Jill Kedersha McClay

Wait a Second...: Negotiating Complex Narratives in "Black and White.".

Jill Kedersha McClay Jill Kedersha McClay is an Associate Professor in the Department of Elementary Education, University of Alberta, Canada. She teaches courses in language and literacy, with a particular focus upon young adolescent writers and readers. Her current research involves young adolescents who write in a variety of media. “Wait a second . . .”: Negotiating Complex Narratives in Black and White

Pirates and poachers: Fan fiction and the conventions of reading and writing

Abstract This article explores what teachers and students can learn about contemporary story‐telling from a study of fan fiction – that is, stories created by readers and viewers out of the canonical material of previously published fictions. Drawing on the example of Pirates of the Caribbean, it investigates ways in which fan fiction writers develop codes and conventions to govern themselves. For example, online litmus tests establish when a writer is self‐indulgently writing ‘Mary Sue’ characters into a story; the self‐styled Protectors of the Plot Continuum patrol the fictional limits of an imagined world to make sure that canonical information is not violated by fan fiction writers. This article makes use of such examples to investigate how quality control in fan fiction is codified, and to explore what teachers can learn from such enterprises about contemporary writing, reading and viewing. It compares these possibilities with issues of online literacy outlined by Henry Jenkins under three headings: the participation gap, the transparency problem, and the ethics challenge.

Adolescents Composing Fiction in Digital Game and Written Formats: Tacit, Explicit and Metacognitive Strategies

This article reports on a study of 23 tenth-grade students who created fiction in digital game and written formats. The researchers observed them at work, analysed their stories in both formats, and interviewed selected students to learn what affordances and constraints they demonstrate and/or articulate in such authoring. The students used ScriptEase, a software tool that supports the creation of digital stories, based on the game engine of Neverwinter Nights (Bioware). The authors consider the theoretical literature about narrative and games, focusing especially on indicators of verbal tense and mood. They discuss the overlaps and differences between digital and written stories, drawing in particular on the work of two students, and they conclude with implications for theoretical understandings of contemporary narratives in multiple formats and implications for literacy education.