Translated material
School of Fan Fix
Translation by Tatyana Danilova
Comed Hizer Loyer 13, she read the book that changed her whole life: "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone." Inspired by the stories about how the book by J. Rowling chopped children to reading, the girl decided that she would help to introduce children to literary skills in the same way. Less than a year later, she launched the Online newspaper Hogwarts’s fictional college entitled “Daily Prophet” . Today, the regular authors of the newspaper of 102 children from all continents of the world.
Young Loyer is still the editor -in -chief of the newspaper. She gains commentators who illuminate the weekly sensations from the last match to the Kviddich to the Muggles kitchen, and edits each of them. She encourages her employees to compare the initial options for their writings with edited versions and, if necessary, advises them on the problems of style and grammar.
Hizer, by the way, studies at home, and starting from the first grade of her legs was not at school. We often pretend that the monopoly on education belongs to schools, but only smart children have long been aware of how not to allow the school to become an obstacle to their education.
Teachers sometimes complain that they are forced to compete for students' attention with pop culture. This statement suggests that the information received by children from the media is less useful than those that the school gives. However, it is in the media that children learn a lot of what the school is trying to teach - often without any success. (Someone said that if they taught sex in schools, the human race would have stalled through a generation.)
I will focus on school-age children who read, write, edit and criticize Harry Potter fan fiction on the Internet. Keep in mind that such informal studies are found in other online communities. You can, for example, say about the important role of the Riot Grrl subculture in the development of technical knowledge in teenage girls of the early 90s, when the cyberspace was mainly male. You can call young fans of anime who help each other to learn the Japanese language and get acquainted with Japanese realities to make home -made subtitles for their favorite films.
Finding out why, in collaboration with pop culture, children learn more, more active and deeper than in interaction with the contents of textbooks, professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison James Ji calls such an informal studies "attraction spaces". As one 16 -year -old fan Harry Potter told me: "It’s one thing to discuss the plot of a short story that you had not heard about before and which you are on the drum. And it’s completely different to argue with a friend about the opus that he sprinkled for three months - fifty thousand words about Harry and Hermione."
I studied the communities of fans and participated in them for more than two decades (with interruptions). Nevertheless, my spirit took my breath when I recently paid attention to the fans of Harry Potter. Ten years ago, women were written by women 20-30 years old and older. Today, they were joined by a generation of new participants - children who found a fan fiction on the Internet and decided to try their strength in it.
Take, for example, a girl known on the network under the name Flourish. At 10 years old, she began to read the fan fiction on X-Files, at 12 she wrote the first of her own stories about Harry loss and at 14 published the first novel on the Internet. Flourish quickly turned into a mentor of those who write fan fiction - and even those who are older than she. Most people believe that now she is studying in college. Online communication allowed her not to mention age until she occupied among fans of a position in which age does not matter.
And what value will this be over time if the number of young writers grow, who begin to publish and receive responses to their work, being schoolchildren?
And what will happen when these young authors will exchange impressions and become critics, editors and mentors? Will their skills develop faster - and will the vocabulary will develop, allowing you to think about professional writings?
The largest meeting of Harry Potter Fictionalley includes more than 30,000 stories and chapters from books, hundreds of completed and unfinished novels. The staff of this archive consist of 200 voluntary employees, and among them 40 mentors, personally and warmly receiving every new participant. On Sugar Quill , a friend of a popular site, each work is discussed by participants, and the process itself is called "beta-reading". Often, new authors rewrite their work many times until they lay out the final option. “The beta -reading service actually helped me remove unnecessary dialects, place pretexts in places, improve the structure of phrases and improve the quality of the text,” explains the girl who writes under the nickname Sweeny Agonistes, which has just entered the college and published on the network for several years.
Like many other young writers, Agonistes claims that for her work, Rowling's books became a kind of construction forests. "Entertaining intrigue, characters and other literary skills are easier to develop if the reader is a little familiar with the world where the action unfolds," she says. Rowling, poaching in lands, writers can start with the world familiar to everyone and a set of familiar characters - and then focus on other aspects of their craft. Often, topics that are not completed in books encourage the authors to think through their own plots or look at the heroes in a new way.
