at] gmail [dot] com. Make the subject line be "90 SECOND NEWBERY" and please tell me your name, age, where you're from, and whatever other comments you'd like to include, including whether you'd like me to link to your personal site. You can give an alias if you want; I understand privacy concerns. 5. Sending the link to me grants me (James Kennedy) the right to post it on my blog and to other websites where I sometimes post content (like Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and to share at public readings, school visits-and hopefully the 90-Second Film Festival at the New York Public Library in the Fall of 2011. 6. Deadline is September 15, 2011.
I'll add in some details of my own. Participants must be between the ages of 0-18. Yes, we will take teenage versions of these books, if they want to participate. Everyone is welcome.

New York Caveat: The film festival will consist of Newbery videos, yes. BUT, New York kids are not restricted to just the Newbery. If your kids want to do one of the books listed on the Children's Books 2010: 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing list, that is a-okay. Equally, if New York teens would like to do any videos you can chose from the Stuff for the Teen Age list. We will present these videos as a secondary party of the film festival. Such submissions, however, should be sent to me rather than James. You can do so by clicking on my name at the beginning of this (or any other) post on this blog and that will take you to my email.

For a series of highly amusing suggestions of how to approach the Newbery part of the contest, head on over to the 90-Second Newbery page and read through Mr. Kennedy's suggestions. And for those of you working in places where YouTube is blocked, you can see the video at Vimeo too.

Have fun!

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Introducing the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival

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How it all began is anybody's guess, but it probably started with YA author James Kennedy. On a day like any other I received an email from him with a proposal: Why not have a contest where kids created videos of their favorite Newbery books. The catch?

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Want to make a 90-Second Newbery movie but don't know where to start? Are you a kid (or a teacher, drama coach, home school coordinator, or librarian) who wants to get a group together to make a 90-Second Newbery, but don't know where to start? We are ready to help! Here is a series of posts that outline a step-by-step method on "How To Make A Great 90-Second Newbery," with more posts to be added soon:
Step 1: Watch Great Previous 90-Second Newberys Step 2: Read The Book And Start Planning Step 3: Breaking Your Story And Writing The Script Step 4: Shot-By-Shot Analysis Of A Wrinkle In Time
You should also check out Deb Ross' detailed curriculum that will help folks create their own awesome 90-Second Newbery video. It also includes meeting instructions, tips on video creation, and worksheets to keep you organized. You can download the free PDF from this page.

The Highland Park Public Library put together a good page of resources for kid filmmakers. Edutopia also put up a page of links of filmmaking resources. If you're new to editing with iMovie, KidLit.TV has a good tutorial.
Free Sound Effects and Music
You video will be a lot snappier if you add sound effects and music! Of course, you can use the audio effects that come bundled with iMovie or MovieMaker. But what if those programs don't have the sound effects or music you're looking for? Or what if you don't want to use the same sounds every other movie uses?

Two recommended websites for free-to-download, free-to-use sound effects are FreeSound and SoundBible.

You can find some great free-to-download, free-to-use music at Incompetech and BenSound.
Special Effects
Ever wanted to put a lightsaber battle in your movie? How about a laser shootout? You can do it all with this super-cheap app called SaberFX. It's only $25! (Want to see a 90-Second Newbery movie that uses it? Here's the 1987 Newbery Medal Winner The Whipping Boy done in the style of complete with lightsabers and space battles!)

Want to put crazy explosions, crashing helicopters, or murderous robots in your movie? Use green screen! You can find a million green screen resources to use for free on YouTube. Here's a collection of tons of crazy green screen effects to get your started.
Case Studies: Behind-The-Scenes on These Great 90-Second Newbery Movies!
A step-by-step description of the Wilmette Public Library's creation of a stop-motion puppet version of Grace Lin's 2010 Honor Book Where the Mountain Meets the Moon.

A blog post detailing the creation of the Zenz family's award-winning 90-Second Newbery for Where the Mountain Meets the Moon.

Behind the scenes of the Zenz family's 90-Second Newbery of E.B. White's 1953 Honor Book Charlotte's Web.

Behind the scenes of the Zenz family's 90-Second Newbery of Arnold Lobel's 1973 Honor Book Frog and Toad Together.

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Want to make a 90-Second Newbery movie but don't know where to start? Are you a kid (or a teacher, drama coach, home school coordinator, or librarian) who wants to get a group together to make a 90-Second Newbery, but don't know where to start? We are ready to help!

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The 90 Second Newbery Film Festival: Kids Make Great Movies Out Of Great Books - Lessons - Tes Teach

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NerdCampMI2017-90-SecondNewbery - Google Slides.90-Second Newbery - Video Resources.Curriculum for Creating a 90-Second Newbery Film.pdf.Best of the 90-Second Newbery.2017 90-Second Newbery Film Festival Opening in Minneapolis, with KELLY BARNHILL, JAMES KENNEDY, and KEIR GRAFF on Vimeo.90-Second Newbery: Brookline Screening Opener with M.T.

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Need inspiration for your own 90-Second Newbery videos? Curious about standout entries from years past? You're in the right place.

The video that kicked off the film festival was this relatively straightforward adaptation that I made of Madeleine L'Engle's 1963 Medal winner, A Wrinkle in Time:

Fun! But a really amazing 90-Second Newbery should be more than a mere summary. Think of a strong cinematic spin that will transform the story. For instance, children's book author Aaron Zenz and his family adapted E.B. White's Charlotte's Web in the style of the opening credits of a 1970s superhero TV show, sung to the tune of "Spider-Man":

Make it weird! Retell the story with an unexpected genre twist! Adapt it in an intriguing format!

For instance, here's Jennings Mergenthal and Max Lau's very funny stop-motion Claymation adaptation of the very first Newbery medal winner, Hendrik Willem van Loon's The Story of Mankind (1922):

(Jennings specializes in adapting nonfiction historical Newbery winners. Check out his other stop-motion masterpieces: a Claymation version of Jim Murphy's 2004 Honor Book An American Plague and most recently a Claymation version of Steve Sheinkin's 2013 Honor Book Bomb: The Race to Build-and Steal-the World's Most Dangerous Weapon.)

How about adapting your book into the style of a black-and-white silent movie? Advantages: you don't have to worry about audio on the set or flubbed lines, you can speed up the film to get that old-fashioned look (making it easier to squeak in under 90 seconds) and use intertitles to move the plot forward. The Aurora Public Library in Illinois ingeniously filmed Avi's 2003 Medal winning Crispin: The Cross of Lead in the style of a black and white silent movie:

Let's say you don't have time to build sets. Or you're stuck doing all your filming inside a school. What do you do? Use green screen! Facets Cinematheque's Chicago International Children's Film Festival adapted Neil Gaiman's 2009 Newbery Medal winner The Graveyard Book (in the style of a horror movie, appropriately) using green screens, a homemade puppet monster operated with hidden strings, voiceover, sped-up footage, sound effects, creepy soundtrack music and even turning the lights on and off rapidly to get the horror movie feel:

Different "spins" on the same book can yield fascinatingly different results. For instance, in Beverly Cleary's 1978 Honor Book Ramona and Her Father, Ramona's father Mr. Quimby loses his job and gets depressed. Ramona tries to make her father stop smoking. The family's nerves are strained. The Quimbys do have one nice night carving a pumpkin, but then their cat Picky-Picky devours and ruins the pumpkin in the middle of the night. Mr. Quimby eventually gets a new job.

Straightforward, right? But what if you do all of that ... in the style of a musical?

Pro tips if you're going to do your movie as a musical: get the song lyrics super tight, making every line either push the story forward, express an emotion, or be funny (preferably all three!). If you're doing a takeoff of a known song, you can find the karaoke version online. It's funniest when the rewritten lyrics totally contradict the original song, like the way this group used "Happy." Spend A LOT of time recording the song in Audacity or iMovie or wherever, and then when it's time to film, lip-synch the songs that you play on-set, but when you're editing, replace the on-set audio with the pre-recorded audio. Don't attempt to use the song audio that you recorded on set, it won't sound good! And always definitely put the lyrics in the subtitles, so the audience can understand everything.

Now, if you were adapting Ramona and Her Father, how do you try to top a musical? Well, how about going all the way into the hyperspace of weirdness: by adapting Ramona and Her Father in the style of a James Bond movie!

Wait what?! Think about it: What if Ramona's father was James Bond? And instead of losing his normal job, he was sacked from MI6? And their cat Picky-Picky was actually a secret agent working for the villainous Blofeld ... ?

Notice if we're going to do an adaptation that pivots off a particular well-known movie genre, it works best when we fulfill all the "promises" of the genre. For instance, a James Bond movie will always have gunplay, ridiculous English accents, double entendres, a scene with the gadget guy "Q," a scene with some bloviating ostentatious villain, fights, explosions, James Bond music, a martini "shaken not stirred," etc. The juxtaposition of that with ordinary suburban life is exactly what makes it funny. The lesson: find a genre twist that is as far as possible from the source material!

I also loved how this movie completely dispensed with the plot of the original book at the end. In certain cases, that's OK! As long as you follow most of the plot faithfully at first, and your changes are funny enough, you can veer off into craziness at the end of your movie.

For instance, how about doing Richard and Florence Atwater's 1939 Honor Book Mr. Popper's Penguins as a zombie apocalypse?

A lot of these Newbery movies have big casts, but you can also do a 90-Second Newbery all by yourself, as a one-person show. Like this fantastic one-man version of Lois Lowry's 1994 Medal winner The Giver, by Brooklyn up-and-comer Leo Lion:

Another option if you don't want to deal with live actors, or if you want more control over your sets: use puppets, like the Bookie Woogie blog did for their adaptation of the "Dragons and Giants" vignette from Arnold Lobel's 1973 Honor Book Frog and Toad Together:

Again, it's fun to see how different filmmakers handle the same material. Here's another take on Frog and Toad Together, of the vignette called "The List," by Sara Truscott of Tacoma, WA. This one brilliantly transforms Frog and Toad into a love story like a Wes Anderson movie or French ye-ye pop music video:

If you've read Sid Fleischman's 1987 Newbery Medal winner The Whipping Boy, you know that it's a funny adventure about a poor boy who is hired by the royal family to be whipped in the prince's place when the bratty prince misbehaves (it's against the law to hit a prince). The Schaumburg District Township Library retold the story in the style of Star Wars, complete with lightsabers, spaceship chase scenes, and lasers! (If you're interested in adding lightsabers and lasers to your video, check out the easy-to-use SaberFX software.)

But you don't necessarily need elaborate filmmaking to create a great 90-Second Newbery! For instance, Jacob von Borg of Portland wanted to make a 90-Second Newbery of Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's 1992 Medal winner Shiloh, which is about a boy and his dog. The catch: Jacob didn't have a dog available! But Jacob was resourceful, and his solution made the movie much funnier than if it'd actually featured a dog:

Speaking of animals, this paper-puppet version adaptation of Joyce Sidman's 2011 Honor book of poetry, Dark Emperor and Other Poems of the Night, covers all 12 poems in the book, each about a different night animal. Many Newbery winners are books of poetry, which actually makes for a natural fit for a 90-Second Newbery, since those books are short and invite interpretation. This one is by kids from the Lozano Branch Library in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago:

Speaking of puppets, here's another creative way to adapt your book: as a shadow-puppet show! The first movie I ever got from 90-Second Newbery superstars Aaron Zenz and family was this incredible adaptation of Grace Lin's 2010 Honor book Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, done entirely with shadow puppets (which went on to win a "Trailee Award" in 2011 from the School Library Journal):

Here are two more Claymation 90-Second Newbery movies, both of them by Anya Schooler of Portland, OR. They're amazing movies, pretty much professional level! First, Ruth Gannet's 1949 Honor Book My Father's Dragon:

That movie does so much without any dialogue at all, just pure visual storytelling! A triumph! Here's another movie by Anya, this time of Mary and Conrad Buff's 1952 Honor Book, The Apple and the Arrow. These clay figures are better actors than most people! And the Claymation is so fluid and beautiful!

These movies are amazing, but don't be intimidated! Special effects and arty styles can be a lot of hard work, but it takes nothing but ingenuity, resourcefulness, and careful editing for your movie to be hilarious. Check out this very funny adaptation of Megan Whalen Turner's 1997 Honor Book The Thief, by kids from St. Andrews Episcopal School in Saratoga, California. Best use of a riding mower in a movie ever:

Have you read Margi Preus' terrific 2011 Honor Book Heart of a Samurai? The kids of Chicago's Burley Elementary School filmed it in the style of an Akira Kurosawa-style samurai movie-and all in Japanese! (Don't worry, there are subtitles.) How about teaming up with the language teacher at your school to do The Giver in Spanish? Or Flora and Ulysses in Mandarin? Go for it!

Even making a movie that's only 90 seconds long still involves an insane amount of work. The solution? You can break the book into four parts, and assign four different groups to adapt the four different parts, each in a different style! Such a fragmented style is particularly well-suited for William Bowen's 1922 Newbery Medal winner The Olde Tobacco Shoppe: A True Account of What Befell A Little Boy in Search of Adventure, one of the more bonkers entries in the Newbery canon, adapted here by Portland Youth Media's Thursday Thing media club:

Speaking of Portland, Laurelhurst Elementary School of Portland, Oregon filmed this hard-to-beat Witch of Blackbird Pond as a class project, and it's fantastic (I love how all the romantic subplots are resolved in 10 seconds):

Do you have some talent that can be used in your movie, like singing or songwriting or playing an musical instrument? Elephant and Worm Theater Company of Chicago did this FULL-SCALE MUSICAL of William Pene du Bois' 1948 Medal winner, The 21 Balloons. Are you a school librarian who wants to do the 90-Second Newbery, but you're unsure how to proceed? Consider teaming up with your school's music department (to make music) or art department (for set design) or drama department (for acting) for a truly cross-disciplinary project!

(Completists should also check out Elephant and Worm's similarly awesome adaptation of Robert C. O'Brien's 1972 Medal winner Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, complete with rat-rap, giant cat, fourth-wall-breaking, and cute costumes.)

Lately Minecraft has become super popular. But did you know that you can make movies in this game? What an opportunity for a 90-Second Newbery movie! After all, you can construct any elaborate or exotic set you want, because you're just dealing in pixels. You can put the camera in all kinds of impossible places. It's like Minecraft was made for the 90-Second Newbery! Here is the Tacoma Public Library's take on Wanda Gag's 1929 Honor Book Millions of Cats:

The most successful 90-Second Newberys retell the book in an unexpected filmmaking genre. For instance, the next movie is of Charlotte's Web, but completely different, because it's done as a horror movie! It makes sense, actually. The very first line of the book is "Where's Papa going with that ax?", the plot hinges around a spider using unnatural powers, at any moment our hero might get butchered and eaten, and it ends with thousands of spiders spawning all over the countryside. Warning: this movie is actually kind of scary!

CHILLS YET? Also, notice that this one was a bit longer than 90 seconds. That's okay, as long as the quality is high. We're unlikely to accept anything that pushes four minutes, but if your entry is super inventive and engaging, we'll let it slide. Just remember, every second you go over the 90-second limit, the more critical the judges will be. That said, if it really and truly takes a full 3 minutes to culminate your genius vision, go for it!

Here's another genre twist: taking the medieval soliloquies of Laura Amy Schlitz's 2008 Newbery Medal winner Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village and putting them in the context of a medieval reality show-yes, "The Real Housewives of Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!"

The best genre twists are the ones that seem counterintuitive at first, but on reflection make total sense. For instance, Karen Cushman's 1996 Medal winner The Midwife's Apprentice is set in medieval England in the book, but it has the structure of a "stranger-comes-to-town" Western. So why not adapt it using all the stylistic choices and tropes of an old Sergio Leone spaghetti western, complete with old-west slang, cowboy hats, and gunplay?

Rap is well-suited for making a 90-Second Newbery, because if you're a good enough rapper, your rapid-fire flow can get across a lot of info in a very short time. Jamie Molitor's Media Arts class from the Fine Arts Interdisciplinary Resource (FAIR) School in Crystal, MN adapted Louis Sachar's 1999 Newbery Medal winner Holes in rap style! If you've ever wondered what Minnesota-style rap is like, we've got you covered. These students created the beat from scratch, too:

Here's one more by the Zenz family. It's Lloyd Alexander's 1966 Honor book The Black Cauldron, but in a different style-animating their daughter's drawings of the book while her voiceover hilariously explains the plot:

Okay, okay! That's quite enough! Hopefully these exemplary videos are enough to spark your imagination for your own 90-Second Newbery videos. Thank you everyone who made these movies!

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Need inspiration for your own 90-Second Newbery videos? Curious about standout entries from years past? You're in the right place. The video that kicked off the film festival was this relatively straightforward adaptation that I made of Madeleine L'Engle's 1963 Medal winner, A Wrinkle in Time: Fun!

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What Does The Doctor Mean to You? | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios

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How is Ms. Marvel Changing Media for the Better?

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How is Ms. Marvel Changing Media for the Better?

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How is Ms. Marvel Changing Media for the Better? | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios

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Classroom Activities - Fanfiction for Literacy

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A Professional Development workshop for secondary English teachers about incorporating fanfiction into your classroom.

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Rethinking Popular Culture and Media: Introduction

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Corporations also seek to define the tastes of children and adolescents through how they market toys and other children's culture. Authors in this section point out how ideas created in a marketing boardroom such as "age compression" or the decision to package Disney princesses together have implications for teaching.

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NCTE Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education

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NCTE Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education

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Adopted by the NCTE Executive Committee, November 2008
By: National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE), Student Television Network (STN), Media Commission of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), Action Coalition for Media Education (ACME), and Visual Communication Division of the International Communication Association (ICA)

WHAT THIS IS
This document is a code of best practices that helps educators using media literacy concepts and techniques to interpret the copyright doctrine of fair use. Fair use is the right to use copyrighted material without permission or payment under some circumstances - especially when the cultural or social benefits of the use are predominant. It is a general right that applies even in situations where the law provides no specific authorization for the use in question - as it does for certain narrowly defined classroom activities.

This guide identifies five principles that represent the media literacy education community's current consensus about acceptable practices for the fair use of copyrighted materials, wherever and however it occurs: in K-12 education, in higher education, in nonprofit organizations that offer programs for children and youth, and in adult education.

WHAT THIS ISN'T
This code of best practices does not tell you the limits of fair use rights. Instead, it describes how those rights should apply in certain recurrent situations. Educators' and students' fair use rights may, of course, extend to other situations as well.

It's not a guide to using material that people give the public permission to use, such as works covered by Creative Commons licenses. Anyone can use those works the way their owners authorize - although other uses may also be permitted under the fair use doctrine. Likewise, it is not a guide to the use of material that has been specifically licensed (by a school, for example), which may be subject to contractual limitations.

It's not a guide to material that is already free to use without considering copyright . For instance, all federal government works are in the public domain, as are many older works. For more information on "free use," consult the document " Yes, You Can! "

It's not a guide to using material that someone wants to license but cannot trace back to an owner - the so-called "orphan works" problem. However, orphan works are also eligible for fair use consideration, according to the principles detailed below.

And it does not address the problems created by the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which creates barriers to otherwise lawful fair uses of copyrighted materials that are available only in formats that incorporate technological protections measures (such as encryption).

HOW THIS DOCUMENT WAS CREATED
This code of best practices was created by convening ten meetings with more than 150 members of leading educational associations, including signatories to this document, and other educators across the United States. The process was coordinated by Profs. Renee Hobbs (Media Education Lab, Temple University), Peter Jaszi (Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, Washington College of Law, American University) and Patricia Aufderheide (Center for Social Media, American University). The code of best practices was reviewed by a committee of legal scholars and lawyers expert in copyright and fair use. (Consult the end of this document for a complete list of signatories and members of the legal committee.)

MEDIA LITERACY EDUCATION
Media literacy is the capacity to access, analyze, evaluate, and communicate messages in a wide variety of forms. This expanded conceptualization of literacy responds to the demands of cultural participation in the 21st century. Like literacy in general, media literacy includes both receptive and productive dimensions, encompassing critical analysis and communication skills, particularly in relationship to mass media, popular culture, and digital media. Like literacy in general, media literacy is applied in a wide variety of contexts - when watching television or reading newspapers, for example, or when posting commentary to a blog. Indeed, media literacy is implicated everywhere one encounters information and entertainment content. And like literacy in general, media literacy can be taught and learned.

Media literacy education may occur as a separate program or course but often it is embedded within other subject areas, including literature, history, anthropology, sociology, public health, journalism, communication, and education. It can occur in formal educational settings in both K-12 education and at the university level, as well as in nonprofit community-based programs. Its content may vary as well - from lessons designed to expose the mechanics of how language, images, sound, music, and graphic design operate as symbolic forms for transmitting meanings to exercises designed to reinforce these understandings through hands-on media making.

Media literacy education distinctively features the analytical attitude that teachers and learners, working together, adopt toward the media objects they study. The foundation of effective media analysis is the recognition that:

All media messages are constructed.

