Transformative Works, Transformative Learning: The Powerful Pedagogy of Fandom Culture

May 2007 made literary history, albeit in two different realms: the established and the subversive. The former announced the first London Literature Festival, beginning an annual celebration that pedestals brilliant authors and spotlights publishing accomplishments. The latter founded the Organization for Transformative Works, a nonprofit to preserve and protect “fanworks”—to uplift the hobby creations of thousands of writers, artists, and fans. Yet today, this seemingly stark divide between “formal” and “informal” literature continues to close as the literary world reckons with the actual, potential value of fandom. Fandom is broadly defined as a fan collective of a book, movie, game, or other piece of media that, in turn, creates inspired fanworks such as fanart, fanfiction, blog posts, and podcasts. These creations are commonly known as transformative works, as they “transform” a source material into a uniquely interpreted product. I spent most of my childhood being an individual fan: in elementary school, I obsessed over the Harry Potter books, the My Little Pony TV series, and even Louis Sachar’s famous novel, Holes. But my true introduction to the fandom unit was in my fifth grade class. My English teacher had created a plethora of lunchtime book clubs for our classroom, with each focusing on a popular series: The Hunger Games, Percy Jackson, Warriors, and many more. During lunch, I would pop open my soup thermos and chat with fellow classmates in the Harry Potter book club—discussing the shocking plot twists, geeking out over favorite scenes, and debating which character was the best. At the age of ten, my passions had brought me into a community, one that encouraged my critical thinking and social engagement. Moreover, the experience introduced to me the idea of fandom in the classroom—fandom as an educational method.

As a long-time participant in fandoms, I want to explore this overlooked, stigmatized, and almost taboo aspect of pop culture and align it with the contrastingly well-respected field of education. With the growing popularity of fan culture, the decline in youth literacy, and the evolving climate of education in a post-COVID, technology-driven society, fandom-based pedagogy is worth implementing into the classroom as a tool to teach students various skills—such as reading comprehension, writing, and collaboration—in an engaging and contemporary way.

Despite its educational potential, many people dismiss the possibility of fandom and fanfiction’s academic merit because of public opinion’s preconceived notions; often, mainstream media characterizes fandom participation as obsessive, gauche, and juvenile. For one, Daryna Stanko and Iryna Kolegaeva observe that many critics believe the “informal nature” and “amateur writing” of fanfiction “may reinforce poor grammar or stylistic habits,” prevent students from preparing for “more structured, formal writing tasks,” and limit students’ ability to exert original thought by creating reliance on a source material with pre-existing characters and storylines (207, 211). With consideration to these concerns, Stanko and Kolegaeva specifically recognize fanfiction’s academic merit only in the specialized instances where it exhibits sophisticated language use, “linguistic complexity,” and “thematic richness” (208). Although their stance contains more nuance than most, it still supports the generalized notion of quality fanwork as exceptional and fandom frivolity as otherwise universal.

In an age of declining literacy, however, upholding this elitist separation—both between traditionally published writing and fanfiction as well as between “good” and “bad” fanfiction—further discourages students from pursuing reading and writing habits. In his review of Karis Jones and Scott Storm’s Fandoms in the classroom—a proposal to use comics, websites, and online posting forums in curriculums—Scott Gregory asserts that although fanfiction and other traditionally non-academic writing is often dismissed as “lowbrow” and “inferior,” “‘text is text’ no matter what format words appear in” (369). Jaime R. Roots similarly criticizes this “hierarchical division between what students perceive as ‘high’ and ‘low’ artforms,” stating that it limits the scope of academic critique and exploration (10). Ultimately, treating all text as being worthy of examination and analysis, as Peter Gutiérrez argues, allows students to develop media comprehension, respond to texts critically, and apply those skills universally, not just to scholarly works that fit the classical criteria for literary tradition (228). Although some of these quality limitations can apply to fanfiction use in formal educational settings like the classroom, I argue against upholding those limitations in daily life. If we are to push back against the illiteracy, conformity, and indifference that currently threatens our society, we must be willing to read and write beyond the construct of what is “worth” consuming. Regarding critics’ concerns about the creative restriction of writing within the bounds of pre-existing intellectual property, adaptation has always been an avenue for creativity, not a hindrance, even within classic and well-lauded media. John Milton’s Paradise Lost reimagines the Bible with subversive nuance and sympathy towards sinful behavior; Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story alters Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet into a class-conscious musical; Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea transforms Brontë’s Jane Eyre into a post-colonial critique. Thus, to dismiss fanworks as lazy and unsophisticated is to turn down endless opportunities for art education, exploration, and creation.

