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Adolescents anime-inspired fanfictions: An exploration of Multiliteracies

Kelly Chandler-Olcott, Donna Mahar

her morning study hall, typing furiously at a comThe authors explore fanfiction as a valid puter throughout the period, while Rhiannons literacy practice in the context of the friend Eileen looked on and offered comments. Entitled The Shrine for Vegeta, the Multiliteracies framework (New Chandler-Olcott teaches at three-page story referenced material London Group, 1996). Syracuse University. She
can be reached at the university, 200 Huntington Hall, Syracuse, NY 13244, USA. Mahar teaches at West Genesee Middle School and is a doctoral student in Reading Education at Syracuse University. This study was supported by an Elva Knight Research Grant from the International Reading Association.

Twenty or more middle school students are eating lunch in Donnas classroom, as is their habit. Some work on group projects that are due soon; some meet with Donna, their English teacher, for extra help; others chat about their lives and practice cheerleading routines. A cluster of students in the back of the room finds a typed document near the printer. Wow, Ms. Mahar, did you see this? one girl asks, bringing the pages to Donna. Do you know who wrote it? It looks like some type of fanfic, her friend speculates. It really has some specific detail.

from two Japanese cartoons and featured an obviously autobiographical main character, Rhi, whose computer skills allowed her to hack into the school server to remove evidence of wrongdoing (Indecent exposure...clear... swearing...clear) attributed to her and her comradesmembers of a secret detective organization. The piece concluded with a romantic scene between Rhi and Wufei, a character from the animated series Gundam Wing. When Donna returned the story to Rhiannon the next time the study hall met, she asked Rhiannon to tell her more about it. After some initial embarrassment (Oh my god! Did you read it?), Rhiannon began to explain how fanfictions worked. Eileen, once again present, offered ideas as well. Hoping to document the students insights more fully, Donna invited both girls to type some notes about fanfics at a classroom computer. They obliged, producing a page of dialogue that resembled online chatting in its back-and-forth structure and liberal use of abbreviations and emoticons (a typed symbol used to convey feelings). Rhiannon opened the conversation with a definition of fanfics, which Eileen elaborated:

Such was our introduction to fanfictionfanfic for shorta text form described by Jenkins (1992) as the raiding of mass culture by fans who use media texts as the starting point for their own writing. In the midst of collaborative research on adolescents personal literacy practices, particularly those enhanced by technology, we were on the lookout for genres and texts that adolescents embraced in their lives beyond school. Although we were unfamiliar with the term fanfic then, Donna did know who had written the story. She had noticed Rhiannon (student names are pseudonyms), a seventh grader in

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Rhiannon: OK, well first off.... A Fanfic is like a story or a dream or something that just happened to pop into your mind. I usually write mine about my dreams though and that is why most people dont understand me.... Except for my best friend, Eileen. Eileen: Fanfics are basically a story that you make up about a cartoon character or a videogame character. They can be any genre. Some of the fanfics that I have read are really stupid and goofy, while others are tearjerkers, and one Zelda fanfic that I read had sooo much innuendo in it that I dropped the fic in mid-page. Fanfics about cartoon characters are cool, thats because I love cartoonsanime cartoons, but cartoons just the same.

of teen zines, and Mojes (2000) study of the literacy practices of youth who considered themselves gangstas. We hope that insights about out-ofschool literacy practices that deeply absorb adolescents may help us devise new ways to make school literacy more meaningful and engaging.