Each medium has different characteristics and strengths and a unique language of construction.

Media messages are produced for particular purposes.

All media messages contain embedded values and points of view.

People use their individual skills, beliefs and experiences to construct their own meanings from media messages.

Media and media messages can influence beliefs, attitudes, values, behaviors, and the democratic process.

Making media and sharing it with listeners, readers, and viewers is essential to the development of critical thinking and communication skills. Feedback deepens reflection on one's own editorial and creative choices and helps students grasp the power of communication.

USE OF MEDIA IN EDUCATION vs. MEDIA LITERACY EDUCATION
Teachers have always used texts, now including audiovisual and digital material, to convey facts and information. From time to time, the school is also a venue for entertainment, as when a film is screened to reward the class. These activities, however, are not media literacy education. Rather than transforming the media material in question, they use that content for essentially the same purposes for which it originally was intended - to instruct or to entertain. In many or even most cases, of course, these uses of media will not have significant copyright implications, either because the content in question has been licensed or because it is covered by one of the specific exemptions for teachers in Sections 110(1) and (2) of the Copyright Act (for "face-to-face" in the classroom and equivalent distance practices in distance education). Teachers involved in media literacy education may, of course, sometimes make use of licensed materials or take advantage of the provisions of Section 110. But this guide addresses another set of issues: the transformative uses of copyright materials in media literacy education that can flourish only with a robust understanding of fair use.

COPYRIGHT: A CONTENTIOUS CLIMATE New norms of information sharing - file sharing, downloading, podcasting - are emerging at the very moment when copyright owners are attempting to capture new revenue streams from various sources, including the "educational market." As documented in the report, " The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy," educators involved in media literacy feel uncertain in this new environment of heightened commodification. On the one hand, they sense that copyrighted material should be available for their activities and those of their learners, and that such availability has great social and cultural utility. But on the other, they are aware of the increased vigilance with which copyright owners are enforcing their rights. And their actual understanding of the subject is incomplete or even distorted. As a result, there is a climate of increased fear and confusion about copyright, which detracts from the quality of teaching. Lack of clarity reduces learning and limits the ability to use digital tools. Some educators close their classroom doors and hide what they fear is infringement; others hyper-comply with imagined rules that are far stricter than the law requires, limiting the effectiveness of their teaching and their students' learning.

FAIR USE AND EDUCATION
Educators and learners in media literacy often make uses of copyrighted materials that stand far outside the marketplace, for instance, in the classroom, at a conference, or within a school-wide or district-wide festival. Such uses, especially when they occur within a restricted-access network, do enjoy certain copyright advantages. As a practical matter, they may be less likely to be challenged by rights holders. More important, however, if challenged they would be more likely to receive special consideration under the fair use doctrine - because they occur within an educational setting.

From the beginnings of fair use in the courts, judges have drawn the connection between this special doctrine of copyright law and the central importance of education in the American republic. The word "education" appears prominently in the preamble to Section 107 of the current Copyright Act, where the doctrine is codified. In addition, educators who rely reasonably on fair use are insulated against statutory damages in Sec 504(c)(2). However, there have been no important court decisions - in fact, very few decisions of any kind - that actually interpret and apply the doctrine in an educational context. This means that educators who want to claim the benefits of fair use have a rare opportunity to be open and public about asserting the appropriateness of their practices and the justifications for them. This code is intended to support such assertions. It also means that educators seeking to arrive at a reasonable and balanced understanding of the doctrine, like the authors of this code, need to reason from first principles.

Law provides copyright protection to creative works in order to foster the creation of culture. Its best known feature is protection of owners' rights. But copying, quoting, and generally re-using existing cultural material can be, under some circumstances, a critically important part of generating new culture. In fact, the cultural value of copying is so well established that it is written into the social bargain at the heart of copyright law. The bargain is this: we as a society give limited property rights to creators to encourage them to produce culture; at the same time, we give other creators the chance to use that same copyrighted material, without permission or payment, in some circumstances. Without the second half of the bargain, we could all lose important new cultural work.

Copyright law has several features that permit quotations from copyrighted works without permission or payment, under certain conditions. Fair use is the most important of these features. It has been an important part of copyright law for more than 170 years. Where it applies, fair use is a user's right. In fact, as the Supreme Court has pointed out, fair use keeps copyright from violating the First Amendment. New creation inevitably incorporates existing material. As copyright protects more works for longer periods than ever before, creators face new challenges: licenses to incorporate copyrighted sources become more expensive and more difficulty to obtain - and sometimes are simply unavailable. As a result, fair use is more important today than ever before.

Copyright law does not exactly specify how to apply fair use, and that gives the fair use doctrine a flexibility that works to the advantage of users. Creative needs and practices differ with the field, with technology, and with time. Rather than following a specific formula, lawyers and judges decide whether an unlicensed use of copyrighted material is "fair" according to a "rule of reason." This means taking all the facts and circumstances into account to decide if an unlicensed use of copyrighted material generates social or cultural benefits that are greater than the costs it imposes on the copyright owner.

Fair use is flexible; it is not unreliable. In fact, for any particular field of critical or creative activity, lawyers and judges consider expectations and practice in assessing what is "fair" within that field. In weighing the balance at the heart of fair use analysis, judges refer to four types of considerations mentioned in the law: the nature of the use, the nature of the work used, the extent of the use, and its economic effect (the so-called "four factors"). This still leaves much room for interpretation, especially since the law is clear that these are not the only permissible considerations. So how have judges interpreted fair use? In reviewing the history of fair use litigation, we find that judges return again and again to two key questions:

Did the unlicensed use "transform" the material taken from the copyrighted work by using it for a different purpose than that of the original, or did it just repeat the work for the same intent and value as the original?

Was the material taken appropriate in kind and amount, considering the nature of the copyrighted work and of the use?

If the answers to these two questions are "yes," a court is likely to find a use fair. Because that is true, such a use is unlikely to be challenged in the first place.

Both key questions touch on, among other things, the question of whether the use will cause excessive economic harm to the copyright owner. Courts have told us that copyright owners aren't entitled to an absolute monopoly over transformative uses of their works. By the same token, however, when a use supplants a copyright owner's core market, it is unlikely to be fair. Thus, for example, a textbook author cannot quote large parts of a competitor's book merely to avoid the trouble of writing her own exposition.

Another consideration underlies and influences the way in which these questions are analyzed: whether the user acted reasonably and in good faith, in light of general practice in his or her particular field. Media literacy educators' ability to rely on fair use will be enhanced by this code of best practices, which will serve as documentation of commonly held understandings drawn from the experience of educators themselves and supported by legal analysis. Thus, the code helps to show that the uses of copyrighted materials described here are reasonable and appropriate for the purposes of teaching and learning.

Fair use is in wide and vigorous use today in many professional communities. For example, historians regularly quote both other historians' writings and textual sources; filmmakers and visual artists use, reinterpret and critique copyright material, while scholars illustrate cultural commentary with textual, visual, and musical examples. Equally important is the example of commercial news media. Fair use is healthy and vigorous in daily broadcast television news, where references to popular films, classic TV programs, archival images, and popular songs are constant and routinely unlicensed.

In some cases professional communities have set forth their understandings in consensus documents, which may be useful to educators and learners if they are involved with these creative practices. For instance, documentary filmmakers have established their own code; so have film scholars, who routinely use popular films in their teaching; and now a code of best practices has been established for online video creators as well. Although professional groups create such codes, no one needs to be a member of a professional group to benefit from their interpretations. For instance, anyone who does media literacy education, in any circumstances, can usefully employ this code's principles.

THE TYRANNY OF GUIDELINES AND EXPERTS
Today, some educators mistakenly believe that the issues covered in the fair use principles below are not theirs to decide. They believe they must follow various kinds of "expert" guidance offered by others. In fact, the opposite is true. The various negotiated agreements that have emerged since passage of the Copyright Act of 1976 have never had the force of law, and in fact, the guidelines bear little relationship to the actual doctrine of fair use. Sadly, as legal scholar Kenneth Crews has demonstrated in "The Law of Fair Use Guidelines," The Ohio State Law Journal 62 (2001): 602-700, many publications for educators reproduce the guidelines uncritically, presenting them as standards that must be adhered to in order to act lawfully. Experts (often non-lawyers) give conference workshops for K-12 teachers, technology coordinators, and library or media specialists where these guidelines and similar sets of purported rules are presented with rigid, official-looking tables and charts. At the same time, materials on copyright for the educational community tend to overstate the risk of educators being sued for copyright infringement - and in some cases convey outright misinformation about the subject. In effect, they interfere with genuine understanding of the purpose of copyright - to promote the advancement of knowledge through balancing the rights of owners and users.

In fact, this is an area in which educators themselves should be leaders rather than followers. Often, they can assert their own rights under fair use to make these decisions on their own, without approval. In rare cases where doing so would bring them into conflict with misguided institutional policies, they should assert their rights and seek to have those policies changed. More generally, educators should share their knowledge of fair use rights with library and media specialists, technology specialists, and other school leaders to assure that their fair use rights are put into institutional practice.

Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education

GENERAL POINTS ABOUT PRINCIPLES
Through its five principles, this code of best practices identifies five sets of current practices in the use of copyrighted materials in media literacy education to which the doctrine of fair use clearly applies. These practices are associated with K-12 education, higher education, and in classes given by nonprofit organizations. When students or educators use copyrighted materials in their own creative work outside of an educational context, they can rely on fair use guidelines created by other creator groups, including documentary filmmakers and online video producers.

These principles apply to all forms of media. Depending on the instructional goal,
educators may use materials designed for entertainment and for persuasive or
advocacy purposes. They may use print, images, Web sites, moving-image media,
and sound media-in both analog and digital forms. In all cases, a digital copy is the
same as a hard copy in terms of fair use. Veteran teachers may keep clippings from
newspapers in manila file folders to use for media literacy education; younger ones
may store their materials as digital files. Functionally, their practices are identical.

The principles apply in institutional settings and to non-school-based programs. Media
literacy education may occur in university classrooms, in elementary schools, in
computer labs in community technology centers, or in after-school and summer camp
programs run by religious groups or nonprofit organizations. In addition to their fair
use rights, teachers in conventional schools enjoy the benefit of limited educational
exemptions under Section 110(1) and (2) of the Copyright Act. Educators in
community-based organizations may not be covered by these exemptions, but they
still can claim the right to use copyrighted materials under the doctrine of fair use.

The principles concern the unlicensed fair use of copyrighted materials for education, not the way those materials were acquired. When a user's copy was obtained illegally or in bad faith, that fact may affect fair use analysis. Otherwise, of course, where a use is fair, it is irrelevant whether the source of the content in question was a recorded over-the-air broadcast, a teacher's personal copy of a newspaper or a DVD, or a rented or borrowed piece of media. Labels on commercial media products proclaiming that they are "licensed for home [or private or educational or noncommercial] use only" do not affect in any way the educator's ability to make fair use of the contents-in fact, such legends have no legal effect whatsoever. (If a teacher is using materials subject to a license agreement negotiated by the school or school system, however, she may be
bound by the terms of that license.)

The principles are all subject to a "rule of proportionality." Educators' and students' fair
use rights extend to the portions of copyrighted works that they need to accomplish
their educational goals-and sometimes even to small or short works in their entirety.
By the same token, the fairness of a use depends, in part, on whether the user took
more than was needed to accomplish his or her legitimate purpose. That said, there are
no numerical rules of thumb that can be relied upon in making this determination.

PRINCIPLES

PRINCIPLE: Under fair use, educators using the concepts and techniques of media
literacy can choose illustrative material from the full range of copyrighted sources
and make them available to learners, in class, in workshops, in informal mentoring
and teaching settings, and on school-related Web sites.

LIMITATIONS: Educators should choose material that is germane to the project or
topic, using only what is necessary for the educational goal or purpose for which it
is being made. In some cases, this will mean using a clip or excerpt; in other cases,
the whole work is needed. Whenever possible, educators should provide proper
attribution and model citation practices that are appropriate to the form and context of use. Where illustrative material is made available in digital formats, educators should provide reasonable protection against third-party access and downloads.

TWO: Employing Copyrighted Materials in Preparing Curriculum Materials
DESCRIPTION: Teachers use copyrighted materials in the creation of lesson plans,
materials, tool kits, and curricula in order to apply the principles of media literacy
education and use digital technologies effectively in an educational context. These
materials often include clips, copies or examples of copyrighted work along with a
description of instructional practices, assignments, and assessment criteria. These
materials may include samples of contemporary mass media and popular culture as
well as older media texts that provide historical or cultural context.

PRINCIPLE: Under fair use, educators using the concepts and techniques of media
literacy can integrate copyrighted material into curriculum materials, including
books, workbooks, podcasts, DVD compilations, videos, Web sites, and other
materials designed for learning.

LIMITATIONS: Wherever possible, educators should provide attribution for quoted
material, and of course they should use only what is necessary for the educational
goal or purpose. The materials should meet professional standards for curriculum
development, with clearly stated educational objectives, a description of instructional
practices, assignments, and assessment criteria.

THREE: Sharing Media Literacy Curriculum Materials
DESCRIPTION: Media literacy curriculum materials always include copyrighted
content from mass media and popular culture. Informal sharing of these materials
occurs at educational conferences and through professional development programs,
as well by electronic means. Media literacy curriculum materials are also developed
commercially in collaboration with publishers or nonprofit organizations.

PRINCIPLE: Educators using concepts and techniques of media literacy should be able
to share effective examples of teaching about media and meaning with one another,
including lessons and resource materials. If curriculum developers are making sound decisions on fair use when they create their materials, then their work should be able to be seen, used, and even purchased by anyone-since fair use applies to commercial materials as well as those produced outside the marketplace model.

LIMITATIONS: In materials they wish to share, curriculum developers should be
especially careful to choose illustrations from copyrighted media that are necessary
to meet the educational objectives of the lesson, using only what furthers the
educational goal or purpose for which it is being made. Often this may mean using
a small portion, clip or excerpt, rather than an entire work, although sometimes it
may be permissible to use more-or even all. Curriculum developers should not
rely on fair use when using copyrighted third-party images or texts to promote their
materials. For promotional purposes, the permissions process is appropriate. In
addition, if a teacher or a school has specifically agreed to a license, then (of course)
its terms are likely to be binding-even if they impinge on what would otherwise be
considered fair use. And, of course, illustrative material should be properly attributed
wherever possible.

FOUR: Student Use of Copyrighted Materials in Their Own Academic and Creative Work
DESCRIPTION: Students strengthen media literacy skills by creating messages and
using such symbolic forms as language, images, sound, music, and digital media to
express and share meaning. In learning to use video editing software and in creating
remix videos, students learn how juxtaposition reshapes meaning. Students include
excerpts from copyrighted material in their own creative work for many purposes,
including for comment and criticism, for illustration, to stimulate public discussion,
or in incidental or accidental ways (for example, when they make a video capturing a
scene from everyday life where copyrighted music is playing).

PRINCIPLE: Because media literacy education cannot thrive unless learners themselves
have the opportunity to learn about how media functions at the most practical
level, educators using concepts and techniques of media literacy should be free to
enable learners to incorporate, modify, and re-present existing media objects in their
own classroom work. Media production can foster and deepen awareness of the
constructed nature of all media, one of the key concepts of media literacy. The basis
for fair use here is embedded in good pedagogy.

LIMITATIONS: Students' use of copyrighted material should not be a substitute for
creative effort. Students should be able to understand and demonstrate, in a manner
appropriate to their developmental level, how their use of a copyrighted work
repurposes or transforms the original. For example, students may use copyrighted
music for a variety of purposes, but cannot rely on fair use when their goal is simply
to establish a mood or convey an emotional tone, or when they employ popular songs
simply to exploit their appeal and popularity. Again, material that is incorporated
under fair use should be properly attributed wherever possible. Students should be
encouraged to make their own careful assessments of fair use and should be reminded
that attribution, in itself, does not convert an infringing use into a fair one.

FIVE: Developing Audiences for Student Work
DESCRIPTION: Students who are expected to behave responsibly as media creators
and who are encouraged to reach other people outside the classroom with their work
learn most deeply. Although some student media productions are simply learning
exercises designed to develop knowledge and skills, media literacy educators often
design assignments so that students have the opportunity to distribute their work.

PRINCIPLE: Educators should work with learners to make a reasoned decision
about distribution that reflects sound pedagogy and ethical values. In some
cases, widespread distribution of students' work (via the Internet, for example) is
appropriate. If student work that incorporates, modifies, and re-presents existing
media content meets the transformativeness standard, it can be distributed to wide
audiences under the doctrine of fair use.

LIMITATIONS: Educators and learners in media literacy often make uses of copyrighted works outside the marketplace, for instance in the classroom, a conference, or within a school-wide or district-wide festival. When sharing is confined to a delimited network, such uses are more likely to receive special consideration under the fair use doctrine.

Especially in situations where students wish to share their work more broadly (by distributing it to the public, for example, or including it as part of a personal portfolio), educators should take the opportunity to model the real-world permissions process, with explicit emphasis not only on how that process works, but also on how it affects media making. In particular, educators should explore with students the distinction between material that should be licensed, material that is in the public domain or otherwise openly available, and copyrighted material that is subject to fair use. The ethical obligation to provide proper attribution also should be examined. And students should be encouraged to understand how their distribution of a work raises other ethical and social issues, including the privacy of the subjects involved in the media production..

CONCLUSION
Most "copyright education" that educators and learners have encountered has been shaped by the concerns of commercial copyright holders, whose understandable concern about large-scale copyright piracy has caused them to equate any unlicensed use of copyrighted material with stealing. The situation has been compounded by the-again understandable-risk-aversion of school system administrators and lawyers. So-called fair use guidelines that institutional stakeholders have negotiated with some copyright holders have had similar results, intensifying fear and creating confusion among educators. These approaches have not responded directly to the actual needs of educators and learners, nor have they fully expressed or recognized the legal rights that educators and learners have.

This code of best practices, by contrast, is shaped by educators for educators and the learners they serve, with the help of legal advisors. As an important first step in reclaiming their fair use rights, educators should employ this document to inform their own practices in the classroom and beyond. The next step is for educators to communicate their own learning about copyright and fair use to others, both through practice and through education. Learners mastering the concepts and techniques of media literacy need to learn about the important rights that all new creators, including themselves, have under copyright to use existing materials. Educators also need to share their knowledge and practice with critically important institutional allies and colleagues, such as librarians and school administrators.

COMMON MYTHS ABOUT FAIR USE

MYTH: Fair Use Is Too Unclear and Complicated for Me; It's Better Left to Lawyers and Administrators.
Truth: The fair use provision of the Copyright Act is written broadly - not narrowly - because it is designed to apply to a wide range of creative works and the people who use them. Fair use is a part of the law that belongs to everyone - especially to working educators. Educators know best what they need to use of existing copyrighted culture to construct their own lessons and materials. Only members of the actual community can decide what's really needed. Once they know, they can tell their lawyers and administrators.

MYTH: School System Rules Are the Last Word of Fair Use by Educators.
Truth : If your school system's rules let you do everything you need to do, you certainly don't need this code. But if you need to exercise your fair use rights to get your work done well, in ways that your system's rules don't foresee, that's a different story. In that case, the code may help you change the rules! Many school policies are based on so-called negotiated fair use guidelines, as discussed above. In their implementation of those guidelines, systems tend to confuse a limited "safe harbor" zone of absolute security for the entire range of possibility fair use makes available.

MYTH: If I'm Not Making Any Money Off It, It's Fair Use. (And If I Am Making Money Off It, It's Not.)
Truth: "Noncommercial use" can be a plus in fair use analysis, but its scope is hard to define. If educators or learners want to share their work only with a class (or another defined, closed group) they are in a favorable position. However, some more public uses may be unfair even if no money is exchanged. So if work is going to be shared widely, it is good to be able to rely on transformativeness. As the cases show, a transformative
new work can be highly commercial in intent and effect and qualify under the fair use doctrine.

Coordinators:
The Media Education Lab, founded by Professor Renee Hobbs, improves media literacy education through scholarship and community service. The lab is a project of the School of Communications and Theater at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, led by Dean Concetta Stewart.

The Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, led by Professor Peter Jaszi, promotes social justice in law governing information dissemination and intellectual property through research, scholarship, public events, advocacy, and provision of legal and consulting services. The program is a project of the Washington College of Law at American University in Washington, D.C., led by Dean Claudio Grossman.

The Center for Social Media, led by Professor Patricia Aufderheide, showcases and analyzes media for social justice, civil society, and democracy, and the public environment that nurtures them. The center is a project of the School of Communication, led by Dean Larry Kirkman, at American University in Washington, D.C.

Signatories:
Action Coalition for Media Education: A member-supported, independent, nonprofit educational coalition of educators, students, health professionals, journalists, media makers, parents, activists, and other citizens.

