Final Project Idea

I just read Merit's post from Monday: Notes Regarding the "Transgressively Industrial" in a Post-Industrial World: How Fifty Shades of Grey Blurs the Line Between Appropriation and Autonomous Creation.  It seems that critically objectionable material can spawn a lot of thinking.  (Check out her post to find more on 50 Shades and the state of fan-fiction, filtered through book critics and education theorists.)

Merit suggests that fan-fiction could have implications regarding how we teach English:


I think what fan fiction is forcing us to confront is that the line between appropriation and "autonomous creation" (term Jenkins') is often much messier than we often believe.  And, in this, I find a historical study of appropriation in general is a valid practice in the classroom.  Students may often feel inhibited when writing because they're not the "experts"; when they look at Shakespeare, they see a man who sat down in an day or two and wrote Othello while sitting alone at a desk.  In fact, collaboration and "borrowing" are essential for most writers (Proust is the only one I really know of who managed to write truly excellent books while sitting alone in a cork-lined room). But students don't usually see how many books most writers read in order to become good writers, nor how most of writing is the act of participating in a conversation that is already taking place by using allusions and generic forms common to the conversation to scaffold original thought.  Writing, like most other practices, is less about invention and more about innovation. And that reminder, if nothing else (in this case, there really is nothing else), is why Fifty Shades of Grey might ultimately be valuable in some capacity.


(Should I have written an article-spoiler warning?)  I'm going to borrow from my comments to her post.  


History of borrowing in class: Merit, you may have just written an amazing theme-based unit. Well-known classics are read, not solely because they're "essential" in English class, but to examine the context and process of making the book. Students go on to examine the context of writing today, and use new tools to collaborate and document their processes, and publish a text!


(Is this a really lazy blog entry? Copying and pasting from someone else's blog?)  For our class project, I think we can take this a step further:  

1. Begin with the theory of L & K and Jenkins.  
2. Identify an essential quality of 'new' literacies, a skill from Jenkins' 11 (or Karen's 5) that resonates, or we find challenging.  
3. Choose a canonical text, and outline how we might explore that text with our students, through the lens L & K or Jenkins.*
4. How might students apply that skill through a product of their own?  Which technologies might best facilitate this application?**
5. Which technologies would best suit the publication?

*I think that if the theory we are learning has any real value, we should be able to teach at least some aspect of that theory to our students.  Why shouldn't our students also be critical observers of their own education?

**I don't imagine that the final product would necessarily be lesson plans.  We just don't have the time to get that far.  My goal would be, to put a piece of this theory in context: 

• How it can apply to traditional LA content? 
• How can we challenge students to read traditional content in a new way? 
• What are the difficulties, and factors to consider? 
•  How can all of this lead to students collaborating to produce and publish something new?

I hope some of you are interested because I don't know how to do this on my own.

I don't know what our final product would look like.

Interested?

Suggestions?