Anime as a source for fanfictions

As the excerpts from their dialogue suggest, Rhiannon and Eileens fanfictions were connected to their interest in anime (Japanese animation), which was, at the time, a new art form to us. Over time, we learned that a sizable minority of students at Donnas school collected anime-related videos, comics, and memorabilia. We also became more aware of references to anime on the Web and in newspapers. Recently, we were intrigued to see an anime-focused article (Kehr, 2002) in as mainstream a publication as The New York Times. Although they may not have appeared on most teachers radar screens yet, anime and its cousin, manga (Japanese comics), have been big business in Japan for a number of years. Manga sales represent nearly 40% of the total number of books and magazines sold in Japan (Schodt, 1996), and animated features account for about 50% of all movie ticket sales there (Napier, 2001). Conferences drawing as many as 300,000 attendees are organized around dojinshi, the Japanese term for fanzines (Schodt, 1996). Dojinshi are also distributed on CDs and on the Web, making it easier for non-Japanese fans like Rhiannon and Eileen to access material about their favorite television shows. One scholar has argued that anime represents Japans chief cultural export (cited in Napier, 2001, p. 5) since anime fan clubs, conventions, and Web rings have sprung up all over the West, particularly in the United States. As Eileen points out in her dialogue with Rhiannon, fanfictions can be written in any style: comic, tragic, fantastic, and so forth. The same is true of the Japanese cartoons that inspire these

Later in the dialogue, the girls talked about fanfictions as an insider text form best appreciated by readers familiar with the source material. As Rhiannon explained, if the fanfic is about a specific cartoon then you need to understand the cartoon in order to be able to understand the fanfic! Eileen concurred: You have to be a weirdo and understand cartoons like Rhi and I. They also wrote about relationships between fanfiction and fan art (drawings inspired by popular media), and Rhiannon mentioned the pride and ownership she felt about her new creations. Our decision to explore fanfiction writing further was related to our twin desires to understand youth culture better and to make school literacy instruction more responsive to learners needs. Like Moje (2000), we believe it is important for teachers and researchers to understand how unsanctioned literacy practices may provide adolescents, especially those who are marginalized, with ways of constructing and maintaining thought, identity, and social position (p. 252). We see our work in the tradition of other recent literacy studies that took adolescents interests in media and popular culture seriously, including Alvermann and Hagoods (2000) inquiry into one young mans music fandom, Lewis and Faboss (1999) study of adolescent girls use of instant message technology, Finderss (1997) investigation of middle school girls consumption

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written texts. Anime shows range from those for young children to hentai (adult pornography), with the most popular genres being fantasy, romance, and science fiction (Poitras, 2001). Media scholars like Napier (2001) advised caution when using schema from American cartoons to understand anime, however, as Japanese cartoons tend to be more complex in their story lines, more sophisticated in their visual style, and less compromising in their treatment of sensitive topics than their American counterparts. This last point was underscored by Eileen when she wrote to Kelly (first author) that anime includes such topics because the Japanese have a much better grip on gays, sex, violence, etc. than we do. We do not provide this introduction to anime because we think that the cartoons in and of themselves are imperative for literacy educators to consider. Although anime is significant enough for some of Donnas 20012002 students to have started a lunchtime club to share fanfics and other anime-related texts, it is still of limited interest to many adolescents. For us, what is most intriguing about Eileen and Rhiannons fanfics transcends their choice of source material. As researchers interested in how adolescents use various tools (including technology) and draw on various discourses (including those from popular culture) in their literacies, we find the girls composing process as fascinating as the compositions themselves. That said, we realize that Rhiannon and Eileens fandom (Alvermann & Hagood, 2000) is a primary influence on the writing they produce. Without at least a preliminary understanding of anime as an art or media form, it would be difficult for us to analyze their texts in any complexity, or for readers to make sense of the points we make about the girls writing later in this article.

already, our fanfic inquiry was part of a larger study of adolescents use of digital technologies for literacy-related purposes (see Chandler-Olcott & Mahar, 2001). The research took place in a suburban middle school in upstate New York in the United States. Kelly, a university-based researcher, spent one or two days a week observing and interviewing students about their technology use and media interests. She also conducted home visits with several informants families. Donna, an English teacher at the school, gathered data from daily interactions with students in classes, study hall, and other school activities. Eileen and Rhiannon, our focal informants, were friends enrolled in Donnas study hall during the 20002001 school year. Our observations suggest that both were marginalized from the dominant peer culture in their gradea culture whose tone was set by a number of middle- or upper-middle-class girls who resembled Finderss (1997) social queens in their concern for appearances and use of in-group literacy practices such as instant messaging and note-passing. Eileen, a middle-class student of European American descent, lived with her parents and sister. Perceived by her teachers as an excellent student, she won several academic awards during our data collection period. Although Eileen wore head scarves, patchouli perfume, and Ozzy Osbourne T-shirts (which differed from most of her peers who dressed in clothing from fashion stores), she participated in school-sponsored activities such as soccer and track. Her technologymediated literacy practices included e-mailing messages (often with drawings attached) to local and distant friends; surfing websites related to her interests in anime and heavy-metal music; and participating in an anime art-focused mailing list, to which she sent scanned copies of her artwork for feedback. She began writing anime-inspired fanfictions in April of 2001 after several months of serving as Rhiannons illustrator. Rhiannon was also of European American descent and lived with her mothera single parentand a younger sister. Described by a