Media Education Foundation: Produces and distributes films, study guides, and other teaching materials that examine the impact of media on society.

National Association for Media Literacy Education: Formerly Alliance for a Media Literate America, a national membership organization dedicated to advancing the practice of media literacy education in the United States.

National Council of Teachers of English: A 60,000-member international organization devoted to improving the teaching and learning of English and the language arts at all levels of education.

Visual Communication Studies Division of the International Communication Association: A division examining visual representation in all its forms, within an academic association for scholars interested in the study of communication with more
than 3,500 members in 65 countries.

Legal Advisory Board:
Jamie B. Bischoff
Ballard Spahr Andrews and Ingersoll LLP
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Robert W. Clarida
Cowan, Liebowitz, and Latman, P.C.
New York, New York

Kenneth D. Crews
Copyright Advisory Office
Columbia University
New York, New York

Michael J. Madison
University of Pittsburgh
School of Law
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Jennifer Urban
Intellectual Property and Technology Law Clinic
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, California
Funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, with Feel free to reproduce this work in its entirety. For excerpts and quotations, depend upon fair use. additional support from the Ford Foundation through the Future of Public Media Project.

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Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education - NCTE

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Adopted by the NCTE Executive Committee, November 2008 By: National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE), Student Television Network (STN), Media Commission of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), Action Coalition for Media Education (ACME), and Visual Communication Division of the International Communication Association (ICA) WHAT THIS IS This document is a code of best practices that helps educators using media literacy concepts and techniques to interpret the copyright doctrine of fair use.

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Just like any book-to-movie, or comic book-to-movie, adaptation the manga version of an anime will often have tons material that didn't make it to the screen. Some anime act like an alternate dimension, missing characters and straying wildly from the original plot, others will start off in the same place as the books, and then end up in a radically different spot. Occasionally, when you are very lucky, a manga series will keep going past the last episode of a series. This means that you get all new story lines and character arcs, and is a beautiful thing if you have become attached to the characters (I am looking at YOU Kimi Ni Todoke). The three titles explored below are extremely popular shows that fall in to the last category. Enjoy!

Ouran High School Host Club

Ouran Academy is a private school where students from super rich families kill time by participating in a series of fabulous and extravagant club activities. Allegedly they also attend classes, but little of that shows up on screen. Scholarship student Haruhi breaks one club's expensive vase while looking for a quiet place to study. Now Haruhi must work for the Host Club to pay back the cost of the item... but what exactly do they do?

Costume changes and shenanigans, romantic and otherwise, abound in this classic comedy anime. It only ran for a single season back in 2012, but the twenty six episodes have lived in anime fans' hearts forevermore. The differences between the anime vs. the manga start off fairly mild, with extra scenes sprinkled throughout the first few volumes, but the end of the manga run has tons of new material on all your favorite characters. More Tamaki, more Haruhi, and a whole alternate ending!

Kimi ni Todoke - From Me To You

Sawako Kuronuma's big goal is to finally make friends this school year. This will be tough because in addition to being super awkward she looks just like the ghost from "The Ring!" It is hard to make friends when everyone thinks you can curse them. Then the effortlessly popular and handsome Shota Kazehaya starts paying attention to her. Is he interested in something more? Things start to look up on the friend front after her class's assigned seating is reshuffled. Will she be able to make friends with the blunt Chizuru Yoshida and the sophisticated Ayane Yano?

The writing for this High School series is delicate and nuanced. The work is full of funny moments, and Sawako's new friendships are given as much weight and time as the romantic plot lines. She is a delightful protagonist and getting to see her grow and fall in love is a real treat. There are two seasons of this series and the anime included almost all of the stories from the Manga up through volume 11. The best part? The manga is still being published! (Volume 25 has a US publication date in Sept 2016) Continue reading Anime for Book Lovers: More in the Manga

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Just like any book-to-movie, or comic book-to-movie, adaptation the manga version of an anime will often have tons material that didn't make it to the screen. Some anime act like an alternate dimension, missing characters and straying wildly from the original plot, others will start off in the same place as the books, and then end up in a radically different spot.

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Don’t miss what’s happening

People on Twitter are the first to know.

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Don’t miss what’s happening

People on Twitter are the first to know.

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I am going to connect your favorite video games, graphic novels, manga, books, music, and movies with other things to play, read, listen to, and watch... and you are going to love it.

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NPR's entertainment and pop culture round-table podcast features spirited discussions of movies, books, television, nostalgia, and - every time - what's making us happy this week.

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How Game-Based Learning Can Help Students

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How Game-Based Learning Can Help Students

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In school, kids play during recess and work during class. But some of the biggest names in psychology, including Jean Piaget and Jerome Bruner, believe that play is a child's work. The best way to teach kids, they say, is through hands-on, active learning. But with state benchmarks and performance-based teacher evaluations hanging above our heads, it's hard for educators to imagine spending precious academic time playing games with kids. That's where game-based learning (often confused with gamification, which isn't quite the same thing) comes in. With this approach, learning and play aren't at odds with each other; in fact, games are the vehicle and environment for learning.

Bruner's Discovery Learning Theory

According to Bruner, students who engage in hands-on learning and play-based activities experience the following benefits:

increased motivation

buoyed creativity

enhanced problem-solving skills

a greater sense of personal responsibility

the joy of autonomy and independence

What teacher doesn't want her students to be motivated, creative, smart, responsible, and filled with joy? If playing games truly benefits students in this way, we can't afford not to play with them. But what does that mean in real terms?

Quest to Learn: A School of Games

You may be wondering where, in your busy classroom schedule, you'd find time in your day to insert more games. One solution is to go whole hog and play nothing but games 100 percent of the time. That's the theory behind Quest to Learn (Q2L), a 6 th through 12 th grade NYC school in which students learn every subject via digital games.

Q2L opened its doors in 2009. At that time, writer/editor Owen Edwards expressed trepidation in an Edutopia blog post. The school's curriculum, said Edwards, consisted of an "underwhelming" set of lessons that would be taught solely through games. He quipped that education is not all fun and games and fretted over the future of legitimate schooling.

Q2L's founder and executive director, Katie Salen, offers a different point of view. As a game designer and digital media professor, Salen endorses Q2L's "game-like" learning style. She believes that because video games are such an important part of most students' lives anyway, playing them at school is a potent way to inspire and motivate them.

Every course taught at Q2L is standards-based. For example, sixth-grade math and science standards are integrated into a one-trimester gaming experience called " The Way Things Work." Through video gaming, the students help a mad scientist navigate his way through a virtual human body. As they play, the students absorb the same Common Core knowledge taught to their cohorts across the country. And they have a great time doing so.

Creating Their Own Curriculum

While the benchmarks taught at Q2L are familiar to most teachers, the curriculum is obviously different. Game designers and curriculum designers meet with teachers at a place called the "Mission Lab" to design classroom games. The team identifies learning strands that are difficult for students, then brainstorms ways to overcome those difficulties through play.

Learning Design strategist Eliza Spang calls the brainstorming process at Q2L an amazing experience. When three heads come together at the ideation table - the teacher, the game designer, and the curriculum specialist - Spang says students benefit from educational products that a single-minded group of teachers or other professionals would never create.

The Benefits of Playing Games at School

If you're intrigued by the concept behind Q2L and want to learn more about how playing video games boosts learning, you're in good company. Reviewers at the American Psychological Association recently delved into the effects of playing video games on student learning, social skills, and health. These professionals reported that playing video games, even violent ones, helps develop a person's capacity for three-dimensional thinking, problem-solving, and creativity.

The U.S. Department of Education recently released a blog detailing a joint effort with the White House called Education Game Jam, a one-off event that took place in September 2014. Teachers, game developers, and students collaborated to create 23 educational games that address difficult-to-master K-12 concepts, then showcased their creations during a 48-hour conference at the White House.

Bringing Games to Your Classroom

Most teachers don't have the means or the administrative support to initiate curricular changes like those seen at Q2L. However, that doesn't mean that you and your students can't play more games in your classroom. Here's a look at three popular video games that are used in classrooms today:

Minecraft

Q2L educator Dan Bloom recently wrote of his success using Minecraft to teach DNA extraction to 9th-grade biology students in an Edutopia article. Minecraft can help you with more than just biology; visit MinecraftEdu for a "school-ready" version of the beloved game, and learn about more great curriculum ideas in this recent article on Edudemic by Ann Elliott. The company offers discounts to teachers.

Civilization IV

Illinois teacher Zach Gilbert uses the strategy-based Civilization IV game to hook his sixth graders on history. Through play, students are transported back to ancient times in which they must build their own civilizations. Some critics worry that Civilization IV, a game developed by Firaxis Games, is not always historically accurate. Gilbert views these inaccuracies as "teachable moment" opportunities. If you're interested in using Civilization IV in the classroom, our very own Jim Hinton has more tips in an article he penned for us in late 2014.

The Walking Dead

You might feel squeamish about allowing your students to play a gory video game like The Walking Dead as a means of learning ethics and decision-making. But that's exactly what Norwegian high school teacher Tobias Staaby has done, according to a recent Edutopia post. Never has Staaby seen his students so engaged. He has his principal - a man who encourages teachers to use an "entrepreneurial approach" to designing lessons - to thank.

Tips

Whether you're an elementary teacher who wants to integrate math learning apps into your classroom or a high school teacher looking for ways to use Minecraft at school, video games are a fun and effective way to inspire and motivate your students. Follow these tips for the best results:

Play the game yourself first.

Find ways to connect sore spots in your curriculum to the game.

Be ready to justify your use of games in the classroom to dubious onlookers.

In Short

Increasing play time when you're under the gun to crank out achievement-oriented test takers requires you to take a leap of faith. Though it might seem counterproductive, research has shown time and again that your leap of faith will have positive results. For more ideas on incorporating games into education, check out Edudemic's Best Game-Based Education Resources for 2014.

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How Game-Based Learning Can Help Students of All Ages Learn

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In school, kids play during recess and work during class. But some of the biggest names in psychology, including Jean Piaget and Jerome Bruner, believe that play is a child's work. The best way to teach kids, they say, is through hands-on, active learning.

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Back in the early 90's my older brother and I were playing Dragster on the Atari 2600 when our father walked in and looked over our shoulders for a minute. We expected the typical, "Alrighty boys, time to do something else," but to our surprise, for the first time we got, "It's my turn next."

I remember him fumbling with the controller, blowing the Dragster's engine several times, and explaining to us the best timing for gear changes.

The reason this sticks in my memory so clearly is because we were spending time together, learning and enjoying something different that we all loved.

Because home video games were so foreign to my father's generation, gaming with your children was never seen as an acceptable pastime and way to spend with your kids.

However, those of us who grew up playing the Atari, NES and Genesis have come to see videogames, if facilitated properly, as another way to bring together generations and create some quality bonding time.
Like a lot of Rebels, I have always loved video games, and now that I'm a father to three, I'm beginning to see the wonderful benefits, along with the dangerous pitfalls, that gaming with my children has to offer.
Gaming and kids can be a controversial topic for parents - some are all for it, while others are dead against it. So today we're going to weigh up benefits and problems on this issue, to help you make your own educated decisions with when it comes to your own kids, nephews and nieces, or any other children, be it now or in the future.

GOOD GAMING

If we believe what we've heard from the media since the release of Mortal Kombat (wow, was it really 1992?), video games are literally the worst thing ever for anyone under the age of 21. However, when we dig a little deeper, indicates that it may not all be gloom and DOOM (get it?).

Research has established that under the right circumstances, video games can be very beneficial to your child's developmental, educational, social and emotional needs.

Now, whether it's beneficial will depend on certain factors:

how much time your child spends gaming

what type of games your child plays

why your child is playing games

if they are playing alone or with someone

Developmentally, video games can improve your child's:

hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills

problem-solving, strategy and planning, decision-making and logic skills

ability to set and achieve goals and time management skills

Emotionally, video games may help them feel:

less stressed - video games can be a way to manage mood or 'let off steam'

capable of doing something well - their self-esteem can grow as their skills as a gamer does

connected to other people - particularly with online play (more about that later)

Socially, games may help a child:

strengthen existing friendships and make new ones - both online and IRL

learn to play fairly and take turns - (a concept my kids have yet to learn, unfortunately)

feel closer to family and friends - especially when you all play games together.

Video games can have some educational benefits too. These include helping your child get better at:

remembering things and critical thinking - I know the power of memory and video games personally; the Konami Code has been etched in my brain for decades

recognizing and understanding visual information

understanding concepts like mathematics, learning new words, navigation, and more.

All these things aside, the reason I, and many other parents, play video games with their children is because it's an awesome bonding experience.

Researchers from Arizona State University explain , "Parents miss a huge opportunity when they walk away from playing video games with their kids....often parents don't understand that many video games are meant to be shared and can teach young people about science, literacy and problem solving.
Gaming with their children also offers parents countless ways to insert their own 'teaching moment'."
Gaming with kids certainly has its benefits in terms of development and creating some special time between you and the kids. There's nothing like multiplayer Mario Kart family nights, coaching your child through a level you learnt at their age, seeing their face light up as they conquer a difficult challenge, or just absolutely schooling them in NBA 2K, but there are certainly some downsides when it comes to mixing kids and gaming, so be sure to do so wisely.

Like anything, particularly with developing little minds and bodies, gaming should be done in moderation. Issues can certainly arise when kids are spending too much time in front of a screen and not enough time playing outside, getting some exercise, hanging with friends in real life, and just doing regular kid stuff.

We want our children to live life, not a second life!
Along with the issues that come with inactivity playing video games too much can lead to:

poor performance at school

poor sleep or not enough sleep

mental health problems

and square eyes (according to my mum, an expert in this field who still calls a PS4 'The Sega')

Excessive gaming can be detrimental to developing minds, and we all know how easy it is to get lost in a great game. Who else has ever said 'I'll just play for an hour' and then suddenly it's next Tuesday? So be sure to supervise younger children and keep tabs of how long older children are gaming.

To avoid this trap, it's important is being able to provide your child with alternatives to gaming that they find stimulating and engaging that you can do together.
For starters, try:

Board Games

Live Action Role Play

Sports - Take 2K to the driveway

Catch up with families with similar aged children together

Get active - Play, Swim, Jump, Chase, Hide, Seek. Just spend some time being a kid with your kid, you don't need to overthink it.

Moderation and supervision are the ultimate tools needed here. I'm not going to try and answer the classic ' how much should my X year old be playing games a week? ' question, because each child is totally different.

There are a range of (widely varying) guidelines available by 'experts' on the topic, but I've worked with children who play Minecraft for hours on end each day with zero impact on their development or wellbeing whatsoever, and also seen some children's mental health and school grades deteriorate due to some very casual tablet gaming.

As a rule of thumb, if any aspect of your child's wellbeing or regular routine is becoming disrupted as a result of gaming, start implementing strategies with them to address these behaviors.

This could be simply setting a gaming schedule or working on a contract together, disabling the wifi after a certain hour, or seeking professional help.

UGLY GAMING
Even as video game lovers and supporters, we can't deny that there is a really dark side to gaming, and this force can be especially strong on our younger rebels.
As we gamers know, the media loves to talk about violence in video games. Although there are a lot of misconceptions about the role of violent video games and violence in general, I agree that violent video games are not appropriate for younger children. This is because at a young age, many kids find it hard to tell the difference between fantasy and real-life , and witnessing violent content can not only upset younger children, but impact on their perceptions towards violence in reality.

But for older children...it's not so clear cut. Once again, our mates 'The Experts' can't seem to all agree on whether violent video games lead to aggression in real life, but I think the vast majority of us who have played a violent video game aren't planning on shooting up the neighborhood any time soon.
If you're in doubt about whether a game may be appropriate for your child:

Read some reviews - our favorite source is IGN.com

Watch some Twitch or YouTube gameplay

Even play the game yourself (Any excuse will do, right? After 87 hours of gameplay and selfless research, I have now concluded that Grand Theft Auto V is probably not suitable for my 3 and 5 year olds).

You know your child the best, so do your research and before calling the shots. As with every aspect of parenting, you're not always going to make the right decision, but that's all part of the fun (and also why I got to play Mortal Kombat at the age of 7).

If you're having concerns about the types of games your child is playing, have a talk with them about it. Share your own values, and ask for theirs. Speak with them about how to properly deal with anger, respectful relationships with the opposite sex, and what they're gaining from gaming.

By showing an interest in their gaming, you can keep a line of communication open, which can be vitally important throughout the adolescent years.

Online Gaming
In addition to violence, in recent years online game play has opened up a whole new can of worms with younger gamers.
As with any social situation bullying can happen online. (Feel free to join any Call of Duty match if you don't believe me. According to my competitors, my mother has become quite fond of many 14-year old American boys).

Jokes aside, bullying is a real issue with many children and adolescents and if left unnoticed and not dealt with, in extreme circumstances, the consequences can be devastating. Our children can also be taken advantage of in online games via the world of microtransactions and shady game developers deliberately exploiting our children for cash.

I know parents who have installed "Free to Download and Play" children's' apps on their tablets, only to receive huge credit card bills the next month because they left their password saved on the device and their child had unknowingly been paying for DLC every few minutes of gameplay. So also be sure to protect yourself in these instances.

As with any online activities, when your child is gaming online, they are interacting with strangers. So ensure your child knows how to stay safe online , and knows they can speak to you about anything they see or hear without getting in trouble.

Finally, we get to the really ugly beast of Gaming Addiction. Games have always been enjoyable and rewarding, they provide us with clear goals, measures of success and achievement.

We as humans love this kind of stuff, but since the instant feedback nature of games works at such a faster time scale than our choices in real life, gaming can also contribute to players (particularly young players) developing addictions if they become the only ways in which a person experiences these rewards and achievements in their life.

Recognizing when the gaming has changed from a form of enjoyment way to meet some or all of these psychological needs is difficult, but if you feel that gaming may be impacting aspects of your child's (or your) life, start by questioning why this is so and exploring what is missing from their life that is contributing to this.

Yes, there are pitfalls and a big dark side when it comes to mixing games and children, but if we educate ourselves and our children and communicate well, most of this can be counteracted with supervision and moderation.

For starters, try keeping all consoles or devices in a common area of the house. Not only will you be able to keep an eye on the game content and time spent gaming, but it will give you an opportunity to game and interact with each other.

START, PAUSE OR EXIT, IT'S UP TO YOU.
So there we have it: the good, the bad and the ugly.
Now it's time for you to make your own decisions. Nobody knows your child better than you, and what works for one child may not always work for another.

Educate yourselves, try a few different approaches, know the risks and how to avoid these. Like a lot of aspects of raising kids, when it comes to video games, the healthiest approach is moderation .

Playing video games in moderation and balancing video games with other activities are the keys to avoiding most problems that can come with gaming.

Any parent quickly realises how little time their kids stay kids, so it's vital to spend some special time with them doing things you both love. Whether that be gaming or something else, make sure your child is safe and enjoying themselves.
And as a parent to three younger rebels just starting to game, I want to hear from you: What games do you love playing with your children? What alternatives to gaming work well for you? What challenges have you found with kids gaming, and how did you work through it? Did anyone actually get square eyes in the 90's? Let us know in the comments! -Dan
photo credit: clement127: Sweet family, kid with controller, ps4 controller, greyscale xbox controller, Dan Schmidt.

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A Nerd's Guide to Gaming with Kids | Nerd Fitness

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Back in the early 90's my older brother and I were playing Dragster on the Atari 2600 when our father walked in and looked over our shoulders for a minute. We expected the typical, "Alrighty boys, time to do something else," but to our surprise, for the first time we got, "It's my turn next."

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Pop Culture Classroom: Storytelling Through Comics

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Educational Technology and Mobile Learning

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May 24, 2014
Games are ubiquitous digital activities that students , regardless of their grade level, engage in online. They play them on their computers, smart phones, with each other and with others they have never met. Several scientific studies published in this regard speak for the advocacy of game integration in education Check out this list to learn more :
I also invite you to check the infographic below to learn more about how games help students learn.

Source:onlineschools.com

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11 Reasosn Why You Should Integrate Games in Your Teaching

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May 24, 2014 Games are ubiquitous digital activities that students , regardless of their grade level, engage in online. They play them on their computers, smart phones, with each other and with others they have never met.

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Who We Are

The Games and Gaming Round Table (GameRT) of the American Library Association provides a venue for librarians interested in the use of games and gaming in libraries of all types a place to gather and share. GameRT was formed in 2011, replacing and extending the pre-existing gaming member interest group. As a round table, GameRT is built around our shared passion for games and the use of gaming within libraries. With members from all types of libraries, GameRT encompasses a wide variety of viewpoints, situations, and user types. For more information about GameRT, you can join us on ALA Connect (even if you aren't an ALA member) or contact one of the officers directly through ALA Connect. Have an interest in Gaming in Libraries and want to get involved? Volunteer for GameRT!