Foremost, fan culture relies on participation, socialization, and collaboration, practices that can bolster students’ learning experiences and interactions with source materials. Gutiérrez explains that “an integral part of being a fan is finding out what the other fans think” (230). Particularly with book fandoms, he emphasizes that “the act of reading itself is not complete until one’s thoughts and questions can be aired, replied to, filtered, and probed by another fan” (230). Fans, Gutiérrez says, “engage in ongoing, meaningful, and authentic discourse” with fellow enthusiasts through beta reading (test reading) each other’s fanfiction before publication, interacting with each other’s online posts, and asking each other about “[w]hat was confusing…inconsistent…[or] being foreshadowed” in the media (230). Thus, classrooms can mirror this inherent social component of fandom to promote student engagement and collaboration. To explore this potential, Jaime W. Roots, a professor at Washington and Lee University, experimentally incorporated fanfiction into his “Fairytales Through Pop Culture” course: he tasked students to write fanfiction as a creative-writing project, with the source material being a chosen fairytale. As part of the assignment, “each student also served as a beta reader for three different students, providing feedback on drafts of their projects” (Roots 6). Roots states that in implementing peer review, students find value in their fellow students’ opinions and learn beyond teacher or professor instruction (12). Ultimately, “Learning is a social activity,” Roots asserts (6). In “Fandom: The classroom of the future,” Paul Booth too promotes this philosophy—one that is intrinsic to fandom culture—as a classroom strategy and claims that fans who can debate ideas civilly, offer compliments and criticisms respectfully, and collaborate with fellow fans are, in turn, students who can utilize those same social skills with their peers (9).

This idea of fandom social engagement connects to the greater concept of how interacting with and creating fanworks can teach students critical thinking and media analysis skills. In particular, through its exploration of—and deviation from—source material, fanfiction creates an opportunity for social commentary and deeper investigation of literary devices. Passionate fans have an intrinsic motivation to probe the media they love. Booth reveals the rigor of these investigations, as they range from “Bechdellian analyses of the roles of women in media” and “gender representation in comic books” to “Joseph Campbell’s classic hero’s narrative in young adult fiction” and “video game narrative dissonance” (2). Naturally, fans approach social issues along the way that they can further examine in their fanworks. For example, Gregory reviews Jones and Storm’s classroom exercise, where they instructed students to select fandoms and were encouraged to dissect potential attitudes of misogyny and homogenous identity present in them; in the end, students were able to identify not just sexism, but racism, homophobia, classism, and ableism in media that people otherwise might not look into deeply, such as Gossip Girl and Disney movies (370). Through implementing fanfiction into his college course, Roots emphasizes the importance of critiquing pop culture in order to recognize stereotypical representations of marginalized groups and to address it in derivative works (9). One can use fandom practices as an avenue for exploring social attitudes through conversing about such issues with other people on fan forums, reinterpreting the canon (the authority of the original work) by writing fanfiction with better representations, and implementing greater diversity in fanart by reimagining characters with personal interpretations of identities. Although these educational tactics can be used within classroom settings—as Jones, Storm, and Roots did—its educational quality carries over in its original, recreational form as well. A research project by the Social Science Research Council found that on average, students spend approximately 16% of their time working on and thinking about in-class critical inquiries; in contrast, they spend 51% of their time in leisure (qtd by Booth 7). Therefore, by encouraging fandom activity, Booth argues, students can increase their overall critical thinking by combining the active engagement of class and the passive growth that happens in leisurely fandom participation (7).

Furthermore, fandom pushes students to be creative and develop their writing skills. After all, fanworks are, according to Stanko and Kolegaeva, a “transformative form of expression” (208). On the motivations for creating fanfiction, Henry Jenkins states that derivative works are “born of a balance between fascination and frustration: If media content didn’t fascinate us, there would be no desire to engage with it; but if it didn’t frustrate us on some level, there would be no drive to rewrite or remake it” (qtd in Roots 7). Writing fanfiction is an exercise in turning creative potential into reality. One must brainstorm alternative realities and scenarios for characters, conceptualize what-ifs in the canon’s storylines, and question what aspects of the source material are unsatisfied in order to satisfy them oneself. Gutiérrez highlights “this idea of ‘building upon,’ through commentary, annotation, and remixing” as the premise to fandom’s creative processes, creative processes that ultimately center around adaptation (228). Learning how to adapt existing material can then teach students how to wield a unique kind of artistic freedom, as well as develop traditional writing skills. In “Engaging fan cultures: What students learn when they study fans,” Professors Adam Golub and Ashley Loub refer to fellow instructors who have students compose fanfiction as a way to expand their literary capabilities and, simply, learn creative writing (24). In these classroom exercises, they practice character, plot, and theme development in their derivative works, which can then become a stepping-stone for future original creations. Students come to think of source material not as bounds for their imagination, but as a different kind of vehicle for creative ideas.