Situating our inquiry

Before we move to discussion of particular texts and their composition, we want to provide a bit more context for our work. As we mentioned

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teacher as a good student but one who does not open up, she spent most of her time pursuing activities with her church group and using the Internet. Because she had Internet access through WebTV, not a computer, her online activities were easily monitored by her mother, who took an active role in supervising them. Her technologymediated literacy practices included e-mailing messages to online friends, participating in chat rooms and online role-playing games, and developing Internet homepages that included a shrine (a fan-developed website devoted to one anime character) and a Hypertext Markup Language help site for kids. In September 2000, she shared printed copies of her fanfics with us; later that year, she began to post her writing on her webpages. After we discovered Rhiannons first fanfic and began to talk to her and Eileen about it, we decided to investigate fan writing more systematically. To this end, we kept notes during conversations with both girls. We annotated copies of fanfictions that they gave or e-mailed us, and we downloaded others from Rhiannons homepages, for which she provided the Web addresses. Near the end of our analysis, Donna enlisted several anime fans who were a year behind Eileen and Rhiannon in school to examine some of the girls fanfictions with her and explain references and genre conventions we might not otherwise have understood. At Eileens recommendation, we also explored the Anime Web Turnpike (http://www.anipike.com), a clearinghouse website including links to news groups, image galleries, plot synopses, fanfictions, and shrines. From these activities, we developed a deeper understanding of the girls anime fandom and of the place that fanfictions held in that fandom.

whose emphasis on the effects of technological change seemed relevant to our study. The book and an earlier article (see New London Group, 1996) were collaboratively authored by a group of literacy scholars from the United States, Great Britain, and Australia. They called their proposed framework Multiliteracies because the term referenced two key elements of their vision: (a) the multiplicity of communications channels and media and (b) the increasing salience of cultural and linguistic diversity (Cope & Kalantzis, p. 5) in peoples daily lives. As these authors saw it, existing theories of literacy teaching and learning were no longer adequate in what one of the groups members, Allan Luke, called New Times in this journal (Luke & Elkins, 1998). Before we discuss some of the New London Groups other premises, we need to say that while we see Multiliteracies as a practical framework relevant to teachers and researchers daily work, its technical language and theoretical complexity were initially daunting. We found ourselves needing to read chapters multiple times, often stopping in the middle to talk about a topic or write notes. We explored the concepts further in lowstakes, informal contexts, beginning with memos to each other about connections we saw to our study. Donna tested her understandings in a presentation to peers in a graduate seminar, and we made several references to the framework in a piece we wrote on digital genres (ChandlerOlcott & Mahar, 2001). Had we not used these strategies to construct meaning with the texts, we might have abandoned a powerful tool for thinking about our work. We urge you to consider using some of these meaning-making strategies if you have not encountered the Multiliteracies framework before, and we hope you will choose to read about the framework in the original. Among the numerous points that resonated for us in the framework was the authors contention that schools and other dominant institutions have historically privileged language, particularly written literacy, over all other modes of communication, thereby neglecting the

The Multiliteracies framework

Around the same time the girls introduced us to fanfics, we were also reading and discussing Multiliteracies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000), a text

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possibilities of those other modes. According to Cope and Kalantzis (2000),

Not only does this represent a reduction of expressive possibility. It is also increasingly anachronistic given recent social as well as technological trends in our communications environment which extend the range and technical integration of multimodal communication...[and allow] the unprecedented integration of visual and linguistic design. (p. 217)