What We Do

The mission of the GameRT is to provide the following:

A forum for the exchange of ideas and concerns surrounding games in libraries;

Resources to the library community to support the building and maintaining of library game collections;

A force for initiating and supporting game programming in libraries;

Create an awareness of, and need for, the support of the value of gaming and play in libraries, schools, and related learning communities;

Create an awareness of the value of games and gaming in library outreach and community engagement plans;

A professional and social forum for networking among librarians and non-librarians interested in games and gaming.

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The Games and Gaming Round Table (GameRT) of the American Library Association provides a venue for librarians interested in the use of games and gaming in libraries of all types a place to gather and share. GameRT was formed in 2011, replacing and extending the pre-existing gaming member interest group.

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Sci-fi Stories That Imagine A Future Africa | Nnedi Okorafor TED Talk

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Sci-fi Stories That Imagine A Future Africa | Nnedi Okorafor TED Talk

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Nnedi Okorafor: Sci-fi stories that imagine a future Africa

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"My science fiction has different ancestors -- African ones," says writer Nnedi Okorafor. In between excerpts from her "Binti" series and her novel "Lagoon," Okorafor discusses the inspiration and roots of her work -- and how she opens strange doors through her Afrofuturist writing.

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A Superhero for Generation Why | G. Willow Wilson | TEDxRainier

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A Superhero for Generation Why | G. Willow Wilson | TEDxRainier

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A Superhero for Generation Why | G. Willow Wilson | TEDxRainier

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Superfandom by Zoe Fraade-Blanar and Aaron Glazer

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Superfandom by Zoe Fraade-Blanar and Aaron Glazer

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As fandom sheds its longtime stigmas of geekiness and hysteria, fans are demanding more from the celebrities and brands they love. Digital tools have given organizations-from traditional businesses to tech startups-direct, real-time access to their most devoted consumers, and it's easy to forget that this access flows both ways. This is the new 'fandom-based economy': a convergence of brand owner and brand consumer. Fan pressures hold more clout than ever before as audiences demand a say in shaping the future of the things they love.

In Superfandom, Zoe Fraade-Blanar and Aaron Glazer explain this new era of symbiosis. For producers, it can mean a golden opportunity: brands such as Polaroid and Surge, preserved by the passion of a handful of nostalgic fans, can now count on an articulate, creative, and, above all, loyal audience. Yet, the new economy has its own risks-it's also easier than ever for companies to lose their audience's trust.

Fraade-Blanar and Glazer explain why some kinds of engagement with fans succeed and some backfire, probing fandom's history, sociology and psychology. From the 19 th century American Alice Drake, who bribed her way into the houses of her favorite European composers, to Hatsune Miku, the Japanese virtual celebrity whose songs are composed entirely by fans, the dynamics of fandom-the activities we perform to show we belong to a group of people with common interests-may be as old as culture itself.

For groupies of financier Warren Buffet and enthusiasts of Cards Against Humanity alike, the consumer relationship has been transformed. Superfandom is an essential guide for those who care about, contribute to, and live in our rapidly expanding fan-driven economy. Available in Hardcover, eBook, and audiobook.
Get the book! "

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Superfandom, the Book - How Our Obsessions are Changing What We Buy and Who We Are

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As fandom sheds its longtime stigmas of geekiness and hysteria, fans are demanding more from the celebrities and brands they love. Digital tools have given organizations-from traditional businesses to tech startups-direct, real-time access to their most devoted consumers, and it's easy to forget that this access flows both ways.

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Theorizing a public engagement keystone: Seeing fandom's integral connection to civic engagement through the case of the Harry Potter Alliance by Ashley Hinck

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Theorizing a public engagement keystone: Seeing fandom's integral connection to civic engagement through the case of the Harry Potter Alliance by Ashley Hinck

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View of Theorizing a public engagement keystone: Seeing fandom's integral connection to civic engagement through the case of the Harry Potter Alliance | Transformative Works and Cultures

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Return to Article Details Theorizing a public engagement keystone: Seeing fandom's integral connection to civic engagement through the case of the Harry Potter Alliance

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The Social Justice League (Teaching Tolerance)

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The Social Justice League (Teaching Tolerance)

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9 Tips for Engaging Your English Class with Pop Culture 

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9 Tips for Engaging Your English Class with Pop Culture 

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This guest post has been contributed by Jay Meadows.

I've been teaching English for many years, across multiple grade levels, from middle school to high school to college. I've read (and have written) heaps of education books and research articles. And yet the premise for this post is so simple, I'm willing to bet that any one of our students can pin it down without a moment's hesitation.

What is the most essential ingredient to a rockstar lesson?

It's student engagement.

We sometimes dress it up with the bells and bows of PBL, or strip it down to its bare components: authenticity, motivation, relatability. We beg, borrow, and steal from the folks who seem to be getting it right-video game designers, social media pundits, even mega-corporations like Google.

And for what?

To better engage our students. To help them fall in love with the content we teach. To make learning even the most complex skills feel effortless. To hear them say, "Wow. This class always feels so short."

In recent years, I've had the greatest success in achieving these things-and in evoking that sensation of having time-traveled-when I've gone out of my way to make deliberate connections between my students' most popular interests and the "stuff" of my class. As it turns out, Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, and Kanye West are incredible English teachers. Who woulda' thunk?

What follows is a list of practical strategies that promise to heighten engagement without sacrificing rigor when integrating popular culture into your English classroom.

1. Treat pieces of popular culture, like song lyrics and music videos, as valid academic texts. You will soon find that they are wolves dressed in sheep's clothing (...in a world where wolves are complex and helpful, and sheep are only superficially pleasant). Pop songs, for instance, are literally built to be accessible for all readers, but their stylistic and rhetorical choices can be quite complex. As such, they provide an incredibly engaging pathway for fostering the foundational skills that are essential for tackling more complex texts. You can check out some sample analyses here!

2. Ask your students to build bridges between popular culture and the "stuff" of your class. This harkens back to the classic "make Holden Caulfield's mixtape" assignment, but packs a much heavier punch when students are required to synthesize their sources, and to support their claims with textual evidence. In asking your students to place Jay Gatsby into conversation with Kanye West, or Daisy Buchanan with Taylor Swift, you'll tap into some of the most complex skills in our domain-and your kids will absolutely adore you for it.

3. Don't stop at synthesis! Seek fluid opportunities to fold pop culture into research! Some of the least successful research papers I've ever assigned demanded that students focus strictly on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, while some of the most successful strove to make connections between The Jersey Shore's "Snooki," Chaucer's "The Wife of Bath," and Raunch Feminism. In this case, the impact that a little pop culture had on engagement, rigor, and quality of writing were simply stunning.

4. Not all pop culture was created equally. It would be remiss of me not to mention that any content that's being given valuable time in the spotlight of your classroom should, to some extent, be curated and deemed acceptable. While students' favorite songs are jet fuel for engagement, some are far too explicit to incorporate into instruction (unless explicitness is the instructional focus, but perhaps we can reserve that particular lesson for college?). Further, some pop songs, ads, and speeches are simply better than others for academic consideration. The analytical depth can be truly profound when we apply the tools of English to rich pop culture texts-but we'd be kidding ourselves if we expected this to be true for each and every cheesy hit!

5. Pop stars don't always make great role models, but they can be solid mentors. Those of you who are familiar with the practice of using mentor texts know where I'm going with this one. Consider how popular songs and blockbuster movie speeches can be repurposed to teach tone, voice, and style. Ask students to rewrite a scene from Harry Potter in the voice of Holden Caulfield, a speech from Independence Day as Beowulf, or any Beatles song as Jay Gatsby (i.e. Yesterday, old sport!).

6. Use those pop culture mentor texts to teach parody. In the style of Weird Al, ask your students to authentically repurpose a pop song's style, voice, rhyme scheme, and meter with the intention of crafting a distinctly different (and perhaps ridiculous) message. Teaching satire can be notoriously challenging, but taking steps to help students become satirists themselves is a surefire path to mastery.

7. Advertising teams spend hundreds of millions of dollars to craft highly effective multimodal arguments-also known as commercials. A lot can be said for teaching students to be critical consumers of media, especially in a world where multi-billion dollar corporations are doing everything they can to compete for their attention. Open your students' eyes to the highly effective argumentative tactics being used to manipulate them in popular advertisements while giving them an awesome opportunity to practice rhetorical analysis.

8. Savor the multimodal. It isn't often that we can truly enjoy a visual text that excites students about doing hard work. (Yes, you may find those Civil War era photographs to be highly captivating primary sources, but strangely, our students feel a stronger pull toward Adele's music videos.) Hook them with a music video or commercial before you put them through the paces with close visual reading, analysis, and synthesis.

9. Have fun! Don't lose sight of the reason why pop culture is such a great tool to heighten engagement and rigor! It's a relatively novel academic exercise, your students will have a pre-existing interest in the content, and because of these factors, pop culture lessons don't feel quite as much like work. Your students will literally feel compelled to laugh, dance, and sing along to the cadence of your classroom instruction-and, in all likelihood, you'll feel compelled to laugh, dance, and sing along right beside them. ♦
If you're interested in checking out some of the actual materials Jay has used successfully in class (teaching close reading and synthesis using Beyonce's "Lemonade"), grab them here!

Keep in touch.
Join the Cult of Pedagogy mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration-in quick, bite-sized packages-all geared toward making your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to my members-only library of free downloadable resources, including my e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, which has helped thousands of teachers spend less time grading!

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9 Tips for Engaging Your English Class with Pop Culture

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This guest post has been contributed by Jay Meadows. I've been teaching English for many years, across multiple grade levels, from middle school to high school to college. I've read (and have written) heaps of education books and research articles.

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Harry Potter and the Sacred Text Podcast

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Harry Potter and the Sacred Text Podcast

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Reading fiction doesn't help us escape the world, it helps us live in it.

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Bigger Than Me: A Documentary about Fandom 

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Bigger Than Me: A Documentary about Fandom 

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Bigger Than Me: A Documentary About Fandom ► JamesChats

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Aardman Animation, the stop-motion studio behind the Oscar-winning Wallace & Gromit shorts and Chicken Run, has brokered a new deal that puts ownership of the studio in the hands of its devoted team of employees.

CBS All Access is in talks with Michelle Yeoh to star in her own spin-off Star Trek series for the streaming channel.

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald will arrive in theaters next week, but reviews are out now, and the consensus seems to be leaning more negative/mixed than the previous installment.

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Aardman Animation, the stop-motion studio behind the Oscar-winning Wallace & Gromit shorts and Chicken Run, has brokered a new deal that puts ownership of the studio in the hands of its devoted team of employees. CBS All Access is in talks with Michelle Yeoh to star in her own spin-off Star Trek series for the streaming channel.

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Shelter Starts Sorting Dogs Into Hogwarts Houses To Help Them Get Adopted

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Shelter Starts Sorting Dogs Into Hogwarts Houses To Help Them Get Adopted

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So far, the shelter has sorted over 40 dogs into the different Hogwarts houses. The most populated house as of now is Hufflepuff, and while Gryffindor and Slytherin are also well-represented, there haven't been too many Ravenclaws as of yet. Not a lot of studious, hardworking dogs coming into the shelter, apparently.

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Shelter Starts Sorting Dogs Into Hogwarts Houses To Help Them Get Adopted

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So far, the shelter has sorted over 40 dogs into the different Hogwarts houses. The most populated house as of now is Hufflepuff, and while Gryffindor and Slytherin are also well-represented, there haven't been too many Ravenclaws as of yet. Not a lot of studious, hardworking dogs coming into the shelter, apparently.

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How Harry Potter Fans have Changed the Pop Culture World

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How Harry Potter Fans have Changed the Pop Culture World

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Harry Potter, the triumph of fandom, and the future of creativity.

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by iStock and Valerie Macon/AFP/Getty Images.

Heidi Tandy still remembers the dread she felt the day in 2002 when she received an official-looking email from Warner Bros., the studio that produced the Harry Potter films. Tandy was one of the founders of FictionAlley, a website dedicated to Potter fan fiction. She'd first become involved in fan culture back in 1994, on an email listserv for Friends buffs. Like everyone she knew, she assumed that any communication from rights holders (the Powers That Be, or TPTB in fandom lingo) meant a serious danger to her site-a cease-and-desist notice, or even a threat to sue.

However, as Tandy recalls in a collection of essays edited by Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World, it turned out that the studio's representative had seen a front-page article about Pottermania in the New York Times and wanted to suggest that FictionAlley become an associate of the Warner Bros. store. Although this sounds like a perfectly mundane exchange today, that studio email marked a watershed. Fandom in all its forms, thanks in large part to Harry Potter, had become legit.

Through their remarkable ubiquity, J.K. Rowling's series and the films based on it shaped an entire generation to an unprecedented and still unreckoned-with degree. Earlier touchstones-the Beatles or Star Wars, for example-may have marked epochal cultural moments, but Pottermania united kids across the globe, pulled in vast numbers of adult enthusiasts, and enjoyed the whole-hearted support of a well-coordinated and highly effective network of professionals-teachers, librarians, and booksellers among them. Certainly book publishing, usually regarded as a sleepy backwater of the culture industry, had never seen anything remotely like Harry Potter before (or since). Everything about the general frenzy, from the seemingly endless stream of media coverage to the hundreds of people lining up for midnight bookstore parties, came as a revelation.

Harry Potter also launched a phenomenon that's seldom acknowledged and barely understood, but that's as powerful and lasting as the books themselves: the first massive internet-born fandom. That fandom and its legacy have transformed today's cultural landscape-creating new audiences, nurturing new billion-dollar media properties, and forever changing the way creators and consumers interact with each other and with the world.

Fandoms existed before Harry Potter, of course, going all the way back to the first truly modern fandom, which sprang up around Sherlock Holmes and harangued the great detective's weary creator into resurrecting him from that supposedly fatal plunge off the Reichenbach Falls. Pottermaniacs were also far from the first fans to explore the internet's ability to connect them with each other. Devotees of The X-Files are generally acknowledged to be pioneers, creators of the first internet-native community as well as inventors of the term shipping, used to describe fan activity (speculation, conversation, fan fiction) inspired by the desire to see two characters in the source material, or canon, become a couple.

But J.K. Rowling's series came along at precisely the right historical moment to take advantage of the rapidly evolving internet. The first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (to use the original British title), was published in 1997, followed by three more installments over the next three years. As Melissa Anelli, webmistress of the Leaky Cauldron, explains in her book Harry: A History, during roughly the same time span the number of Americans using the internet increased by more than fivefold, from 19 million to 100 million. Anelli writes, "The Internet changed Harry Potter about as much as the Internet was changing everything else."

When she first got excited about Harry Potter in 2000, Tandy recollects, mailing lists and Usenet (an early form of discussion group) could be difficult for less internet-savvy people to access, especially because many fans tried to fly under the radar. "A lot of people thought being hard to find was important to fandom because if you didn't, the Powers That Be would find out about you and shut you down," Tandy said. Other groups shared fan fiction with adult themes and wanted to avoid exposing children to it. People who got very excited about, say, Star Trek were often met with ridicule and worse for their nerdiness, leading to shame or just an excess of caution when it came to talking about their taste.

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Easy-to-use browsers like Netscape Navigator, first released in 1994, and the rapid adoption of the web suddenly made the internet's riches available to anyone daunted by its original command-line interface. You could use the web to ask to join a Yahoo Group like the seminal Harry Potter for Grownups, but users on those lists-many of them still paying for their internet use by the hour-didn't like to see their inboxes "cluttered up" with fan fiction and other "off-topic" material. "On forums," Tandy explained, "you could talk about a lot more topics." Forums were visible and more free-ranging than Listservs, divided up into categories and topics but also highly browsable. You might come to a web log like the Leaky Cauldron for news about forthcoming books and films and then wander off into its forums to join fans scrutinizing the books for clues or fiercely debating the motives of Severus Snape.

At times, the conversations could get pretty granular. "Ok, as weird as this may seem, this is meant to be a serious question!" wrote Holly in 2001 on MuggleNet, one of the first and biggest fan sites, founded by 12-year-old Emerson Spartz in 1999 and favored by younger readers. "What do the characters of Harry Potter wear under their robes? I figure they have to wear something, so do they wear muggle clothing or do they have a dress code?" Other burning topics included whether Dumbledore would ever tell Harry why Voldemort tried to kill him, whether Harry would play Quidditch professionally, and whether or not Ron "liked" Hermione based on his behavior at the Yule Ball.

Each volume in Rowling's series is set during a single Hogwarts school year, and in the prolonged interlude between the 2000 publication of the fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and the fifth, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix-a time that Harry Potter fans have named the Three-Year Summer-hunger for new stories about her beloved characters rose to a fever pitch. This led many curious young Pottermaniacs to discover fan fiction for the first time. In forums and especially in fan fiction communities, a fledgling writer could earn a modest or even substantive reputation and following of her own. It was during this lull in Rowling's publication schedule that Tandy and fellow fans, discontented with the policies of the online clearinghouse fanfiction.net, founded FictionAlley. "It was a real 'on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog'-type situation," Flourish Klink told me of the regular column she wrote on fanfiction.net starting in 1999. She was 12. The truth about her tender age only really came out two years later, when she joined Tandy in starting the nonprofit that runs FictionAlley: "We realized I couldn't be on the board or sign any forms because I was too young."

The web made the fandom a much bigger, better connected, and more international phenomenon-in high school, Klink counted as her best friend a fellow fan who lived in Switzerland-but Harry Potter lovers were already legion and unabashedly open about their enthusiasm. Because everyone they knew in real life was also reading the books, kids felt no hesitation to geek out over them, and in the process, geeking out in general lost much of its stigma, for good. Unlike comic books, rock 'n' roll, and video games, Pottermania was a youth craze that inspired very little backlash from authorities, apart from the occasional religious nut who thought Rowling was promoting witchcraft. For younger children, this support meant getting to go to midnight release parties and having permission to socialize online with other fans. Adults who loved the books sometimes got a little more guff from their peers, but positive coverage in the Times and other establishment publications kept reminding them that they were far from alone. They started "Wizard Rock" bands and invented a real-life form of Quidditch that is now played by more than 500 teams in 26 countries.

Although Rowling did occasionally tangle with fans over sexually explicit fan fiction made too accessible to children or for-profit plundering of her own work, she went on the record as "flattered" by grassroots fan activities and fan-authored stories based on her books. Tandy-now a trademark attorney-was invited to the Warner Bros.' studios in Burbank, California, to meet with their intellectual property counsel and found them "nice, friendly, and supportive of fans, fandom and fannish creativity." Harry Potter fandom was the first large, multimedia fandom to flourish under such an imprimatur, and today most rights holders like film and TV studios actively encourage the sort of fan activity they once threatened to prosecute.

After the last volume in the Harry Potter series was published, in 2007, the book industry enjoyed a boom in young adult publishing; children's books continue to be one of the sectors of business that most consistently thrives. Series like Twilight and The Hunger Games became hits that led to blockbuster films. Few realize just how big a role the fan networks and projects inspired by Rowling's series have played in those successes. For example, the YA novelist John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars, was already a prize-winning author when his brother, Hank, posted a YouTube video of himself warbling a song about the vexations of awaiting the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. But when that video-part of an ongoing series of public messages the siblings exchange as the vlogbrothers-went viral, it brought them to the attention of millions of Potter fans who in time also became Nerdfighters, as fans of the Greens call themselves.

It was the mass migration to LiveJournal by a significant portion of creatively inclined Potter fans in the mid-2000s that eventually led to the flourishing of networks that would transcend Harry Potter itself and foster the fledgling writers who would become the next generation of YA novelists. An early form of social media, LiveJournal combined a blogging platform with both a friending and a commenting system. You could use the site as it was originally intended, to keep and share a daily account of your thoughts and activities, but fan fiction writers also posted their stories there, and other members (depending on the account's privacy settings) reviewed them; conversations and controversies blossomed. On LiveJournal, you could follow tags that kept you up to date on what other fans thought about the Harry Potter canon, but you could also follow particular writers, who in time developed fans of their own. The New York Times best-selling YA author Cassandra Clare started out writing Potter fan fiction before moving on to writing her own books.*

Fannishness about Rowling's books has morphed into fannishness in general, and even fannishness about fannishness itself.

But above all, Potter fandom taught an entire generation of readers how to be enthusiastic evangelists for the books that capture their fancy, how to bypass traditional media and forge a new supercharged incarnation of word-of-mouth. While I was researching a 2012 piece about the publication of Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games, sources told me again and again that online networks of YA bloggers, vloggers, and social media mavens had played a major role in the book's success, and that most of these "influencers," all women in their 20s, had roots in Potter fandom. At the moment, it might be sites like ReadingTeen or Pandora's Books or YA Interrobang that fans of the genre turn to, but none of these myriad voices have set themselves up as alternatives to establishment publications like the New York Times Book Review or Publishers Weekly; a more fundamental change has taken place. Most blogs, like most fan activity, are amateur projects. They come and go, flare into popularity for a year or two, then fall into inactivity when the blogger loses interest or goes off to college or has a baby. Even at its peak, no individual blog or vlog has the power to rocket a book onto the best-seller list all on its own. But this is the internet: Power comes in the aggregate.