Ultimately, what makes didactic fandom—fandom that has the ability to teach—such a unique opportunity for the classroom is how it can encourage students to read and write by catering to their interests and allowing them to participate in these activities with enjoyment and intrinsic motivation rather than apathy. In the United States, United Kingdom, and other nations, reading rates have been on a dire decline in the last 20 years. According to the National Literacy Trust, the enjoyment level of reading in UK youth has dropped 36% percent since 2005; only 1 in 5 students ages 8-18 read daily in their leisure time (Clark et al. 2). With this growing disinterest in reading, engagement with fandom practices like blogging and fanfiction creates casual opportunities for students to incorporate reading and writing into their everyday lives. Stanko and Kolegaeva affirm that “[s]ince fanfiction is based on popular media, students are often more motivated to read and write about topics they are passionate about, making learning more enjoyable and less of a chore” (212). In a time where students are losing motivation to read and write, discriminating against the content that they engage themselves with further alienates them from pursuing those skills at all. Additionally, motivation and interest in the material improves the educational outcome, as Gregory argues that “student passion becomes a catalyst for greater authentic engagement” (370). Similarly, Chin Ee Loh, a researcher on adolescent literacy, affirms that pleasure fuels self-motivated reading, which leads to increased reading and correlated enhanced reading proficiency (599). Because of this, Loh argues, students should be trusted with autonomy over their media consumption and their ability to find deeper meaning within it rather than have adults and instructors police them (599). If reading and writing about one’s favorite book, comic, or movie motivates one to engage in literary practices, then those personal stakes should be encouraged and can even act as a bridge towards classical literature, original creative writing, and academic papers.

One of the greatest arguments for fandom pedagogy is that it is a relevant, and possibly natural, evolution of learning strategy in today’s ever-evolving educational climate. Currently, educators face the enduring crisis of adapting to a post-COVID and technology-reliant world. In 2025, the National Assessment Governing Board, which administers the Nation’s Report Card—an evaluation of academic performance in the United States—reported that even nearly half a decade after the COVID-19 pandemic, secondary school students continue to score below pre-pandemic performance levels in reading, as well as have declining scores in comparison to 2022 (1). These repeating results illustrate not only students’ persisting academic struggles in today’s climate, but also the failure of current standardized testing and curriculum standards in alleviating them. In tandem, Loh notes that surveys and tests on youth literacy only focus on students’ interactions with traditional books when in reality, the shifting technological and cultural landscape has led youth reading practices to change with them: for example, increased internet access has contributed to adolescents’ growing involvement in digital media, fanfiction, and fandom spaces (599). As Storm and Jones emphasize, “Reading has changed. The way we think about teaching reading needs to change too” (qtd in Gregory 369). By incorporating fandom practices into the classroom, educators adapt to students’ evolving reading habits and cater to their interests and circumstances rather than follow traditional testing and curriculum norms that may no longer benefit students in the modern era. Through this, adolescents are able to have more meaningful experiences with books and reading. Classes can still teach traditional texts, as Booth does in his “Fairytales Through Pop Culture” course, but the contemporary methods they approach the texts with have the potential to accommodate youth reading habits and motivate students towards the literary and comprehension goals that educational institutions ultimately want them to achieve.

To non-fans, though, the idea of fandom in the classroom perhaps appears odd until one realizes that at its core, fan activities are simply, as Golub and Loub call it, “audience participation” (26). Fandom is an amalgamation of people’s reactions to popular culture: the products of fandom, from blog discussions to fanfiction, are the products of the questions, curiosities, love, hatred, or creative urges that emerge from a piece of media. This interactive philosophy to both creation and consumption in fandom makes it such an intriguing opportunity for education. Although the skills of collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity are not practices unique to fandom, the basis of authentic passion and innate motivation within fan culture sets apart this pedagogy as an unconventional approach to learning these universal skills. This growing conversation on fandom’s place in educational spaces is one that scholars, professors, and students are exponentially exploring, from increased research studies to experimental curriculum plans; the concept of a fandom education is not as unfathomable as one might initially assume. Soon, we can move beyond hypotheticals and experiments and towards developing feasible, concrete classroom implementations. People often laud young students, from those in elementary school to college, as visionaries for radical change. Perhaps one of those radical changes is in recontextualizing our literary world by breaking down the elitist barrier between “proper” and “improper” reading, alongside the subjective line between what is deemed truly educational or not. In embracing fandom culture and transforming our education methods, we have the opportunity to transform the way we think and the way we create—but more importantly, to transform ourselves into open-minded, innovative individuals.

Works Cited