Fanfictions: Patterns and themes

Our inquiry into Rhiannon and Eileens fanfiction writing yielded a number of patterns and themes. First, the girls reported multiple purposes for composing their fanfictions. Writing was seen as a way to have fun, exercise ones imagination, and avoid boredom. Rhiannon also characterized it as stress relief. What they were less likely to say explicitly, but what seemed clear to us, was that fanfiction writing also helped to develop and solidify relationships with various friends, online or otherwise. Whether they were sharing their texts with each otheror, as was the case with some of Rhiannons stories, writing their friends into the narratives in a more literal sensefanfics appeared to serve as social glue (Beach, 2000, p. 9) for them. It was not surprising, then, that Rhiannon and Eileens primary audiences for their fanfictions appeared to be themselves and a few trusted friends and family members. In her written dialogue with Eileen, Rhiannon characterized fanfiction writing as a private pursuit, one that was kinda fun when no one is looking, and she talked about Eileen being her best reader because they were such good friends. Eileen sent first drafts of her stories to a small circle of confidantes including her sister, Rhiannon, and a friend from another school who, as she put it, also likes writing stories, though hers are about dragons and stuff. Sometimes, however, the Internet provided the potential for a wider audience than intimate friends and family. For example, Eileen wrote a fanfiction about Lina and Phibrizzothe heroine and villain, respectively, from the Slayers fantasy seriesat the invitation of a boy she met online after discovering his Phibrizzo shrine on the Web. Around the same time, Rhiannon began to post several fanfics on her webpages, including one inspired by Slayers and another influenced by the video game turned movie Final Fantasy. While the counters on these sites indicate that they did

The New London Group proposed that the construction of meaning should be seen as a process of Designing, one that draws on a range of what they called Available Designs to create Redesigned texts. Available Designs used as resources in this process included the linguistic, visual, audio, gestural, spatial, and multimodalthe last representing connections between or among the other Designs.
The outcome of Designing is a new meaning, something through which meaning-makers remake themselves. It is never a reinstantiation of one Available Design or even a simple recombination of Available Designs; the Redesigned can be variously creative or reproductive in relation to the resources available for meaning-making available in Available Designs. But it is never a simple reproduction (as the myths of standards and transmission pedagogy would have us believe), nor is it simply creative (as the myths of individual originality and personal voice would have us believe). (New London Group, 1996, p. 76)

These ideas were useful to us in analyzing Rhiannon and Eileens fanfics because they acknowledged composition as a social process and accounted for popular culture as a source of Available Designs. As Multiliteracies contributor Carmen Luke (2000) pointed out, the framework also considered the influence multimedia technologies might have on adolescents meaningmaking beyond the classroom walls and into the borderless world of Internet resources (p. 82).

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not receive many visits, Rhiannon did report that they were visited by friends she met online who lived as far away as North Carolina and New Mexico in the United States. Noticeably absent from Eileen and Rhiannons fanfic audience were their teachers. Aside from Eileens submission of lyrics from an anime theme song for a poetry class taught by her English student teacher, we have no evidence that either girl brought her anime fandom into any formal school activity. Nonetheless, both girls maintained that their personal writing was more important to them and higher in quality than the work they completed for class. When Kelly asked Eileen if she could see samples of her school writing, Eileen assented but was quick to add, they arent as good as my fics. Likewise, Rhiannon reported devoting far more time and energy to her fanfics than she did to school assignments she dismissed as the essay part of my writing. At times, however, it appears that both girls could have benefited from the assistance that contact with their teachers or classmates might have provided. Their compositions were sometimes limited by the tools that were available to them and by their skill with those tools. For instance, Eileen wrote one fanfic entirely within e-mail because she did not know how, at that time, to compose within a word-processing program and then paste the text into an e-mail message to share it with others later. She wrote her four-page story over several days; each time she concluded work for that session, she had to mail the story to herself to save it. Working within a word processor would have made it easier for her to add and revise text as she went. In a similar fashion, Rhiannon used two different e-mail accounts to compose her fanfics because one of the accounts allowed her to post her writing more easily to her website than the other. However, she did not figure out how to eliminate evidence of the message to herself, so the header from the e-mail remained at the top of the first page. While these examples point out the girls resourcefulness in devising ways to make the technologies

work for them, they also suggest ways that someone more experienced with those technologies could have facilitated their composition process.