Over the past two decades, fandom itself has gone from being about a passion for a particular story or set of characters to a kind of self-sustaining identity. LeakyCon, originally a Harry Potter convention organized by the Leaky Cauldron, has spawned GeekyCon, an annual gathering of people who love other books, movies, and TV series the way they love Harry Potter. Fannishness about Rowling's books has morphed into fannishness in general, and even fannishness about fannishness itself. Instead of the preoccupation of a rather secretive, sheepish minority of people mocked for their geeky passions, fandom had become a badge of honor, even a claim to fame. It feels like home to vast numbers of people who grew up in the 2000s.

Harry Potter made possible this shift in attitude, and it also laid down connections and habits of connecting that have transformed how millions of people find out about their next favorite book, movie, or TV show. Fans graduated from grateful consumers of culture to a force to be reckoned with, capable of propelling a creator's work into enormous popularity, but also prone to inflicting various forms of punishment when they are displeased. The fans of the BBC series Sherlock have been feuding with its producers, who alternately appease and bait them, for a couple of years now. Recently, fans enraged by an image posted by a storyboard artist for the animated series Steven Universe hounded the woman off Twitter. Quitting Twitter over harassment borne out of "fantitlement" has become something of a rite of passage for creators. Joss Whedon, of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Avengers fame, ever the trendsetter, has done it twice.

Whether today's fans really have much say in the direction taken by an unfolding series remains debatable. Most creators still fiercely protect their prerogatives when it comes to the work itself. But the new networked fandoms that emerged in the years since Rowling published that first Harry Potter novel have undeniable clout in the marketplace, courted and favored by studios and publishers alike. And nowadays, the very last emotion Heidi Tandy feels when she sees an email from a movie studio in her inbox is dread.

*Correction, Sept. 14, 2016: This essay originally noted that author Rainbow Rowell based her novel Carry On on Harry Potter fan fiction. Rowell wrote Slate to note that Carry On is not based on her previous work. (Return.)

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How Harry Potter Fans Have Changed the Pop-Culture World

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Harry Potter, the triumph of fandom, and the future of creativity. Heidi Tandy still remembers the dread she felt the day in 2002 when she received an official-looking email from Warner Bros., the studio that produced the Harry Potter films. Tandy was one of the founders of FictionAlley, a website dedicated to Potter fan fiction.

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Photo: Deney Terrio

USC Professor Henry Jenkins is a hard-core fan with hard-core fans.

I should know. I'm one of the audience members who stalked him at a conference a few years ago after his keynote, hoping to have a conversation about a paper he'd just published at the time. It was an argument for a whole new way of thinking about literacy. Reading, writing, and understanding words on a page won't cut it anymore. In a digitized world, Henry says young people need new skills that go way beyond basic composition and comprehension. Skills like play ("the capacity to experiment with one's surroundings as a form of problem-solving"), collective intelligence ("the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal"), and transmedia navigation ("the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities").

Henry's ideas about literacy were formed out of his academic training for sure, but he also draws from a more personal source--his own fan identity. I crossed paths with Henry again this year at another meeting about digital culture and learning, and this time I cornered him (via follow-up email) to talk more about the relationship between fandom, literacy, and scholarship.
Why fans make better scholars
Henry: Fandom taught me how to read television. Television is a challenging medium for critics. A long-running television series may run on for 100-200 hours of content. Academic critics don't typically work on that scale. It isn't like reading an individual novel or watching a single film. For a time, academics would choose episodes almost at random for close examination in the classroom, feeling that any given episode might represent the series as a whole. Fans have always insisted that each episode contributes something vital to the life of a series: even when television series were largely episodic, they look for the connections across episodes, and now that television is more serialized, they are very good at tracing how characters grow over time and anchoring that growth to specific transformative moments in particular episodes. They do some of this work as individuals, but they do more of it as a community of readers, who compare notes, pool knowledge, and thus can deal with the scope and complexity of rich television narratives. As critics, they are so far ahead of either academics or journalists in terms of dealing with television as television.... Fandom describes a creative lifestyle, not a subservient relationship of worshipful awe before some creative artist.
So what does fandom have to do with literacy?
Henry: Fans are people who actively engage with the content of the culture around them and often use it as resources for their own cultural productions. Many of them write original stories or songs about the shows they watch; some make art or costumes; some edit vids or produce film parodies or do podcasts or develop websites or engage in a broad range of other expressive practices. They do so in a context that encourages their participation and where they often get benign and sometimes constructive feedback on their work. In short, they are part of a literacy community that supports their growth as writers, critics, and artists and provides a distribution network for their work.

Our schools at best struggle to provide these same resources and experiences to students; fandom offers these resources in a context of shared interests and playful pedagogy, and it does so for people of all ages, not simply school children...Right now, education assumes that anything worth knowing should be taught to every student. We should know the same things, and we should structure what happens in the classroom to prepare us for a standardized test, which tries to make sure we all know the same things. But in the kind of community I've described above, value gets produced because we all know different things.
Reducing the world's suck
Henry wants digital culture researchers to use what they do to "reduce the suck" in the world. I wondered how Henry knows suck when he sees it.

Henry: For me, suck consists in imposing your tastes on someone else by cutting them off from participating in meaningful activities. Right now, our schools do that all the time. Mark Twain told us to never let schooling get in the way of our education. Yet, for too many kids it does. And the first standard of education should be to above all, do no harm. So, for me, when school computers block sites having to do with Herman Melville's great American novel because Moby-Dick contains the word, Dick, they introduce a certain amount of suck into the world. When schools use technology to spy on their students rather to open the world to their investigation, that's suck, no matter how you cut it. And when kids are classified as "dangerous" because they are emo or gamers or..., then again, there goes the big suck.
Post-Columbine testimony revisited
Speaking of dangerous youth, I wondered if Henry's thinking about the relationship between entertainment, media, and violence had changed since he testified before congress more than ten years ago after the Columbine killings.

Henry: I wish I could say yes, since it seems shallow to say you haven't rethought your position. So, let me put it this way, nothing has led me to challenge my initial perspective that media violence does not cause real world violence, that playing video games is not going to turn a normal child into a killer, or that the best way to rid the world of aggression is to ban violent entertainment. Where my views have changed is that I once accepted as given that there was something called "media violence" and now, the idea that this constitutes a meaningful category seems to me increasingly ridiculous. Our culture tells many different kinds of stories about human aggression and tragedy; those stories carry a range of different meanings and emotional resonances. Some of them involve direct representations of violence. Some of them involve physical or emotional or social violence. Yet, the idea that we can lump all of those varied representations together, count them, and assume we've said something meaningful about our culture is silly in the extreme. And I would say the idea that we could construct meaningful art by excluding discussion of these themes, which are so central to human experience, seems also far-fetched. I certainly think it is a problem that violence is so often depicted in banal, formulaic, meaningless, and heartless ways. My goal would be to encourage more meaningful representations of violence. But it depresses me that ten years of actively challenging the myths around media violence has done little to change the way the public thinks about these issues. We have to assume that people are deeply invested in the myth of media violence and that it serves some larger function in the way our culture operates.
And finally: the myth of videogame addiction
Henry had more to say about myths when I asked him about what he might say to families (like my own) who don't know what to do when their kids retreat into videogames to an extent that the parents feel like they can't reach their children anymore.

Henry: Well, I would be asking as much about what [the kids were] escaping from as I was concerned about what [they were] escaping into. I think media addiction per se is largely a myth. But I do believe that retreating from the world into a game, cutting yourself off from friends or family, may be a manifestation of depression. I know that for many kids what happens in the game is more meaningful, more emotionally rewarding, more gratifying that anything they experience at school. I know that for many kids, who feel disempowered, playing the game may offer them a sense of empowerment. For kids who feel unsafe, the game may offer a sense of security. For kids who feel alone, the game may offer a chance to interact with others. For kids who feel bored, the game may be challenging and enlivening. When we know what the game is providing that is absent from their lives otherwise, we can then assess whether the problem lies in their heads, their environment, or their games.
What's more...
You can find outtakes from Henry's interview on Youth Radio's site, including his take on the term "digital native," whether the digital divide is history, and how schools need to change. Tomorrow, I'll post my interview with computer scientist and literary artist, Professor Fox Harrell, who's been developing an app inspired in part by a combo of eBay's rating system and W.E.B. DuBois's concept of "Double Consciousness" from The Souls of Black Folk.

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Reducing the World's Suck with Henry Jenkins

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Photo: Deney Terrio USC Professor Henry Jenkins is a hard-core fan with hard-core fans. I should know. I'm one of the audience members who stalked him at a conference a few years ago after his keynote, hoping to have a conversation about a paper he'd just published at the time.

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Can Fandom Change Society? | Off Book | PBS Digital Studios

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The Fangirl's Guide to the Galaxy: A Handbook for Girl Geeksby Sam Maggs

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The Fangirl's Guide to the Galaxy: A Handbook for Girl Geeksby Sam Maggs

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Quirk Books : Publishers & Seekers of All Things Awesome

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This ultimate handbook for ladies living the nerdy life is a fun and feminist take on the often male-dominated world of geekdom.

Fandom, feminism, cosplay, cons, books, memes, podcasts, vlogs, OTPs and RPGs and MMOs and more-it's never been a better time to be a girl geek. With delightful illustrations and an unabashed love for all the in(ternet)s and outs of geek culture, this book is packed with tips, playthroughs, and cheat codes, including:

* How to make nerdy friends
* How to rock awesome cosplay
* How to write fanfic with feels
* How to defeat internet trolls
* How to attend your first con

And more! Plus insightful interviews with fangirl faves, like Jane Espenson, Erin Morgenstern, Kate Beaton, Ashley Eckstein, Laura Vandervoort, Beth Revis, Kate Leth, and many others.
Looking for more? Visit our Zazzle store for related merchandise.
"Read it cover to cover, and then make sure you share it with all the young girl geeks you know."-Brit + Co

"...this book could be invaluable."-GeekMom

"Through and through, Maggs manages to talk about feminism, fangirling, cons, lingo, and the general idea that you should be yourself, and do that unapologetically, with a great deal of lightheartedness and fun."-The Frisky

"For a woman trying to find her way in fandom, I think this book would be invaluable. But that's not to say men can't get something out of it as well."-FreakSugar

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This ultimate handbook for ladies living the nerdy life is a fun and feminist take on the often male-dominated world of geekdom. Fandom, feminism, cosplay, cons, books, memes, podcasts, vlogs, OTPs and RPGs and MMOs and more-it's never been a better time to be a girl geek.

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Henry Jenkins is the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending more than a decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor

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The ground is shifting under the Harry Potter fandom. Things have been rumbling for a while now - really, since the original set of films left off in 2011 up through now, with a new movie series ( Fantastic Beasts), a stage play most fans still haven't seen ( Cursed Child), dozens of entries on Pottermore.com, and author J.K. Rowling's every Twitter whim. There's never been a more confusing time to be a Harry Potter fan, whether you're talking about issues of representation and cultural appropriation, Johnny Depp's presence in the Fantastic Beasts movies, or the revelation that Lord Voldemort fathered a daughter with Bellatrix Lestrange. The legacy of the original series, which launched nearly two decades ago, still holds strong, especially during a time in which people are desperate for the comforts of fiction. But even so, the fandom that made Harry Potter an icon is now deciding if the continued investment that began in 1997 is worth it. They've said goodbye numerous times, after all - it's Harry Potter that won't let go.

On a July Friday night nine years ago, fans lined the streets in front of bookstores around the world. They gathered piles of their friends and waited outside for the precise strike of midnight. Inside those stores, employees worked busily to prep for an onslaught, stepping around the big white boxes with red and black ink, speckled with stars and emblazoned with seven intimidating words: "DO NOT OPEN BEFORE JULY 21, 2007." Harry Potter was about to end, for the very first time.

Five years later, it was time for another goodbye. On a stage in the middle of London's Trafalgar Square at the official premiere of Deathly Hallows: Part 2, Rowling stood in a spearmint green dress dotted with pink flowers and made a statement that would hit the hearts of the millions watching the livestream at home. "The stories we love best do live in us forever," she said as the core cast of the franchise wiped their teary faces behind her. "So whether you come back by page or by the big screen," Rowling said, "Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home." That was July 7, 2011, and a week later, the movie rolled out across the world at midnight, similar tears marking the faces of fans as they lifted their wands to the screen - a ritual farewell to a series that had shaped their very identities.

But while the hospice period for Harry Potter was a long and emotionally arduous one, the death itself was short-lived. In fact, it was barely a nap. "When Deathly Hallows: Part 2 came out, it was about a month after I'd graduated high school," Bayana Davis, a 22-year-old Harry Potter fan and co-host of the podcast #WizardTeam, told BuzzFeed News in a phone interview. "I was like, 'This is literally my childhood. I started reading this at 6, and now I'm 17 and about to go to college.'" Davis and the Potter fandom were symbolically released, only to be teased and prodded for years by Pottermore - Rowling's online proxy for the wizarding world encyclopedia she'd long promised fans. Then, there was the 2013 announcement that there would be a Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them movie series. Oh, and the 2015 announcement that there'd be a Harry Potter play, Cursed Child. Not to mention all the tweets and interviews in between that rocked fans' worlds - from Rowling second-guessing her choice to pair Ron and Hermione to her tweet that Teddy Lupin is a Hufflepuff.

Warner Bros Pictures / Via youtube.com

J.K. Rowling addresses the fans at the World Premiere of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 in London on July 7, 2011.

If you look around the pop-cultural landscape, it's clear we're in the era of the un-death. If a television series or a movie leaves us at all, the chances of it being resurrected for another round are real. Hollywood is playing around with immortality, and the (sometimes delightful) zombies of the things we once loved are everywhere, from Spider-Man to Gilmore Girls. But not every audience is built the same. Some, steadfast and engaged, have emotional, creative, and intellectual desires that become urgent once the thing they spent so much time and energy saying goodbye to declares it's never going away.

This is what the Harry Potter fandom has been grappling with, slowly, over the past few years. And it's a prolonged moment that's only becoming more complicated as Rowling, Warner Bros., Pottermore, and their collaborators stretch the bounds of the wizarding world into the unknown future, dragging an interconnected web of cultures along with them. How or if they rise to a whole bevy of standards matters immensely to modern fandom - and they're the ones taking notes (literally) on their failings and triumphs.

Back when the Potter fandom kicked into gear in the late '90s, the internet was finding its legs right along with it. The first bit of Harry Potter fanfic to hit the legendary refuge fanfiction.net was published in 1999. When there was a break between the publication of Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix - the fourth and fifth books in the series - readers were left on a three-year-long cliffhanger from 2000 to 2003, and the fandom boomed. "We had so much time between stories that we made up our own stories," Robyn Jordan, Davis's cousin and podcast co-host told BuzzFeed News in a video call.

They took what the books had given them and spun it out in all directions, creating sprawling works centered on their favorite characters, pairings, theories, everything. Some of it was silly and light; some of it was dark, or romantic, or twisted, or sweet, or funny, or cerebral. Plenty of it was all of the above. Much of it was incredibly thoroughly thought-out, and some of it was so well-written, it could rival Rowling herself. Some of these writings were over a million words long. This was the birth of an era in which it was commonly believed that Lily Evans was a Slytherin and Blaise Zabini was a girl - a time before the book series would come along to debunk these theories. Harry Potter was one universe, but its fandom was several more, rambunctious and active and utterly in love.

Harry Potter was one universe, but its fandom was several more, rambunctious and active and utterly in love.

At times, the creators of these fan works were galvanized by that intense love for the Harry Potter series; at others, they were inspired by what Rowling and the series couldn't offer them, whether that was answers to their questions about where the series was going or the gut desire for a proxy who shared their experiences. Countless fics mused on Draco Malfoy's potential redemption arc, and a surge of fan art depicted Harry and Hermione as people of color in the years before anyone in the fandom dared to dream that we'd actually get to see a black Hermione brought to life.

"When the casting of [Noma Dumezweni] was announced for Cursed Child, that was the last time I can really remember being excited," Davis said of the December 2015 announcement that a celebrated black actress would be playing Hermione Granger on stage. "I freaked out. I almost had a meltdown in an Uber. And that was the last time I remember being really excited, because then the Magic in North America series dropped on Pottermore. ... And the [Native appropriation issues] there have been really frustrating to me, for a lot of reasons."

Manuel Harlan / Via harrypottertheplay.com

Noma Dumezweni and Paul Thornley in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.

As with any continuation of a beloved series, the impossibility of anything new living up to the lightning in a bottle that was the original hangs in the air. But there are also the growing pains that come with a fandom that has, by and large, become adults - and taken the series' values on that ride with them. They have come to adopt the idea that, to quote another of the undead, "with great power comes great responsibility" - even in art. That has a way of complicating things when the new additions to the wizarding narrative don't match up with the ideals the original Potter books helped teach the fandom to explore: not only tolerance and love, but also social progress and social justice, among other things.

Davis, originally from Oakland but currently living in Chicago, is feeling pressed over the issues of representation and appropriation that are living, breathing problems the modern Potter fandom is trying to navigate. "It's been really interesting trying to juggle all this," she said. "Especially when I'm re-reading the books and still getting so much out of those." Fans' worries crop up not only with major new additions like the play and the movies, but also with every new addition to Pottermore. They are concerned that Rowling has the power to, for example, wipe out their hopes that Remus Lupin could still be canonically queer, with one tweet or Pottermore entry. Or that they'll never be able to see the wizarding world grow to be more inclusive on the big screen, where it's seen by the most people and is still centered on white characters. Davis is like many in the community right now: watching, waiting, and deliberating.

Take, for example, this past March, when those behind Pottermore published Rowling's writings on the history of the magical community in North America as part of the lead-in to Fantastic Beasts' New York setting. The fictional history weaved in many elements taken from the real-life traditions of Native American cultures, homogenizing the history of a host of different communities and assigning wizarding world "explanations" to things like skin walkers - in her version, they're Animagi whom nonmagical people slandered with rumors of evildoing. Across social media, the response was overwhelmingly negative. "It's not 'your' world," Adrienne Keene - the Cherokee scholar, writer, and activist behind the site Native Appropriations - tweeted at Rowling at the time. "It's our (real) Native world. And skin walker stories have context, roots, and reality." Soon after, she tweeted at Rowling again: "You can't just claim and take a living tradition of a marginalized people. That's straight-up colonialism/appropriation."

Rowling never responded directly to the backlash.

With the Harry Potter franchise, it's not an issue of quantity - it's one of quality. The community around Harry Potter is used to being overwhelmed by material. They were revolutionary in that field, innovating what it meant to be a fan in the age of the internet, and serving as a gateway to many of what we consider the major fandoms and pop-cultural phenomena of the past decade. "Back then, we had a feeling that Harry Potter was never going to go away. But we thought that it would be more of a metaphysical state of being," Melissa Anelli, author of New York Times best-seller Harry, A History and founder of Potter fan conference LeakyCon, told BuzzFeed News over the phone this November. "We thought it living on would just be us loving it forever. We had no idea what would happen."

Death, however, is embedded in every bit of Harry Potter. So what does a community with so much baggage do when it's said goodbye, only to immediately be pulled back into the orbit of Rowling's latest version of the wizarding world - especially when it hasn't kept up with the generation that turned it into a phenomenon in the first place? "We have to ask ourselves if they're taking advantage of the audience they have while not meeting the standards that they set," Jordan said.

The Potter fandom has evolved in a multitude of ways since the initial rushes of Pottermania, but Anelli posited that "the biggest thing is that we are more accepting of the notion that it's OK to dislike something about your fandom." She added, "A couple of years ago, whenever you'd voice opposition you'd be shouted down." Anelli described fan spaces now, in contrast, as championing "more varied opinions, more discussion, and more complicated feelings" than ever before. That notion was present and accounted for at the 2016 LeakyCon, held this past October in Burbank, California. Programming on Saturday featured back-to-back panels: " Cursed Child Was Great and So Can You" at noon, followed by "We Deserve Better: Why It's Okay to Reject Cursed Child as Canon" at 1 p.m.

Now, the Potter fandom has crafted a legacy of engagement and creativity that the series' modern canonical efforts are struggling to live up to.

