Exploring Literacy Sponsorship in the Digital Extracurriculum: How Students' Participation in Fan Fiction Sites can Inform Composition Pedagogy.

This dissertation examines the fan fiction literacy practices of six college students in two sites, FanFiction.Net and LiveJournal.com, and argues for the importance of inviting into the classroom students’ literacy experiences in the extracurriculum to understand how they reveal prior understandings of reading and writing that inform students’ practices within the curriculum. These sites, as I propose college composition courses should also do, invite participants to share their experiences in other discourse communities and offer opportunities for participants to co-construct writing ideologies, in part through their focus on reflection and collaboration. This study also reveals contradictions, including conflicted definitions of “constructive criticism” and authors’ desire for feedback and yet their resistance toward reading it or revising accordingly. This dissertation also demonstrates the value of using a framework of literacy sponsorship as articulated by Deborah Brandt, in combination with positioning theory, to interrogate how sites recruit, enable, regulate, and suppress (Brandt 2001) literacy and interactively position participants according to the circulating writing ideologies. The ideologies overlap significantly with those found in composition classrooms, including valuing interaction, collaboration, constructive criticism, reflection, and correctness. Yet the ideologies also compete, as illustrated on one hand by the perceived importance of “correctness” in mechanics, reinforced by FanFiction.Net’s Codes of Conduct, and on the other hand by the importance of what composition instructors consider “global” concerns, such as authentic depictions of characters and credible plotlines. I reveal how participants negotiate these writing ideologies, defining what constitutes “good” writing and “good” feedback by reflecting on their skills, experiences, and preferences as they design their profile pages and when they provide feedback on each other’s stories. The dissertation concludes by situating the study in conversation with the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing designed by the Council of Writing Program Administrators. This research of online writing practices offers evidence of students demonstrating in the extracurriculum some of the “habits of mind” the WPA describes as essential to success in college writing. Finally, I suggest practical ways to use the extracurriculum, and specifically sites in Web 2.0, to help develop students’ rhetorical knowledge, critical thinking, and knowledge of conventions.Ph.D.English & EducationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/86335/1/shultzst_1.pd