Fanfictions and the Multiliteracies framework

The patterns in the previous section became apparent to us as we engaged in inductive, bottomup analysis of our data. Returning to those data with the more top-down lens of Multiliteracies focused our attention on new issues. In particular, the New London Groups (1996) framework helped us to consider fanfictions in a broader contextas texts influenced by cultural artifacts and social discoursesrather than simply two girls idiosyncratic literacy practices. Three concepts from the framework were most useful in this process: multimodality, intertextuality, and hybridity.

Multimodality
Multimodality, or the integration of various Designs such as visual, linguistic, and audio in one text, is a key concept in the Multiliteracies framework. According to the New London Group (1996), all texts are multimodal to some degree, even those that appear to be produced in a single mode. As Cope and Kalantzis (2000) pointed out, even a traditional print text
is linked to visual [meaning], from the business of handwriting itself...all the way through to the heavily designed pages of desktop publishing in which fonts, point sizes, leading, kerning, bolding and italics are all integral to the grammar of the words. (p. 211)

Nonetheless, some texts integrate multiple modes more centrally than others. Attending to this concept while analyzing the girls fanfiction helped us to realize that the stories could be seen as multimodal on a number of levels. The girls stories were sometimes illustrated. For example, Rhiannon asked Eileen, considered

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by both girls to be the better artist, to create a piece of fan art for a brief, Sailor Moon-inspired fanfic describing the wedding of Serena, the shows heroine. The two modes worked well together, as Eileens pen drawing provided detail about the character that Rhiannons writing did not. Rhiannon herself paid attention to color, images, and animation (elements connected to visual and spatial Designs) in her webpage construction. She even left a note in one sites update section that demonstrated her awareness of how a lack of consideration for visual and spatial elements might interfere with visitors pleasure while reading her work: Wow, I got one of my stories up, its not done yet, but its got enough to read. :) Ill work on it! Very soon!! *grins* Hope you enjoy it! By the way, its a .txt file, so you wont ruin your eyes reading it! :) Have fun! Rhiannon had struggled with fanfics in other formats, so she took care to make her story readerfriendly. Her use of a smiley-face emoticon and an action verb set off by stars (a chat room convention meant to signal physical activity) also suggests her awareness that a text drawing primarily of linguistic Design would benefit from the inclusion of other Designs as well. In addition to the multimodal qualities discernible in the girls texts, the process that led to their production was multimodal. Unlike, for example, Star Trek enthusiasts with every episode of the original series on tape (Jenkins, 1992), Eileen and Rhiannon found it difficult to gather a complete set of data about their favorite shows. Because anime has not been wholly embraced by American audiences, the girls needed to construct their fanfictions with information from multiple media, including Japanese manga, cartoons on network television, videotapes, and fanconstructed websites. The fragmentary nature of the girls knowledge became obvious to us during one computer-mediated interview Kelly conducted with Eileen. As they talked, Eileen navigated to several websites devoted to Escaflowne, a series that had only aired on television in the United States for, according to Eileen, about a month. This excerpt from Kellys field notes captures the

flavor of that conversation and Kellys surprise when she realized that Eileens fan-related reading and viewing practices were far less like traditional print literacy than we had assumed.
One of the comics on the site we are browsing has Japanese characters in the dialogue bubbles, NOT English letters. This is the first time I have noticed this! This is one that never happened, Eileen says. These are Chesta and Gatty in the background. We establish that it is not uncommon for fans of this type of anime to look at comic strips with no clear translation. Kelly: How do you know whats happening? Eileen: You can kind of look at the pictures, and she tells you. Kelly: Who tells you? Eileen: The person whos posted the stuff. There is a brief summary of the strip on the first page of the site, where you choose where to go next, before you link to the pictures. Apparently, this is written mediated?by the site author.