There has long been a certain duality in fan communities, but it's grown more pronounced in recent years, as communities settled into spaces like Tumblr, shifted their expectations, and raised the moral bar on which they judged their media. Now, the Potter fandom has crafted a legacy of engagement and creativity that the series' modern canonical efforts are struggling to live up to. For so many fans, especially those at that second LeakyCon panel, it can be hard to get hype about Cursed Child when they recognize in it so many of the tropes they explored themselves a decade ago - in content they created and championed. And when, for just one example, Cursed Child visibly hastened to present the intense central love between Draco's son and Harry Potter's son as platonic - whereas fans had been writing and rewriting their relationship for years, and fandom, Harry Potter and beyond, has long pushed for more queer representation in media. In the days after the script for Cursed Child was publicly released in July, many fans reported that fic they'd read over the years sometimes felt more true to the voice and spirit of the original series than the collaboration between Rowling and Jack Thorne. "Finished #CursedChild. Not sure how I feel," wrote Twitter user and professed fan @Umbrella_Too. "Ups & downs but it's def not @jk_rowling style, writing or story." To put it more simply, @SammyKeiku tweeted: "Cursed Child is the weirdest fic I've ever read."

When Cursed Child did sweep in, it wasn't the be-all and end-all of the fan community. In fact, it was a bit anticlimactic given that so few fans could actually afford the tickets and travel costs to get to London to see it - and since they'd already flocked to YouTube, years ago, to watch the unofficial Harry Potter production A Very Potter Musical and its sequels, and had already elevated that cast to the ranks of fandom rock stars.

But Cursed Child and the looming Fantastic Beasts films still leave the fandom with something to think about. For instance: What happens when, say, Cursed Child gives Voldemort an unpopular secret daughter, or asserts that Cedric Diggory would have become a Death Eater after suffering from a basic public humiliation? Or, when a formerly beloved actor with an allegedly abusive past is cast as a major character in the latest Potter film series?

The revelation that Depp was cast in Fantastic Beasts enraged and disturbed many in the wake of the domestic abuse allegations leveled against him by his ex-wife Amber Heard this past spring. It was especially concerning considering who he's playing: Gellert Grindelwald, who will almost certainly play an integral part in all four of the sequels. In other words: He's an unavoidable part of what's to come for Harry Potter.

Then came Rowling's response to the casting: "I'm delighted," she said at the New York premiere of Fantastic Beasts on Nov. 10. "He's done incredible things with that character." For many in the fandom, that dealt a visceral blow. As Twitter user @wednesdaydreams wrote on Nov. 2, "The Harry Potter universe is all about being against the abuse of power, and yet you cast a known abuser?"

Depp's presence is proving to be a haunting issue - but it's also one in a line of many elements leaving fans uneasy. The concerns of cultural appropriation are especially present as the wizarding world promises to traverse several continents and dive into wizarding history around the globe in the Fantastic Beasts movies and beyond - cultures and histories about which Rowling is likely not an expert. "I don't think she has to be the one to [write all this]," Davis said. "She didn't write [all of] Cursed Child. She could mentor some dope black writer to write the history of black American wizards. Because there's so much mixing of cultures, and all this stuff she could connect, so many things [they] could do."

Carmen Ejogo plays the formidable president of the Magical Congress of the United States of America in a supporting role in Fantastic Beasts, and we're promised more of Zoe Kravitz in the upcoming movies - but the fandom is nervous that payoff for issues like representation will be too little and/or too late. "It's important to question these things," Jordan said. "It's just expecting more from [Rowling], and from that whole enterprise."

So, what happens when the world you've envisioned veers too many worlds away from the "official" one you're presented with on the big screen, on the stage, and on the page? "Right now," Jordan said, "there's this fight over who owns Harry Potter."

In some ways, the future appears to be mapped out. The news that there would be five Fantastic Beasts movies in total spread across social media in late October to exasperated groans and gasps on Twitter and Tumblr as the number of years to go ticked before fans' eyes.

No fandom has ever been a monolith of thought and feeling, but certain patterns are holding true enough to break through the fray: While many are holding on to an unfettered excitement, many too are approaching the new material with fatigue and with caution, if they haven't already said a whole new set of goodbyes. "There's a feeling that's missing," Davis said. "And it really makes me sad, that I don't feel that thing I felt with the books. But then again, it's not my fault that I don't feel that."

Fantastic Beasts hit theaters Nov. 17 - and the emotional and intellectual demands of the Harry Potter fandom likely won't make a dent on box office earnings. But no matter how it's received, it's clear that there will still be issues to address as long as the wizarding world is spinning off of existing cultures and ignoring key bits of real-life history.

The people in control of Harry Potter and the wizarding world may very well choose to make the series live forever. Another project could be announced at any moment - maybe we'll get a Game of Thrones -style TV series following the Hogwarts founders, maybe we'll get an animated short film following a young Dobby. But the exhaustion has already set in, with four more movies and countless Pottermore entries to go.

Dan Kitwood / Getty Images

Harry Potter fans line up for the final installment of the Harry Potter film series on July 7, 2011, in London.

Now, in a post-Brexit world gearing up for the Trump administration, however, Harry Potter's role as both a refuge from the darkness and as a (debated) means to process feelings of political hopelessness is bubbling up as fandom turns toward the tenets of social action embedded in the series. The morning after the election, a fan with the handle @alexdahlberry tweeted, " Harry Potter is with me more than ever today."

Using the original series' allegories didn't just pop up out of nowhere in the wake of the election of President-elect Donald Trump - the original Potter series boomed, in part, during the international turmoil of the early 2000s in the middle of the Bush administration. At the time, a sizable chunk of Harry Potter 's fans were children or adolescents just beginning to learn about real-world politics.

It's clear that the world that gave us the Boy Who Lived will keep on living in some way or another. After all, Rowling once famously wrote, in the voice of Albus Dumbledore, that "death is but the next great adventure." Harry Potter's presence in our lives may never go away, but it's also clear that both Harry Potter and its fandom are at a major crossroads, one that sooner or later will have to be confronted.

"They'll either jump on this train or they'll get left behind," Jordan said of the choice Warner Bros., Rowling, and the other powers that be have in front of them. They can evolve with the times, leave well enough alone when it comes to the wizarding world, or keep creating without evolving and risk losing the core fanbase that made Harry Potter legendary in the first place.

As we enter a period already marked by fear and trepidation, fans will no doubt keep pushing Rowling and Warner Bros. to rise to that responsibility of building an inclusive, thoughtful fictional universe - if only to give us something positive to look at while our own world struggles. ●

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The Harry Potter Fandom Is At A Crossroads

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The world of Harry Potter won't stop growing. But as the franchise struggles to evolve with the times and live up to the tenets of the original series, the devotion of its legendary fandom is showing major signs of fatigue.

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My Daughter's Journey into Superhero Fandom  Has Made Me Look at How Nerd Culture Has Changed

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My Daughter's Journey into Superhero Fandom  Has Made Me Look at How Nerd Culture Has Changed

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"I would love if DC Superhero Girls were really alive." "Why?" "Because I really like them. I'm their biggest faaAaaAan."

Over the summer, my daughter surprised me. When I went to San Diego for Comic-Con, her superhero fascination had cooled. Sure, she was inhaling as much Teen Titans Go! as various streaming services could serve up, falling in love with the comedic shenanigans of DC Comics' young superhero team. I'd expected her to keep on talking about Robin's temperamental blow-ups, imitating Starfire, or singing the show's songs about leg workouts and snack foods. When I got back home from California, she proudly said, "Guess what?! I like DC Superhero Girls now!"

In her mind, the Starfire, Cyborg, and Beast Boy on DC Superhero Girls are the same ones as on Teen Titans Go! But she's also able to call out how they look different and fight bad guys in a different context on the different shows. That's also true of her experiences with the clips from the older Teen Titans cartoon and comics that she's seen and read.

So what is it about her engagement with these shows that makes me think she's following in my nerdy footsteps? Couldn't she just be a kid who likes Raven, Star Sapphire, and Kid Flash in the same way that she watches Elena of Avalor, Princess Sofia, or Shopkins? For some reason, her engagement with superhero-centric material is different. My daughter parses things to peel away questions about plot twists and data points. For example, she doesn't go quoting chapter-and-verse from the Big Book of Boo-Boos to recall which toy suffered a specific ailment on Doc McStuffins. But, when she first saw the "Orangins" episode of Teen Titans Go!, she recited the mixed-up origin stories and was able to tell me that Raven's getting-powers story was an homage to Spider-Man's.

She's a first-grader and, at this point, I suspect that giving her a bunch of comics from the '60s, '70s, '80s and '90s would lead to more explainations than entertainment. But she continues to be hungry for lore. The other day, with no preamble or context, she blurted out "Anyone can be Batman. Anyone without powers, a human can be [Batman]. But not, like, Supergirl." She'll periodically ask me who's the Black Widow's greatest enemy (her phrasing), how fast the Flash can run around the world, or if the Hulk can lift a whole skyscraper over his head.

My kid knows that, depending on the story, Poison Ivy can be either a good guy or a bad guy. (Or she can wind up with a horrifying fate at the end of a children's book, as in the picture below.)

We've made up plenty of bathtime adventures featuring Aquaman, Aquagirl, and Tempest, and she gets that all these characters are simply meant to move through stories. I feel a swell of pride when she remembers Tempest's powers and comes up with clever ways for him to use them to save the day.

She's understanding these characters and their multivalent existences with a lot more flexibility than I did as a younger nerd.

Part of that is because the fandom I grew up in was more embattled. My generation and those that preceded it got teased for reading comics or enjoying video games, and a defensive reflex grew up in reaction to that. For decades, there've been several cycles of fans and pros wanting superhero characters and nerd culture to be "taken seriously" and that's affected discourse and engagement. It's the reason that Batman's many cinematic iterations-with the exception of the Lego versions-have been predicated on the brooding aspects of the character. Those Bruce Waynes are "serious" in a way that Adam West's "Bright Knight " Batman wasn't.

It's not an exaggeration to say that Adam West helped save Batman and changed what was possible...
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You even see that reflex around Teen Titans Go!, which gets bagged on by fans who have fond memories of the less goofy Teen Titans show that came before it. To be totally honest, my nostalgia for the Justice League and Justice League Unlimited cartoons created some wariness on my part for Justice League Action. But then I saw these clips while trawling YouTube...

...and I can't hate on that stuff at all.

Like Teen Titans Go!, Justice League Action leans more toward comedy than its predecessors. But my daughter's experiences have led me think about the shift in tone in a different way. When I was in my late teens and early 20s, a preponderance of superhero entertainment was impossible to imagine. Cape comics' constant struggle for marketplace survival and artistic validation always made it seem like superhero fare would just disappear one day.

I watched a clip of Lego Marvel Super Heroes: Avengers Reassembled with my daughter the other day and it dawned on me: This is what happens after that collective anxiety over extinction subsides. We're in a era of plenitude now. The party-dude Cyborg on the animated shows is, unintentionally, a symbol of that shift. This Victor Stone doesn't have any angst over whether he's still human or not, making him way better than the mopey iteration I grew up with. He simply revels in his hybrid existence, talks trash, and kicks butt.

As I've gotten older, I've become less interested in what the "real version" of a character is. There may be interpretations of, say, Superman that I strongly dislike, but watching my daughter's burgeoning fandom has helped drive home an idea that I've always enjoyed about superhero fare. There's likely another version of Superman out there that's just right for me, for her, for almost anyone. And if there's not one, she can make up one in her head that works for her. My biggest hope for her is the hope I had for myself, that she can grow up in a fandom that doesn't tear itself in half when a black man becomes Captain America, a woman lifts Mjolnir, or a Korean-American teenager transforms into the Hulk.

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My Daughter's Journey Into Superhero Fandom Has Made Me Look at How Nerd Culture Has Changed

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"I would love if DC Superhero Girls were really alive." "Why?" "Because I really like them. I'm their biggest faaAaaAan." Over the summer, my daughter surprised me. When I went to San Diego for Comic-Con, her superhero fascination had cooled. Sure, she was inhaling as much Teen Titans Go!

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When I tell people that I'm a professor who teaches classes on fandom, I'm usually met by one of two reactions. One reaction is disbelief, as if I had just told them I teach classes on juggling, origami, or beer pong. This stems from the perception that the academic classroom is a hallowed space where deep discussions lead to meaningful discoveries (and popular culture, the thinking goes, just doesn't get us there)-think Mr. Chips, not Mr. Miyagi; epic poetry, not fanfic; Twain, not Twilight. The other reaction is jealousy, usually accompanied by a plaintive sigh and "I wish they had courses like that when I was in college!" For these green-eyed friends, studying fans and fandom is meaningful because popular culture reveals the intricacies of contemporary life and the influence of the media on our cultural (and individual) consciousness.

(There is a rare third reaction to my fan studies classroom, as most mechanics ask, "V-belts or serpentine?")

After nearly a decade of teaching students about fans, I've encountered these reactions a lot, and I've spent a long time thinking about how to respond to them. Why teach fandom? What does fandom bring to the classroom (and what does the classroom bring to fandom)? And why is fandom so important today? Here, I want to explore some of the main themes I've discussed with students about teaching fans (unless you really want to hear about fan belts, in which case, you're out of luck I'm afraid).

In class, we discuss a spectrum of practices that individuals can do to be perceived as "fans." I have the students follow one media object (usually a TV show) for 10 weeks; they research its creation, they write fan fiction (fanfic) about it, they analyze the types of fan response the show has generated, they work on a class Tumblr, and they create fan-edited music videos (vids). They spend the quarter discussing different ways people have responded to the show and analyzing the influence of these fans in social and cultural venues. And throughout it all, students discover a wide gamut of reactions, from unyielding devotion to hate-watching, from fandom to anti-fandom. We study the origins and histories of fandom, representations of fans in the media, and the types of practices fans engage in.

I teach about fandom because it influences today's media more than we realize, and it offers a way of looking at the world that can be applied long after the doors of the classroom have shut. I teach fandom because I believe we need to help students build the type of critical self-evaluation and reflection that can happen in fan communities-the type of fan discussion that can change the conversation, can engage issues of diversity, can illuminate the importance of even the most minor of characters or social issues. Conversely, fandom can also be messy, and nasty, and filled with hateful speech; so too students must also learn where this speech is coming from, and why, and then how to safely and appropriately combat it. Teaching fandom isn't just about showing students how to appreciate media in a deeper and more emotional way; it's about discovering the ways fandom itself can change our perceptions.

Much has been written about the influence of fandom on mainstream popular culture; perhaps unsurprisingly, each year my students come into my fandom classes with more knowledge and experience of fandom than the year before. They've encountered fandom online; they've attended Comic-Con or C2E2; they've cosplayed; they've read (and sometimes created) fanfic and seen vids and reblogged Tumblr posts. They know the stories of obscure Marvel heroes and they can name who played the Fourth Doctor.

The history of fans is varied and changes depending on whom one asks-and in that respect, works as a potent metaphor for the importance of teaching fandom. Common fan studies wisdom holds that fan communities started in the late 1920s and early 1930s as science fiction fans wrote letters to and formed friendships through Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories. From these titles spawned a group, the Science Fiction League. The League sought to link multiple fan groups together because they, as Gernsback noted, "believe in the seriousness of SF. They believe that there is nothing greater than human imagination, and the diverting of such imagination into constructive channels." Other science fiction clubs held conventions (like Worldcon, which started in 1939) and wrote fan-created magazines, or zines.

This is the common history of Fandom, and it's perfectly valid (if a bit white and male-centric). From this early science fiction Fandom sprung many other fandoms, including media fandoms like early Trekkers and contemporary ones like the Whedonverse fandom. (Noteworthy, though, are the many schisms that have emerged between the early Fandom and later media fandoms. For the purposes of this essay, I'm using the word fandom in a "Big Tent" fashion that encompasses all of these fandoms.) Yet, interpreting the history of fandom through a different lens reveals a great variety of experiences.

As we know, origin stories tells us more about characters than we realize-the murder of his parents makes Batman into a justice-obsessed vigilante; Kamala Khan was just an ordinary girl before being given extraordinary powers. So too is it with studying fans, as the historical origin story we give to students reveals the type of fan we want to portray. Beyond the traditional stories of Fandom history, other histories tell a different tale. Should students focus on science fiction fans from the 1930s to discuss early cosplay and the rise of convention culture? Or do we look beyond the obvious genre connections to see more feminine antecedents? For instance, even before Amazing Stories, a great many other literary magazines had letter columns which allowed fans to communicate with each other. Although science fiction was largely thought of as the domain of male readers, other genres (romance, melodrama, poetry) had large female followings and similar fan-like communities flourished.

Or should the class focus on the letters to the Strand in the late 19 th century to assess the influence of fans on the creator's writing? Many people may know that British fans of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional detective Sherlock Holmes held demonstrations when the character was killed off in "The Final Problem." Many women were among the fans demonstrating (a famous, albeit possibly apocryphal, story sees one woman dressed all in black accosting Doyle outside his home with plaintive cries of mourning) and women have kept that fandom alive (even before Cumberbatch!). Prior to Holmes, Jane Austen had enormous female fan followings starting in the 1870s. And running parallel to discussions of literary fandom, there are other, less-well-known fandoms in media, music, and sports that saw more African American fans at the heart of fan communities. Should students dig further, to look at the rise of baseball fandom in the 1800s as a type of religious fervor, or look geographically distant to non-Western fandoms in Japan, Korea, India, or the Middle East, from which different fan origins would tell completely different stories?

(For more on the many histories of fandom, check out Rebecca Wanzo's 2015 essay "African American acafandom and other strangers," and both Karen Hellekson's and Alexandra Edwards's forthcoming chapters on the history and experiences of fans.)

Of course, in a class for college students in a media studies program, we focus mainly on the rise of media fandoms in the late 20 th and early 21 st centuries. Studying fandom and its history also helps students understand how fans have impacted (and continue to impact) the contemporary media environment. Many people are aware of the influence of fandom in keeping some television series on the air: Bjo Trimble's letter-writing campaigns kept Star Trek going while fans sent bottles of hot sauce to WB in support of Roswell; Firefly fans bought DVDs and Jericho fans mailed peanuts to CBS. Fans are shrewd: when they learned that fast-food giant was sponsoring Chuck, they went out in droves to buy Subway sandwiches in support of the show.

Studying history allows us to see how this image of the empowered, media-savvy fan contrasts with the antipathy that has greeted fans for decades. Recall William Shatner on 1985's Saturday Night Live, standing in front of a group of nerdy Star Trek fans, declaring, "Get a life" and exclaiming "There's a whole world out there! When I was your age, I didn't watch television! I LIVED! So... Move out of your parent's basements! And get your own apartments and GROW THE HELL UP! I mean, it's just a TV show dammit, IT'S JUST A TV SHOW!" Or, remember obsessed fan Annie Wilkes from Stephen King's Misery, who loves the character Misery Chastain so much she forces author Paul Sheldon to write more (and later dies after being killed with a typewriter and gagged with the pages of the new novel-metaphor much?). How many images of obsessive, violent, or hysterical fans populate television and film? (Even Netflix's recent Gilmore Girls gets in on the fan-shaming act, when Rory has a one-night stand with a man dressed as a Wookiee and then pitches an article about women who have sex with nerds just to feel good about themselves. Ouch.)

Fandom ​often ​becomes a mechanism through which students can approach stereotypes in order to appreciate and better understand issues of diversity and representation. Being a fan is not the same type of socially oppressed identity, but studying representations of fans can ​create opportunities for students to engage more critically ​with issues of representation in fandom, and how they reflect societal expectations regarding who gets to be perceived as "belonging in fandom." For some students, discussions about representation in fandom can also provide a means to explore their own experiences with marginalizations (gender, race, sexuality, disability, etc.) and cultural stereotypes.

Of course, it also matters what people are fans of-masculinized activities like sports are culturally considered much more valid than feminized activities like fanfic. There is a subtle hierarchy of "geekiness" that valorizes particular objects of fandom higher than others-and, leading from that, a hierarchy of audiences as well. Our own fandoms are also on these hierarchies (although we may argue about which is more or less acceptable), and whether we like it or not we stereotype fans of things we think are less valid than our own. Too often in fan circles we are asked to be more or less critical, more or less emotional, more or less concerned with canon. And too often disagreements within fandoms stem from these issues. We are encouraged to practice fandom "the right way" and to discourage those that practice it differently.

But with more popularization of fannish texts comes different fans who bring their own ways of being into the fannish mix. Teaching fandom has brought me into contact with hundreds of students who all approach fandom differently. I've become more aware of the spectrum of fandom. So as a teacher, I try to bring my own fandom into the classroom to demonstrate for students that it's okay to have unmitigated passion for something. I proudly wear my "Gallifrey University" tee shirt and show the students photos of my 10-year-old self dressed as a Dalek for Halloween.

I also try to point out times when my favorite media text is problematic. It's also okay to be critical of the media that we love. We don't have to see everything as all good or all bad. Most media texts are problematic in some way because they are made by people and people are fallible. But it can be hard to critique the problematic things in the media that we love.

So we point out the problems in order to bring light to a variety of under-discussed cultural issues. Fandom gives us a voice to do this while still retaining our passion for the object and for our communities. Fandom presents a bastion of critical thinking in a world of conformity. We need to teach critical and thoughtful fandom in a world increasingly hostile to emotion and increasingly concerned with profit.