Literary Purists, of course, will doubt the soundness of such an unconventional path of development of a child as a creative person. Of course, there is a certain benefit from such writing, but when a teenager is pulled away from himself and tries to look at the world with other people's eyes, he has difficulties. The fact that they are well acquainted with Harry and his friends allows them to retire from their own life at a certain critical distance and look at their problems from a different point of view. The creation of your works about Harry gives them something else - namely, an audience with an interest already embedded in it, which is completely easy to satisfy with the narrative, including original fictional characters. To find the reader, these barely hatched storytellers at the basic level use the ability of pop culture to attract attention.
Harripotter fan fiction fruit with countless narratives about young magicians struggling with the injustices that the authors encounter at school every day. Often young writers are very charming when they look at the world through the eyes of adult characters. Many of the best stories are written on behalf of the teacher or depict the school years of parents or mentors of Harry. Some of the stories of the romantic in others, this sweet has a shade of bitterness of growing up; Still others are full of anger or awakening sexual feelings and plots that are not subject to discussion at school and too immodest to conduct a story from the first person or on behalf of the original character. As these works are discussed, young and adult fans openly talk about their life experience, offering each other tips not only for the development of the plot or characters. A set of characters common to many authors creates many points of contact, and then communication becomes some form of cooperation.
Such online discussions about fan fiction develop the skills of discussing literary works in adolescents, and they learn strategies for rewriting and improving their texts. In fact, adolescents actually compare them with other literary works, establish ties with philosophical and theological traditions, discuss the gender stereotypes of female characters, quote interviews with writers and read critical tests of their texts. They use analytical concepts that, most likely, would not face at all without reaching the level of an advanced graduate.
It is not surprising that, having published the first novel on the Internet and having received a dozen letters with reviews, the student does not at all eager to return to the class, where only a teacher who pays attention to commas is more read than the character of the character. Some adolescents admitted that the drafts of their writings secretly bring to school and, hiding in textbooks, edit them in the lessons. Others, together with classmates, discuss stories and characters in a school dining room or try to engage in literary work on school computers, until the librarian accuses them of a waste of time. They cannot wait for the moment when the school call is nicknamed and it will be possible to focus on their own scriptures.
It is not yet clear whether it is possible to increase these achievements by simply including fan fiction in the school schedule, although some teachers use fan fiction exercises to motivate students. Schools are flexible than the online communities of fans that support the writer at different stages of his development. In addition, schools are imposing tough hierarchies of leadership, emphasizing the role differences in an adult and a teenager. It is unlikely that girls like a chiz or Flourish would have the same favorable opportunities for editorial work in the school as in the fans community.
Even the most advanced schools thematically limit the literary activity of students in comparison with the freedom that they enjoy, left to themselves. Of course, for their work, published on the Internet, adolescents can receive sharply critical reviews, but they make this risky decision themselves and are faced with the consequences of their decisions. Books about Harry Potter are not welcome in all American schools. In manuals and libraries, they had been arguing for the past few years about them as much as they did not argue about any other book. Young writers are well aware of these censorship wars, and many decided that they should not talk about these books with parents and teachers. What adults do not know, it will not hurt them.
Some students say that teachers ridicule them for how much time they devote fanfica. Others complain about parents who are trying to protect them from the "demonic" influence exerted by books about Harry Potter. But some teachers are careful enough to read fan fiction and give reviews on it. And there are cases of family support when parents with sons and daughters fly at a conference where young authors tell in crowded rooms about writing crafts. Teenagers need adults to respect and appreciate their classes without trying to invade their space.
Many young authors of the fan fiction strive for the career of professional writers. Many of them enter the best colleges, and the goals of the Fanfius experience prompted them the goals of the education. Fans communities provide a good opportunity for the development of young talents that would otherwise suppress the system, and offer mentoring to help less gifted students to achieve a more complete expression. One way or another, on the Internet these teenagers find what they lack at school.