By integrating her prior knowledge of anime with the images and verbal scaffolding provided by the Web designer, Eileen was able to construct meaning in sophisticated ways. Although she relied heavily on visual and spatial modes highlighted by the Multiliteracies framework, she also used comprehension strategies such as inference and visualization that are highly valued in transactions with traditional print texts (Dole, Duffy, Roehler, & Pearson, 1991).

Intertextuality
Eileens transactions with these websites also demonstrated her understanding of intertextuality, a term referring to relationships and references between and among texts, which represents another key Multiliteracies concept. As the New London Group (1996) explained, any text being Designed is linked to one or more series (chains) of past texts (p. 75). As a form, fanfictions make intertextuality visible because they rely on readers ability to see relationships between the fan-writers stories and the original

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media sources. Intertextuality informed Eileens decision to cast Chesta, a relatively minor figure in the Escaflowne series, as a major character in a story she wrote that also featured Hitomi, a 15year-old girl whose interests in track and field and tarot cards resembled Eileens own interests. Her piece relied on readers knowledge, constructed from previous texts, that it would be surprising for Chesta to be kind to Hitomi, given his status as her enemys subordinate. Another example of intertextuality can be seen in stories Rhiannon wrote combining characters from more than one showa common practice in the fan community that Jenkins (1992) called a cross over (p. 170). In addition to these textual relationships with the original anime shows, both girls drew on a variety of discourses about heterosexual relationships in their fanfics. In Rhiannons story, The New Mazokus, the heroine, Moon Tear, has been chosen to be queen because of her heritage and power, and she is accompanied and guarded by her faithful knightess, a gender-bending twist on the conventions of most quest narratives. By the end of the episode, however, Moon Tears agency has been much reduced. Rezo and Koppitwo male characters from the Slayers fight over who will be her consort. Rhiannons teaser for the storys next installment does not even mention Moon Tear: Will Rezo know what Koppis plan is, before he executes it? Find out in the next chapter of The New Mazokus. While, on some level, the story probably represents Rhiannons personal attempt to work through what it means to be female in a male-dominated world, she does so with reference to conflicting discourses about gender and relationships that play out in many textsboth media and print beyond her own. Viewing rhetorical moves like these from the perspective of the Multiliteracies framework helped us to appreciate how complicated, and even sophisticated, the girls fanfics often were. Instead of writing Eileen and Rhiannons texts off as derivative, we began to see them as contribu-

tions to an ongoing, intertextual conversation about such issues as friendship, loyalty, power, and sexuality. As we learned more about anime and fanfictions, we, too, were able to make more intertextual connections as we read their stories and to see when they manipulated and transformed established text forms to create new ones.

Hybridity
The process we just described has been called hybridity, which is a term that refers to the creation of new meanings and new genres through the Design process. According to Cope and Kalantzis (2000),
The many layers of identity, the many aspects of experience, and the many discourses that represent the Available Designs of meaning are ever being related, combined, and recombined.... Every Designing picks and chooses from all the bits in the world of Available Designs and puts it back together in a way it has never quite been before. (p. 205)

In their fanfictions, the girls created hybrid texts that wove together various discourses and genres. Rhiannons story, The New Mazokus, for example, blended elements from fantasy, science fiction, and teen buddy genres, in addition to borrowing generously from romance. This hybrid text may have allowed Rhiannon to do more identity work around female heterosexuality, particularly related to issues of power in relationships, than a more homogeneous text might have. It is important to note, however, that the girls hybrid fanfictions diverged in some important ways from genres traditionally privileged in school. For example, unlike most print texts, anime television shows are serialized, with stories unfolding bit by bit, episode by episode. Borrowing that convention, many fanfictions begin in medias res, as does the following story by Eileen.
Hitomi sobbed. She was cold, wet, and lost. Ever since she had fallen off the Escaflowne three days ago, she

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had been wandering the countryside looking for shelter, but had found none. Her leg was swollen and bruisedprobably broken in the fall. She limped slowly and painfully forward, hoping for a scrap of food or a shelter. It was getting late, so she decided to lay down under a tree for the night. The rain soaked through her clothes, making her shiver and cough. The raindrops began to fade into nothing as her eyelids closed.