Studying fandom in the classroom is crucial because people never stop watching media, and their fandom of that media will help guide how they see their culture. I strive for my students to critically evaluate contemporary culture. Studying the different ways fans can react to something tells us that not everyone or everything is homogenous. It is hard for individuals to break out of their own mindset and to realize that other valid viewpoints exist (now, more than ever, this is an important skill to teach). Probably the most challenging thing to instill in students is the idea that not everyone shares their reaction to something-more often than not, I write on students' papers that "you can't assume everyone else finds The Walking Dead compelling."

I'm not saying that studying fandom will radically change the world, but it can help students learn to appreciate alternate viewpoints. So for many students, it's mind blowing. I still hear from one of my students whose fan research on The Monkees has helped her become part of a community she didn't know existed. For others (often the ones who are fans already) it's a chance to dig deeply into an important facet of their life.

Although I tend to get two very different reactions to my teaching fandom, I think both might be right. Some people feel that the college classroom should be reserved for Very Important Subjects; others are jealous because they love fandom and popular culture. But fandom is a Very Important Subject. It is serious work that allows students to approach and talk about serious issues. It is fun but it has real power. Popular culture can be a mirror but it can also be a crystal ball, allowing us not only to comment on what's happening today, but also develop ideas about what we want the future to be like. Fandom is one possible future, and my students will be prepared.

My sincere thanks to Katie Booth for her superb comments on an early draft of this essay.

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Fandom in the Classroom - Uncanny Magazine

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When I tell people that I'm a professor who teaches classes on fandom, I'm usually met by one of two reactions. One reaction is disbelief, as if I had just told them I teach classes on juggling, origami, or beer pong. This stems from the perception that the academic classroom is a hallowed space where ...

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Why You Should Pay Attention to Fandoms by Katie Behrens

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Why You Should Pay Attention to Fandoms by Katie Behrens

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Disclaimer: this is a HUGE topic. I'm only barely scratching the surface.

Remember that Teen Read Week™ art contest we hosted a month ago? Since I'm the one who coordinated it, I won't be forgetting anytime soon!

What I didn't realize when we began was that we were unwittingly embarking on a journey into fandom, specifically fanart. I attended YALSA's Young Adult Literature Symposium a few weeks ago, and fandom was also a central thread (possibly an answer to the symposium's theme. Q: Hit Me with the Next Best Thing / A: Fandom). Fandoms generally arise out of a shared love of a particular story, whether that story is told through television, cinema, video games, and most importantly for librarians, books. There are strong fandoms for The Avengers, BBC's Sherlock and Doctor Who, the Final Fantasy game series, and of course, Harry Potter. Fans (of anything - there can literally be a fandom for anything) converse and share mostly online, across many cyber venues. Fans are different from the average reader/watcher/gamer, though; they are not satisfied to just passively consume media. A fan of Harry Potter doesn't just read the books penned by Rowling herself - oh no, she climbs right into the world and plays there. This fan might write fanfiction using some of the established HP characters, she might draw a scene with some steamy Harry-Draco action, or she might knit herself a Ravenclaw scarf. Fans actively participate with stories. They pick up the conversation where the author left it.

Fanfiction is a topic unto itself (I've provided some article titles below for further reading), so I'm going to try to stay broad when I talk about fandom. The thought process behind participatory fandom is simple: "I really like X, I want more of X, I will create more stuff about X!" At its core, fandom is creative. Fans are inspired by stories to create. Any naysayers who talk about fans not creating their own content should be promptly shown an art history textbook and told to zip it. Artists have always taken inspiration from literature, and fanfiction is as old as the hills (Jane Austen sequels, anyone?). Clive Thompson refers to the activity as creating "paracosms", and he brings in interesting evidence that such imaginative play as a teenager leads to heightened creativity and problem solving as an adult.

Teens make up a huge portion of fandom creators and consumers, and the teenage years are when a person is most likely to find the world of fandom. A fandom is a community - a group of people who all love the same thing(s). Online fandoms are often safe spaces for teenagers to explore identity and sexuality without the fear of ridicule from peers. A fan can "ship" characters together (short for "relationship"), or create a homosexual relationship between two straight characters (usually men) for "slash". Lots of queer teens find refuge in fandoms, seeing representation in fanfiction that is measly at best in published trade books.

While some question the legality of fanfiction and fanart, it's more or less protected under the Fair Use clause in copyright law. The fanfiction/fanart has to be transformative rather than just derivative; in other words, there has to be a good amount of original creativity added to the copyrighted story. Since fanfiction/fanart is usually free, it's not often taken to court over copyright. If you're curious about this aspect, visit the Organization for Transformative Works.

Fandoms are creative, supportive, inspiring, instructive - all things we love here at Library as Incubator! While we appreciate all sorts of fandoms and fans (the fact that we're huge nerds should surprise no one), we have a special place in our hearts for book fandoms. The teens who participated in our TRW art contest were all inspired by books to create incredible works of art.

Hosting a teen fan art competition in your library is totally do-able and absolutely worth exploring! Even if teens aren't active in online fandoms, chances are good they've read something awesome lately and have that creative itch to make something. All you need is a way to display artwork, a voting system or selected judges, and enthusiasm to get teens creating. We ran our contest entirely online, but maybe you can do it IRL (in real life). A lot of libraries have hosted fanart events, so look around to get ideas.

Don't dismiss fandoms as creatively-lazy just because they use the worlds and characters of another. Writing or creating in a pre-established world is more difficult in some ways, because there are rules and character identities to maintain. Fanfic writers can write in the voice of another author - that deserves some respect! Fans make content because it's fun; it's a natural reaction to something you love. If you're unfamiliar with fandoms, drop into DeviantArt or fanfiction.net or some of the other links below to see what it's all about. These people are simply bubbling with creativity.
Resources for Further Reading
Articles (for those who have access)

Griffis, Kimberly and D. Yvonne Jones. (2008). Readers' advisory 2.0: Recommending fanfiction. Public Libraries, 47(6), 62-65.

Kennedy, James. (2010). Fandom 2.0: A celebration of the reader. VOYA, 33(5), 412-414.

Moore, Rebecca C. (2005). All shapes of hunger: Teenagers and fanfiction. VOYA, 28(1), 15-19.

Schaffner, Becca. (2009). In defense of fanfiction. The Horn Book Magazine, 85(6), 613-618.

A Smattering of Fan Sites Katie Behrens is a graduate student in Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. She is currently serving as an intern for the Library as Incubator Project. Though she hasn't written any fanfiction in a LONG time, she's fairly sure some bad teenage Tamora Pierce and Harvest Moon 64 fanfic is still hiding under her bed.

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Essay: Why You Should Pay Attention to Fandoms - Library as Incubator Project

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by Katie Behrens Disclaimer: this is a HUGE topic. I'm only barely scratching the surface. Remember that Teen Read Week™ art contest we hosted a month ago? Since I'm the one who coordinated it, I won't be forgetting anytime soon! What I didn't realize when we began was that we were unwittingly embarking on a journey into fandom, specifically fanart.

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50+ Fandom Programs: Planning Festivals and Events for Tweens, Teens, and Adults by Amy J. Alessio, Katie LaMantia, and Emily 

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50+ Fandom Programs: Planning Festivals and Events for Tweens, Teens, and Adults by Amy J. Alessio, Katie LaMantia, and Emily 

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50+ Fandom Programs: Planning Festivals and Events for Tweens, Teens, and Adults

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Katie LaMantia is a collection specialist at Baker and Taylor. She previously worked as a teen librarian at the Schaumburg Township District Library in Schaumburg, Illinois. She is a former Teen Advisory Board member turned librarian and is the co-author of the books 50+ Fandom Programs: Planning Festivals and Events for Tweens, Teens, and Adults (ALA Editions, 2017) and A Year of Programs for Millennials and More (ALA Editions, 2015).

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Designed to increase public awareness of the value, impact and services provided by libraries and library professionals, the Libraries Transform campaign will ensure there is one clear, energetic voice for our profession.

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This is the third step in the "How To Make A 90-Second Newbery" series. If you haven't already, check out Step 1: Watch Great Previous 90-Second Newberys and Step 2: Read The Book And Start Planning.

You're ready to start the process of making your 90-Second Newbery video. You've watched previous successful 90-Second Newberys ( Step 1). You've read the book, figured out a good "twist," and pulled together some resources to make the movie happen ( Step 2). What next?

You've got to write that script! With a solid script in hand, you have a much better chance of making a great movie.

In this post, I'll start with some particular nuts-and-bolts advice on how to write a 90-Second Newbery script. Then I'll expand the focus to give general advice on story structure that might prove useful.

So, let's dive into advice on writing that script!

Wait, what's a script? Maybe you've never written a script before. What does a script even look like? The good news is that it doesn't matter if you do it "right" or "wrong." This script is just for you and your group. The movie is the final product. That's the only thing that really matters. A script is just a shared document that everyone can use to plan the movie.

Here is the shooting script that was used for the Wrinkle in Time 90-Second Newbery. Read it. It should be self-explanatory. (The only thing that might be mysterious are those scene headings. For those, INT means that the scene is shot indoors, and EXT means the scene is shot outdoors.)

Notice that the script is only 2 pages long. If your script is longer than 2 pages, your movie will probably be over 90 seconds. To be honest, that's okay. We have some great "90-Second" Newberys that are actually 3 or 4 minutes long. But as a goal, you should at least try for 90 seconds. The movie will always end up running longer than you think it will.

Write a terrible first draft. I advise you jump right in. Take your first whack at writing the script, with the format of that Wrinkle in Time script as your guide. Don't worry if your first draft is terrible or too long or unfunny or unoriginal. JUST GET A FIRST DRAFT DONE. You can worry about making it good later. You might even end up throwing away that first draft and starting over. That's fine! Every time you write, you're learning.

The "twist" you decided on in Step 2 will be crucial. It will give you the inspiration and direction to write this script. Maybe you will find, in writing the script, that the original "twist" you came up with doesn't work. That's fine! Throw out that twist and think up another! We're early in the process, nothing is set in stone yet.

Make sure your script has a strong start. Kick off your movie with a visual situation that is fun or compelling or scary or weird! You've only got a few seconds to grab the viewer, so make those first few seconds count!

If writing a script beginning-to-end intimidates you, give yourself permission to write fragments out of order. Think of some "holy cow!" moments, some jokes, some scene ideas based on your twist. Once you have a lot of them, THEN think of ways to string them together.

Remember that movies are a visual medium. They're about images, not words. Your script shouldn't be of a bunch of people standing around talking, explaining the plot. As much as your story allows, your script should be chock-full of physical action, high-drama moments with lots of emotion, lots of scene changes to different interesting locations and costumes. You may be helped by what we learned from the movies we watched in Step 1-cinematic techniques like voiceover, green screen, special effects, shot composition, camera movement, etc.

Don't be afraid to change the original story from the book. You only have 90 seconds to work with, so it's unavoidable you'll have to cut out a lot. It's OK to merge two characters into one, drop subplots, change the order of events, etc. And if your changes are in service of the genre twist (think of the James Bond version of Ramona and Her Father, or the zombie version of Mr. Popper's Penguins), then all the better!

Once you've knocked together a terrible first draft, have everyone in your group look at it and offer suggestions on how to make it less terrible. After you've taken those suggestions, give your edited-but-still-terrible first draft to someone who isn't even in the group, someone who hasn't even read the book. What do they think? Does the script make sense to them? Or is it truly terrible?

Oh no! My terrible first draft really is terrible! That's okay, it's supposed to be terrible. What, did you think you'd write something perfect off the top of your head? That's not how creativity works. You must embrace the possibility of writing garbage in order to free yourself to find the good stuff. A bad first draft is better than no draft at all.

Let's put that terrible first draft aside for a moment. Forget about it for now. Let's look at the original story again.

The number one problem I see in bad 90-Second Newbery movies is that the movies make no sense. I mean literally no sense, like it's impossible to tell what's going on. This happens because the filmmakers try to cram too much plot into a short movie. They don't know which scenes to keep and which to discard. And the scenes aren't linked to each other in a storylike way. They just all feel like disconnected bits that have nothing to do with each other.

How do you avoid that fate? After all, it's easy for these movies to get confusing and incoherent, because so much story info is being smooshed into such a short timeframe.

Luckily, there's a great method.

Discover the "beats" of the story, and determine how each is linked with the magic words therefore or but. I didn't invent this next piece of advice. I learned it from the creators of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone. They explain it better than I can in this video.

In case you can't watch that video, I'll explain it here and point out how it relates to the 90-Second Newbery.

In order to keep our story feeling like a story, we must always make sure our audience understands what is happening in the story, and why it is happening. Otherwise, the audience will be bored or confused.

The good news is that you already have a good story. After all, the book you're adapting won a Newbery Medal or Honor. So the fundamentals of its structure are probably sound. Your story has good "bones." So let's take a closer look at that story.

To get a grip on what you need to write, try writing out the "beats" of the original story-the important actions that cause big changes.

For instance, in A Wrinkle in Time . . .

1. Teenager Meg is dissatisfied with her life, especially that her Dad is missing
2. Meg hangs out with her little brother Charles Wallace and they meet friendly witches
3. Meg and Charles Wallace discover their Dad is being held on another planet
4. The friendly witches take them to the other planet

. . . and so on.

Once you've written out the "beats" of the story, try to find a way in your script to link each beat to the next beat by cause-and-effect. That means, many of the beats of the story should somehow cause the next beat to happen. Beat 1 happens, therefore Beat 2 happens. "Bob heard a noise outside, therefore he went to investigate." "Susan saw the monster coming, therefore she hid behind the tree."

You won't be able to do it in every beat. That's because sometimes the beats aren't linked by cause-and-effect, but rather an unexpected resistance or complication. That is: Beat 1 happens, but Beat 2 happens. "Caroline wanted to buy an apple, but the grocery store was closed." "Sam wanted to ask Lisa to the dance, but Lisa told Sam she was already going with Zack."

Alert! Here's what doesn't work in a story: Beat 1 happens, and then Beat 2 happens. A story fails when too many beats lack a "therefore" or "but" connection, but are simply one thing after another. "I went into the basement and then my dog died and then my dad made pasta for dinner and then aliens blew up the world." All these incidents in isolation might be interesting, but they're not related to each other in any story-like way, and so the audience will get confused and unhappy and bored.

To sum up: write your script such that as many story beats as possible can be connected to the next by the word therefore or but, and not merely and then. It will make the story easier to understand-and don't be afraid to change the story a little in order to make these links clearer!

By the way, you will definitely have to discard some of the original beats of the story in order to make a short movie. Our version of A Wrinkle in Time completely drops the Happy Medium, Aunt Beast, Sandy and Dennys, the Man with Red Eyes, the trip to Uriel, and more. And then it stitches the remaining beats together, connecting them with therefore (Charles Wallace hears a noise outside, therefore he and Meg go outside) or but (Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin tesser to Camazotz, but their way is blocked by a basketball-playing robot) with a minimum of and then.

Again, you can see Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park explain this insight in this video.

Another way of organizing your story: Dan Harmon's "Story Circle." Here's writing advice from another successful TV writer, Dan Harmon (the showrunner of the NBC sitcom Community and the co-creator of the Cartoon Network's Rick and Morty). I'm offering it not because your script necessarily has to follow this scheme, but because it's another helpful way to think about story structure, and it might help your script.

Dan Harmon adapted his "Story Circle" from the anthropologist Joseph Campbell's idea of "The Hero's Journey." I, in turn, am going to adapt my explanation from Dan Harmon's own essay, which you can read here (warning, there is some salty language): Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

In the "Story Circle," many stories can be broken down into seven simple steps:

1. A character is in a zone of comfort

2. But they want something.

3. They enter an unfamiliar situation,

4. Adapt to it,

5. Get what they wanted,

6. Pay a heavy price for it,

7. Then return to their familiar situation,

8. Having changed.

You can arrange these steps around a circle, like so:

Let's look at these steps one-by-one in the context of some Newbery-winning books and well-known movies, and see how that knowledge can be used in making your video. Then we'll observe how these steps are fulfilled in a classic 90-Second Newbery video.

1. "You" - ESTABLISH A PROTAGONIST

In your movie, you need to make it clear as quickly as possible who the protagonist of the story is. If not, the audience will get frustrated watching a bunch of different characters of confusingly equal importance. If the audience can get inside a specific character, then they can get inside the story.

In Star Wars, we don't meet Luke Skywalker until 20 minutes into the movie. But you only have around 90 seconds! So your hero must be the first person the audience sees, or one of the first. Have that hero say a line or do something interesting in character right away. Make the hero's name clear as quickly as possible.

In A Wrinkle In Time, we start with Meg worrying in bed during a storm. In Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, we immediately meet Mrs. Frisby and learn she is the head of a family of field mice living in a farmer's garden. In From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, we learn in the first sentence that Claudia is a kid who wants to run away, but wants to do it in a certain way.

If you give the audience a clear protagonist with a personality right away, the audience will be on board, grateful that they have a hero to root for.

2. "Need" - SOMETHING AIN'T QUITE RIGHT

This is where we show that something is not quite right in the universe, no matter how large or small that universe is. And that problem shows us what the hero wants.

In A Wrinkle in Time, the big problem is that Meg's father is missing. In Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, the problem is that Mrs. Frisby's baby mouse Timothy is sick and can't be moved, and the farmer is planning to plow up Mrs. Frisby's home. In From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, the problem is that Claudia feels bored and unappreciated in her family.

In all these cases, that problem-the thing that's not right in the world-leads to a specific want for the hero. Meg wants to find her father. Mrs. Frisby wants to move the house and heal Timothy. Claudia wants to run away from home and have an adventure.

3. "Go" - CROSSING THE THRESHOLD

This is where your hero takes action and enters the world of adventure. Meg meets the witches and agrees to travel into space to rescue her father. Mrs. Frisby risks her life by going to visit the owl and the rats to enlist their help. Claudia teams up with her brother Jamie and they run away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This step is what your story is "about." It's the thing you would put on the movie poster. Everything below this part of the circle is the "special world," the "adventure world." Luke has blasted off of Tatooine with Han Solo and everyone else on the Millennium Falcon. Indiana Jones gets on a plane in search of the Ark of the Covenant. If possible, show the contrast between these two worlds-the ordinary world we've inhabited until now, and the world of adventure we must now grapple with.

4. "Search" - THE ROAD OF TRIALS

This is where your hero meets the challenges that crop up when they pursue their goal. Our hero gets thrown into the deep end of the adventure, and now it's sink or swim!

Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin travel through space and time and try to come to grips with the evil alien planet of Camazotz. Mrs. Frisby uses her wits and bravery to find her way into the rat's nest, and discovers the rats are secretly technological geniuses. Claudia and Jamie figure out how to survive living at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: scrounging money, hiding in the bathrooms to avoid guards, learning about the museum's collections.

This is the part of the story where our hero is making allies and fighting enemies. Luke Skywalker and his friends are running around inside the Death Star, fighting storm troopers. Indiana Jones is traveling to exotic places, joining with old friends Marion and Sallah, and digging in the desert. Our hero is adapting to the world of adventure, they are meeting the challenges that are thrown at them, which leads us to . . .

5. "Find" - MEETING WITH THE GODDESS

The test and difficulties of the previous "Road of Trials" have all prepared your hero for this moment. At this moment, your hero finds what they were looking for . . . although it's never exactly what they had expected.

This is a special pivot point. It's at the very bottom of the circle, in the center. Imagine your hero began at the top and has tumbled all the way down here. The story's natural tendency to pull your hero downward has done its job, and for a moment, we are in a special state. This is a time for major revelations, and total vulnerability.

After this point, everything will take a different direction. It will a new kind of effort for the hero, and the hero will have to make more difficult choices, after this point.

This is where Meg finally finds her father on the evil planet Camazotz-but he's not going to solve their problems, as she'd hoped. Mrs. Frisby gets the rats to agree to help her-but she also learns that her dead husband was best friends with the rats, that he shared a history with them, though he never shared that secret with her. Claudia and Jamie manage to solve the mystery of who carved the "Angel" statue in the museum. In Frozen, Anna finally finds Elsa in her ice castle.

This is an important moment. The hero wins a brief victory here, and seems to get what they want. Luke Skywalker finally rescues Princess Leia in the depths of the Death Star. Indiana Jones finds the Ark of the Covenant. But this leads to the next step . . .

6. "Take" - MEET YOUR MAKER

Everything falls apart here. The goal your hero sought-and for a moment, thought he had achieved-is actually further away than ever. Or the dream your hero tried to achieve turned out to be a nightmare. Or the hero got his goal, but it led to all kinds of catastrophic side-effects. In short: there is a price for meeting the goddess. This is the part of the story where things get real.

This is where your hero must suffer.

If this is an action movie, this is the part where our hero gets his butt kicked. In a love story, this is the part where they break up. The friend the hero trusted turns out to be a traitor. The mentor who trained the hero dies. The dark night of the soul happens here.

Meg gets her father away from the evil of Camazotz, but she ends up leaving her now-hypnotized brother Charles Wallace behind. The plan goes wrong and Mrs. Frisby is captured by the farmer's family. The museum dismisses Claudia's and Jamie's discovery about the statue, and Claudia cries, and they consider going home in a kind of defeat.

Up until now, everything in the adventure has been preparing the hero for that meeting with the goddess. Now the hero is paying the price.

Luke Skywalker may have rescued Princess Leia, but he still has to fight his way out of that nightmarish space station, and watch his mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi get murdered by Darth Vader, before he can totally escape. Indiana Jones may have found the Ark of the Covenant, but the Nazis steal it from him almost immediately, and they leave him in the pit to die. Anna may have found Elsa, but Elsa blasts Anna in the heart with her ice-power.

Here the hero has to suffer the unendurable, learn the worst truths, come face to face with their weaknesses, and lose their allies.

7. "Return" - BRINGING IT HOME

This is the opposite of "crossing the threshold" in step 3. We are now leaving the world of adventure, and that's not easy. It was difficult to get in, and it'll be difficult to get out. This is the point where the hero must reach deep down, be inventive, and risk everything they've got.

Meg goes back to Camazotz, alone, to save Charles Wallace. Mrs. Frisby escapes the farmer and warns the rats that their home is about to be destroyed, and the rats abandon their nest just in time. Claudia and Jamie, instead of buying a train ticket home, instead audaciously buy a ticket to visit Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler herself.

If this is an action movie, here's where you have your big car chase or bonkers fight scene. Or, in a love story, having realized what's important, the hero must run all the way across town before his girlfriend gets on the plane and leaves his life forever. Luke Skywalker and Han Solo blast through a whole squadron of TIE fighters, they make it to the rebel base, but then Luke decides to join the Rebellion to return to the Death Star and blow it up. Indiana Jones takes one wild risk after another to chase the Nazis who have stolen the ark from him.

But for the hero get the ultimate prize, and finish the story, the story must demonstrate how the hero has changed. Which leads us to the final step . . .

8. "Change" - MASTER OF BOTH WORLDS

The hero faces a final challenge or situation, and the way he deals with the challenge shows us how the story has changed him.

Meg stops worrying about herself and takes a bold risk, using just her love to rescue Charles Wallace from the giant disembodied brain. She's a much braver Meg than the girl we met at the beginning. Claudia and Jamie are able to navigate Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler's mixed-up files, using the knowledge and moxie they've gained over the adventure to find the true solution to their mystery. It shows how Claudia and Jamie have both grown, both individually and as a team.

In an action film, this is where you put the ultimate showdown between the hero and the villain. In a love story, this is where the hero runs across the tarmac, stops the airplane, gets on board and makes a big speech to his girlfriend that causes her to love him again and take him back.

This is where the hero proves how the story has changed them.

In Star Wars, Luke uses what he's learned about the Force to do the impossible and blow up the Death Star. This proves he's no longer a naive farm boy, he's on his way to being a Jedi knight. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana shuts his eyes when the ark is opened, because this once-skeptical archeologist now believes in and respects its supernatural power.

The hero is has changed. They have been to the strange place, they have adapted to it, they have discovered some true things, and now they are back where they started (though not necessarily literally). But our hero is now forever changed, and perhaps able to create change too.

They've earned it. You've watched them earn it. And that's why it's a good story.

Uh, cool story bro, what does this have to do with the 90-Second Newberys? Good point. That's a lot of story structure to learn, but what does that have to do with making a movie?

Well, remember how I said that the number one problem with bad 90-Second Newbery movies is that they don't make any sense? That they just seem to be like a random collection of scenes? You can use this Story Circle to organize your script, so that it truly feels like a story.

To make your movie feel like a satisfying re-telling of the original Newbery book, find what elements of that original story correspond to the points on the Story Circle, and write your script with that in mind. Those eight story beats on the Story Circle are probably already in that Newbery book in one form or another, you just have to read it carefully to find them. And use that to structure your script.

Let me give you an example based on a simple story. Here's a 90-Second Newbery of the vignette "Monsters and Giants," from Frog and Toad Together:

Pretty good movie, right? Definitely one of the best that I've received. And one of the reasons for that is-aside from the adorable puppets, the entertaining voiceover work, the ingenious cinematography-it fulfills all eight points of the Story Circle:

Pretty nifty how that works, huh? So if you're wondering what scenes are important to include from the book in your 90-Second Newbery movie, the Story Circle can be an invaluable tool.

And you just learned some important truths about how stories work in the bargain!

That's it from Step 3 of "How To Make A 90-Second Newbery." In the next post, we'll analyze an existing 90-Second Newbery movie to give you tips on cinematography, camera movement, sound, and editing!

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This is the third step in the "How To Make A 90-Second Newbery" series. If you haven't already, check out Step 1: Watch Great Previous 90-Second Newberys and Step 2: Read The Book And Start Planning. You're ready to start the process of making your 90-Second Newbery video.

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Fandom: The classroom of the future by Paul J. Booth

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Fandom: The classroom of the future by Paul J. Booth

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View of Fandom: The classroom of the future | Transformative Works and Cultures

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Crowdfunding, Fandom and Media Literacy (SLJ)

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Crowdfunding, Fandom and Media Literacy (SLJ)

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Are we teaching kids about Kickstarter? Probably not, I'm guessing. After all, though it's an important part of the media landscape these days, U.S. schools generally don't feel that the media landscape is worth addressing... except of course in cases where students plan on "going into media" as a vocational choice.

Yet Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms connect with young people and their outside-of-school lives in a way that's meaningful to them and increasingly crucial to a range of media from comics and film to pop music: through fandom.

Generally I've been quite supportive of crowdfunding efforts, even in the case of the recent record-setting campaign for the Veronica Mars movie, which would directly benefit the decidedly non-indie business entity known as Warner Brothers. Such efforts seem like a natural outgrowth of today's participatory ethos, and help dissolve creator-audience barriers in ways that feel positive-despite how other agendas might be furthered at the same time.

The other day, though, I got a request from an established for-profit comics publisher asking for support on Indiegogo for a proposed adaptation of Julie Kagawa's popular YA Iron Fey series. Just how popular is this series? In case you didn't know, the pledge request tells you: "Each book (all six!) in the series spent several weeks at the top of the New York [sic] best seller list." But this kind of vast, built-in audience begs the question, doesn't it? After all, this isn't a hand-stapled mini-comic on some esoteric topic that's published out of a basement in Portland. So I kept reading, looking for the rationale for crowdfunding-not for adaptation itself, but for this particular method of financing-and all I found was this: "Your support will fund the comic creators, printers, shipping costs, project management and the army of magic little elves necessary to bring the novels to life and get comics and rewards to your door." In short, the typical expenses of any comics publisher, right, minus the rewards fulfillment? Now, I'm not saying the lesson to be taught and learned here is one of cynicism, though I won't blame you for drawing that conclusion from the raised-eyebrow tone I've been using. And I'm not sure why this particular campaign has made me question things more than in the past. Maybe it's because of that conspicuously absent lack of rationale.

In any case, I had to stop and think why some publishers were going this route even if traditional funding avenues had worked just fine in the past. And the answer I came up with applies to all such crowdfunding campaigns, the ones we like and the ones we don't like: it's not just dollars that are getting invested in the process, but fans themselves.

Consistent among the perks provided by many such campaigns, including the one for Veronica Mars, seem to be "updates" on the project. Let's forget for a moment that disseminating news of this type is usually a part of PR which fans are now paying for the privilege to receive-just as we'll ignore the fact that T-shirts, stickers (like the ones pictured at the top of the post), and other assorted paraphernalia effectively turn fans into marketing agents. We'll put all of that to the side not because it's not worth helping young fans become more media literate in this regard, but because those are standard tactics of any pop culture promotional campaign. It's known as leveraging the fan base, pure and simple.

Yet when fans come to see themselves as part of the extended team bringing a media product to market-the comics publisher mentioned here will draw you into the book, and most indie film outfits will provide a "producer" credit-then that's different altogether. It's no longer just about the fannish ardor of wanting to see any new release of the fan object succeed on multiple levels. Now the fan is directly involved-or at least that's the perception, which is all that really counts-in the fate of the media product. Just ask students whether they'd be more likely to organize a group outing to a midnight screening of a film to which they donated, or to buy a bunch of comics as gifts or keepsakes if they themselves appeared in them. However, in the end it's not even such concrete actions as these that represent profound investments of oneself, but simply all the added talk and thought-discourse both external and internal-that one engages in after this tidal feeling of inclusion.

Teaching students about how Kickstarter and Indiegogo work, how they've affected indie culture and culture more broadly-that's media literacy. Teaching students to become aware of how participation in fan-targeted media marketing affects their decisions and feelings, and aligns them with interests not necessarily their own-that's critical literacy. And, as the name would imply, it's critical.

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Crowdfunding, Fandom, and Media Literacy: One Key Thing We Should Be Teaching Kids

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Are we teaching kids about Kickstarter? Probably not, I'm guessing. After all, though it's an important part of the media landscape these days, U.S. schools generally don't feel that the media landscape is worth addressing... except of course in cases where students plan on "going into media" as a vocational choice.

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Here's a gallery of pictures from the Odd-Fish art show part of the evening. And Time Out Chicago has a great gallery of pictures from the battle-dancing part of the evening.

The Dome of Doom party on Saturday was a delirious success! THANK YOU, all you artists, guests, dancers, performers, and the fine folks at Collaboraction.

The evening began as a gallery show of fan art forThe Order of Odd-Fish. (You can see all the fan art online here.) My brother-in-law Max used to hang art for a living, and it's thanks to him (and Matt and Kevin at Monobrow Studios) the gallery turned out so smashing:

Many of the artists who contributed made it to the show! Max Pitchkites (who did cut-paper mixed-media illustrations of all 28 of Odd-Fish's chapters), Amanda Baylie (who made an Apology Gun), Karen Alexander, Hailey McLaughlin, Teddy Bihun, Carol Mollica, Britnee Berman, Dawn Heath, Kathleen Spale, Mike Bricis, Zach Dodson, Heather Ring (who made Dame Myra's garden of improbable botany), Jac Jemc, Freya Trefonides, Georgia Greenberg (who made the fish that hung as a centerpiece in the gallery), and Heather Norborg (my wife!) were all there. Here's Max Pitchkites, Georgia Greenberg, Teddy Bihun, Hailey McLaughlin, and Kathleen Spale:

Biggest surprise? John Karp, who flew in from California to show up in character as Sefino, complete with immaculate suit and ascot. Every time I spoke to him, he was impeccably Sefino-esque. I had never met John before; now I will never forget him.

At around 9 o'clock we headed downstairs to the Dome of Doom (constructed out of PVC pipes!) and had an under-21 Dome of Doom dance-off, which was tremendous fun. Favorite moment: Theo, dressed as the God of Apologies and toting a gun that shot marshmallows with apologies hidden inside, demolishing the United States Marine Corps. Then, unfortunately due to Chicago liquor laws, I had to bid the under-21 artists goodbye.

Soon the gallery filled up with all manner of odd costumed creatures. The air crackled with expectation for the fights to come. My co-judges Cynthia Castiglione and Seth Dodson showed up, we introduced the costumed battlers to the crowd, Collaboraction impresario Anthony Moseley gave a speech, and costumed marching band Environmental Encroachment led a parade of battlers and spectators downstairs to the DOME OF DOOM. Here's Cynthia, Anthony, me, and Seth - all very tall people, I might add. I look like a angry little chicken in comparison:

Aswirl in smoke and flashing lights, the Collaboraction dancers struck poses and galloped around the Dome, rhythmically banging its sides with sticks as the god-judges cavorted about inside, until the crowd was well and truly hyped up. Yes, Seth's costume did twinkle with a hundred little Christmas lights:

Then: the FIGHTS! Battlers eneterd the Dome and danced fiercely at each other for glory. The god-judges decided who moved to the next round, based on costume, concept, and dance moves. We made some controversial calls.

Undersea grudge match: Octopus vs. Jellyfish. GO!

Earlier this week I posted a video of the battle between Indestructa and Tex-Mex Party Mix. Here's another battle - when the eventual champion, Notorious S.A.D. (aka "Sparkle Motion") wowed us with her moves:

(This is clipped from a longer video by Matt Mayes, which has much more Dome of Doom mayhem.)

The battles continued, broken only by the screams of the wounded, the pitiless roar of the victor, and the raucous music of the marching band:

At last the time for the final battle came. It was between Notorious S.A.D. and Rowlphie, a young man who quickly did away with his trousers and bounded about like a randy puppy in all his bulging glory. But although Rowlphie had annihilated the competition in previous rounds, he just didn't bring the same energy to the final battle, and the judges named Notorious S.A.D. the winner - and proceeded to tear out her heart, and feed her to the All-Devouring Mother:

Once digested and excreted on the other side, Notorious S.A.D. was glorified forever in the annals of the Dome of Doom! Verily, the tournament brackets ran with blood, and were slashed with her name:

Thank you, everyone, who helped make this surreal, incredible night happen. Thanks to the artists who did such fantastic Odd-Fish fan art. It was an honor to feature you in the show. Thanks to everyone at Collaboraction, and in particular Anthony Moseley, for making this bizarre party possible. Thanks to Seth Dodson and Cynthia Castiglione for judging with me, thanks to Hannah for emceeing, thanks to Harrison Adams for controlling the fighting music, and thanks to all the battlers who fought so bravely and hilariously. Thanks to Max for helping me put up the art, to Heather Ring for making Dame Myra's garden on the third floor, to Kevin and Matt at Monobrow Studios, to Environmental Encroachment . . . the list is too long. And finally thanks to my wife Heather. Now I can spend some time at home again, at last!

Time Out Chicago put up a great gallery of Dome of Doom pictures. And here's my own collection of pictures of the art show part of the evening.

I'll leave you with the fight between INDESTRUCTA and TEX-MEX PARTY MIX:

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Here's a gallery of pictures from the Odd-Fish art show part of the evening. And Time Out Chicago has a great gallery of pictures from the battle-dancing part of the evening. The Dome of Doom party on Saturday was a delirious success! THANK YOU, all you artists, guests, dancers, performers, and the fine folks at Collaboraction.

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The Hiccupotamus. 444 likes. "There was a hippopotamus Who hiccuped quite a-lot-amus..."

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What is Bookie Woogie? Over the course of seven years, the Z-Kids embarked on a variety of family reading adventures. I posted their responses to both newly released books and old favorites -- picture books, chapter books, board books, and graphic novels. Together we talked about the craft of writing and the techniques of illustration. They created hundreds of pieces of fan art with crayon, pencil, pastel, clay, cut paper, scratch board, sewing, and video. They interviewed great authors and illustrators, including Newbery and Caldecott winners. And we recorded it all for you! I hope this site serves as a timeless, valuable resource. As you dig into the vast Archive, I hope you'll sense a love for books, a love for art, and a family's love for each other. So what is Bookie Woogie? Bookie Woogie is made up of:

7 years

140 book reviews

20 author interviews

178 books highlighted

177 authors & illustrators highlighted

520 pieces of fan art created (wow!)

Check it all out! Here are links to every Bookie Woogie review:

Bookie Woogie's posts have prompted 120 unsolicited responses from the authors and illustrators whose books the Z-Kids reviewed. Sometimes these creators sent an email, sometimes they left comments on a post, sometimes they posted thoughts on their own blogs or social media. Here's a small, small sampling of what the creators of great children's books have said about Bookie Woogie:

"Check out my favorite review of Rapuzel's Revenge on Bookie Woogie. An utter delight. The icing is the kids do a piece of art, which you can see at the end. Isaac blows me away, Gracie is hysterical, and Lily is so observant. I'd adopt them all if they didn't obviously already have a great dad.

This is such a great way to combine reading, art, and action with kids in the home."

"Please drop everything that you are doing right now and go to Bookie Woogie and read it. It might possibly put a smile on your face. But it won't be as big as the smile on mine. Trust me.
What I love about their review is that I FEEL like I was perched there on the couch with them, this creative, funny family all cozied up reading my book. It's what makes being an author so awesome -- the idea that people, somewhere, are enjoying something I created.
And not just reading it either. They discuss the book. They examine the book. They talk about how it might have been created, how it affects them, what the book is trying to say. Gracie, Lily, and Isaac are going to grow up to be book-lovers. And one of them just might become an author too. Or an artist!! They include ART in their review! Fantastic."

"Thank you, thank you, for your brilliant, delightful and astute discussion/review of my book. It's the best one I've ever gotten. Yay for Bookie Woogie!"

"How to Paint the Portrait of a Bird" review

"Probably one of the best book review sites I've seen! Great comments and awesome drawings. You guys know how to read a book in the full sense of the word."

- Astrid Lindgren winning author/illustrator Shaun Tan

"My favourite review that I have ever received! It made me laugh all the way through, and the drawings are so much fun.

It's such a brilliant way of getting the essence of a book across, really brings it to life. Well done all of you - what a great team - what fun!"

"Several different people have mentioned to me that they'd read your family blog about my book and liked it. So I just wanted to say again how much I appreciate how involved in my donutbook you and your family became and how delightfully you expressed it in your blog."

"I was honored and thrilled by your words. Wow... thank you. I see that you all take this very seriously without losing any of the joy that books bring. It's wonderful that you guys sit down and look really closely. We authors and illustrators live for audiences like you.

One spends all his time in a room trying to make a book that others will want to see, but you never really know what will happen once it goes out into the world. I'm moved and humbled that my book drew you in and had a positive influence. Thank you. Stories like yours make what I do even better than I could ever imagine.

I look forward to reading all your discussions and know I will learn much about books by my friends (authors and illustrators) and many other books that I've loved for years. But I most look forward to being delighted by your smart and thoughtful take on children's books you have loved. I can't wait."

"What an honor it is to have been Bookie Woogied. My most cherished review! Thanks so much."

"It was such a lovely post, it made me want to cry (in a good way)."

"I just read the post and I swear, I laughed out loud! It is truly, TRUUUUUUULY my FAVORITE interview by leaps and bounds that anyone has EVER done! WOW WOW WOW!!! This is just the coolest blog."

"I believe all of you are the most wonderful readers of my books. I've never met readers like you who could read my ideas perfectly and find every detail I made. Moreover, you can read in your own creative way. Your family encourages me a lot, and even your comments give me inspiration. And most of all your drawings are wonderful. I am so moved."

"I think my heart's about to burst!"

"Bookie Woogie remains my favorite book reviewer. A wonderful model for parents about how to talk to their kids about books and extend the learning"

"You know I am a huge and long-time fan of your work, and nearly fainted with joy to see my own book reviewed here. Thank you thank you thank you great readers, great children, great bloggers, and great artists."

"Honestly, when I saw this I was speechless. I am completely wowed by the Bookie Woogie Bloggers' creation! Not only are the shadow puppets so beautifully done, the pacing, script, and music is great, too. This is the perfect movie to show students before and after they read the book."

"I can't tell you how much your review meant to me. Your kids' drawings and conversation has been my favorite part of being a children's illustrator to date."

"Getting kid art by the Bookie Woogie kids is the fan art equivalent of making the cover of Rolling Stone."

"I was having a rough week... lots of little things going wrong. My rule is: mope for 5 minutes, then sketch something. First, for some mysterious reason, I googled "This is the Stable > reviews." And there you all were!

This is without a doubt, the most exciting, endearing, and astonishingly cheerful thing that's twirled my way in many moons. The more I read their comments, the more I smiled. Thank you for reading my little book with your fine crew.

"Best. Review. Ever. There is nothing quite like the feeling of clicking to one of your favorite book blogs and discovering your own book is the day's entry. I'm thrilled. And that art! ASTOUNDING."

"A lot of people depend on your blog for comfort every day."

"Oh me, oh my, this is without a doubt the BEST review I have received. And I include those professional doofuses when I say that. Everything after this point will be downhill."

"I am not exaggerating when I type a tear is in my eye. I have been Zenzed.

'Louise' is on Bookie Woogie, a blog from a family I have never met in person but have known online for over seven years. Aaron Zenz you inspire and now your kids do as well. Thanks for this gift. I am so touched that your amazingly creative family likes my book."

"Your blog has been instrumental for me. For a lot of the accolades I've received, I owe a huge thanks to you guys."

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What is Bookie Woogie? Over the course of seven years, the Z-Kids embarked on a variety of family reading adventures. I posted their responses to both newly released books and old favorites -- picture books, chapter books, board books, and graphic novels. Together we talked about the craft of writing and the techniques of illustration.

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San Mateo's Independent Bookstore. We offer books, toys, teacher resources, and ethically produced/fair trade gifts for all ages focused on Peacemaking, Sustainable Living, Gender Equality.

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Access Google Drive with a Google account (for personal use) or Google Workspace account (for business use).

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Young filmmakers create movies that tell the stories of Newbery-winning books in about 90 seconds.