In such a setting, a more self-consciously hybrid text like a fanfic would serve the writer poorly.

Why teachers need to think about fanfictions

In our opinion, this last example points to one of several reasons why the lack of knowledge Eileen and Rhiannons teachers had about their fanfiction meant lost opportunities for literacy learning. The dissimilarities between the girls fanfics and English language arts practice essays might have offered an interesting entry point for discussion about how different communicative contexts can narrow the range of Available Designs to draw on. Such conversations might help students to be more metacognitive about their compositions, making it easier for them to decide, for example, when certain kinds of intertextuality might be called for. We see a number of other ways that acknowledging fanfictionsor other text forms privileged by students but marginalized by teacherswithin formal learning communities can increase student engagement and achievement in literacy. While we would not recommend teaching fanfiction as a formal genre in school one that every student would therefore need to producewe do see other ways that students interest in and skill with these texts could be tapped productively in classroom settings. For one, fanfictions could be included in the range of texts teachers consider for diagnostic purposes in order to get a sense of what individuals can do as readers and writers, as well as what they value. We wonder what might happen if teachers invited students to bring in examples of their best personal writing at the beginning of the school year and promised, as part of that invitation, not to grade those pieces but rather to examine them for strengths to build on and as a way to get to know learners better. Eileen and Rhiannon were both convinced that their fanfictions represented their talents as writers better than other compositions, but they were equally convincedperhaps rightly

Nowhere in the pages that follow does Eileen provide any back story for the events she mentions here; she does not explain what the Escaflowne is or why Hitomi fell from it. She offers little physical description of her protagonist. She simply plunges Hitomi into a dungeon, where the girl comes into conflict with another barely-introduced character, Dilandau, and the action proceeds. It would be easy to assume that these omissions were due to Eileens lack of knowledge about story grammar and character development, but our discussions with her suggest that this was not true. Instead, her decisions reflected an understanding of the fanfic genre and an awareness of the background readers would bring to the text. Someone unfamiliar with Escaflowne might indeed have struggled to follow the plot, given the information she provided, but Eileen knew that this kind of person was not likely to read her story in the first place. Her text, and the choices she made about it, challenged the prevailing cultural modelGees (2001) term for everyday theories shared by people in a particular discourse communityabout successful writing that was privileged in her school (indeed in most secondary schools). In classes preparing them for the states English language arts examination, both girls were encouraged to produce texts that had a clear beginning, middle, and end and were developed with details for an audience (e.g., teachers or test scorers) with whom it was not appropriate to assume shared understandings. Everything needed to be made explicit, and the purpose for the task was to replicate as closely as possible the model texts provided in state standards documents and commercial test preparation materials.

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so, given the norms of the school they attended that their anime-inspired stories were not welcome in the classroom. Had they been invited to share and explain those texts in school, their teachers would have had considerably more data about them as writers orto be more precise, given the Multiliteracies frameworkDesigners. Examining fanfictions in this way might reposition some adolescents as capable literacy learners in their teachers eyes, as was the case with Dan, a high school student struggling with print literacy profiled by OBrien (2001). When allowed to construct a Web-based documentary of a favorite rock star, Dan showed himself to be adept at taking his ideas and feelings and representing them through authoring choices that drew on various Designs including audio, visual, and spatial. The documentary showed OBrien that Dan, who was positioned as incompetent in terms of a traditional definition of literacy that privileges print, is articulate, creative, and even masterful with media literacies. The same may be true for fanfiction writers if their teachers come to their texts with an appreciation of intertextuality, multimodality, and hybridity, all of which require Designers to use Available Resources in complex ways. We offer these suggestions with the knowledge that importing adolescents personal literacies and preferred texts into school is far from simple. We worry, for example, about the potential of classroom instruction to strip pleasure from pursuits that obviously mean a good deal to adolescents. For some young people, part of fanfiction writings appeal may be its unsanctioned nature and its inscrutability to adults. Rhiannon herself showed ambivalence about bringing her personal writing into school when we asked if she had ever shown her stories to one of her teachers: [No, and] I dont think Id want her to read them anyway, she replied, because theyre in a fashion that she probably wouldnt understand even if I tried to explain it to her. I just think that she isnt open-minded.

Despite these complexities, it seems significant that both Rhiannon and Eileen were so forthcoming about their fanfiction with us and that Eileen, in particular, sought our feedback. While the girls willingness to share may have been related to the fact that neither of us taught in their English class, we do believe that our honest interest played a role as well. We deliberately positioned ourselves as learners with Eileen and Rhiannon, a stance that Alvermann, Moon, and Hagood (1999) recommended for teachers who hope to incorporate popular culture in the classroom. That Donna has been subsequently successful in eliciting talk with her own students about similar personal literacy practices suggests that texts like fanfictions need not remain hidden (Finders, 1997) by all learners from all teachers. We did learn a great deal when we allowed the girls to serve as our guides through the unfamiliar territory of fanfiction writing and anime fandom. Considering the girls fanfiction writing in the light of the Multiliteracies framework helped us to see those texts as more complexas well as more worthy of consideration in academic contextsthan we had previously realized. At the same time, considering Multiliteracies with fanfictions as a test caseand with the girls as key informantshelped us to develop a sense of that frameworks practical implications. By working back and forth between the theory and the data (in itself a form of intertextuality), we began to broaden our conceptions of literacy and to contemplate, as the New London Group (1996) recommended, classroom teaching and curriculum that increasingly engage with students own experiences and discourses (p. 88).

REFERENCES
Alvermann, D., & Hagood, M. (2000). Fandom and critical media literacy. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 43, 436446. Alvermann, D., Moon, J., & Hagood, M. (1999). Popular culture in the classroom: Teaching and researching media literacy. Newark, DE: International Reading Association. Beach, R. (2000). Using media ethnographies to study response to media as activity. In A. Watts Pailliotet & P.

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Mosenthal (Eds.), Reconceptualizing literacy in the media age (pp. 339). Stamford, CT: JAI Press. Chandler-Olcott, K., & Mahar, D. (2001). Considering genre in the digital literacy classroom. Reading Online, 5. Retrieved July 25, 2002, from http://www.reading online.org/electronic/elec_index.asp?HREF=/electronic/ chandler/index.html Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2000). Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures. New York: Routledge. Dole, J., Duffy, G., Roehler, L., & Pearson, D. (1991). Moving from the old to the new: Research on reading comprehension instruction. Review of Educational Research, 61, 239264. Finders, M. (1997). Just girls: Hidden literacies and life in junior high. New York: Teachers College Press. Gee, J.P. (2001). Reading as situated language: A sociocognitive perspective. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 44, 714725. Jenkins, H. (1992). Textual poachers: Television fans and participatory culture. New York: Routledge. Kehr, D. (2002, January 20). Anime, Japanese cinemas second golden age. The New York Times, pp. AR1, AR22. Lewis, C., & Fabos, B. (1999, December). Chatting on-line: Uses of instant message communication among adolescent girls. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the National Reading Conference, Orlando, FL.

Luke, A., & Elkins, J. (1998). Redefining literacy in New Times. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 42, 47. Luke, C. (2000). Cyber-schooling and technological change: Multiliteracies for new times. In B. Cope & M. Kalantzis (Eds.), Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures (pp. 6991). New York: Routledge. Moje, E. (2000). To be part of the story: The literacy practices of gangsta adolescents. Teachers College Record, 102, 651690. Napier, S. (2001). Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke: Experiencing contemporary Japanese animation. New York: Palgrave. New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66, 6092. OBrien, D. (2001, June). At-risk adolescents: Redefining competence through the multiliteracies of intermediality, visual arts, and representation. Reading Online, 4. Retrieved July 25, 2002, from http://www.readingonline. org/newliteracies/lit_index.asp?HREF=/newliteracies/ obrien/index.html Poitras, G. (2001). Anime essentials: Everything a fan needs to know. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press. Schodt, F. (1996). Dreamland Japan: Writings on modern manga. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press.

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