r.

role-play:

Here Indiana Jones poses for a photo

at the site of an archeological dig.

Role-play was a favorite pastime of mine as a small boy (above I am dressed up as Indiana Jones at the site of an archeological dig). I would play dress-up, make-believe, or pretend for endless hours. There was a large wooden box in my parents’ house filled with all sorts of capes, hats, and what seemed like endless costume combinations. I imagined myself as Superman, Captain Hook, or Indiana Jones, and the fate of the universe always rested on my shoulders. At an early age, I was already performing myself onto the world stage around me.

New literacies researchers Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel include a chapter in A New Literacies Sampler (2007) by Angela Thomas. Thomas’ chapter, titled “Blurring and Breaking through the Boundaries of Narrative, Literacy, and Identity in Adolescent Fan Fiction,” discusses how different genres of narrative can become blurred. Thomas examines the lives of two teenage girls, Tiana and Jandalf, who experiment with genres of “role-play” and fan fiction. What Thomas found was that these two girls would blur “role-playing” to create a new literacy and form of narrative. Thomas stated:

"I have observed role-playing communities, and fan fiction communities, but had not seen any young people who were crossing over from one practice to another. Tiana and Jandalf seemed to be pushing the limits and blurring the boundaries in a number of ways, including blurring understanding about narrative as a distinct form, blurring the boundaries of reality and fantasy and challenging all notions of what it might mean to be literate in a digital age” (140).

I realized when reading Thomas’ research, in Knobel and Lankshear’s text, that the art of “role-playing” itself could be used as a way of writing a continuation or alternative perspective of a story into existence. An activity in a future classroom might ask a student to role-play with another student to develop alternative story lines, new perspectives, or alternative endings. With a purpose to ultimately construct a piece of fan fiction, students could be assigned to role play a narrative from a text that they were closely and critically reading. Since fan fiction encourages on some levels multiple, creative, and imaginative readings of a text, issues of “story” and “plot” can become wonderfully complicated through role-play and students can really see what Christopher Norris describes in Deconstruction as the “variety of possible relations between language, text, and reality” (132). The future of fan fiction in the classroom may indeed assume the guise of teaching students how to better complicate and problematize language. Norris commented on story and plot,

"Structuralist theory was clear enough about the basic distinction between ‘story’ and ‘plot’, the one an implied (and imaginably real life) sequence of events, the other a pattern imposed by the requirements of narrative form. They represent two different kinds of reading: the latter is attentive to structure and device, while the former rests on a willing - but not necessarily naïve - suspension of disbelief. To see them locked in conflict or paradox is to mistake the conventions of narrative for the rigours of logical discourse. The tactics of ‘double-reading’ automatically generate the kind of paradoxical impasse they set to find" (132).

Educators might do well to teach students that they have the critical capacity as performers (writers) of role-play and fan fiction to underpin an author’s intent. The idea of deconstructing an author’s intent doesn’t necessarily have to mean a Roland Barthes-like “death to the Author.” A more fundamental deconstruction analysis might simply include examining elements of plot and authorship. These techniques will be invaluable to students in future classrooms for constructing narratives of fan fiction, for future research of their own, and in their lives as critical thinkers and world citizens. Students in a unit of fan fiction might have the opportunity to learn the advantages of unraveling an inter-textual paradox for their own creative and generative purposes. Acts of deconstruction, through acts of role-play and fan fiction, serve as a useful pedagogical tool in a future classroom to successfully teach a unit. Of course, teaching students traditional lessons about plot structure will be necessary to build a foundation and a preliminary understanding for the student to perform a task of close and critical reading. However, pushing and encouraging students beyond a simple plot analysis into a place where they can genuinely “suspend disbelief” will help young readers and writers make the necessary breakthroughs to begin writing their own narratives.

Arguably, students are always and already writing these narrative long before entering a middle school or high school classroom, where a fan fiction unit might be assigned. In my case, I was "blurring the boundaries" of role-play and fan fiction from an early age. I can remember dressing up like Indiana Jones and writing my own adventures of archeological digs. These adventures went on and beyond the films that spawned these narratives (See picture above). I was not yet writing these stories alphabetically, but I was performing these stories (writing unknowingly) and imagining narratives.

The role-playing of Indiana Jones and the performance-based writing of the adventures I was constructing were enacting a process that teachers of English can replicate. The process can be replicated for the purposes of "in-school writing, including fan fiction, graphic narratives, and zines (a form which "blurs" the "in-school/out-of-school" dichotomy). Educators could perhaps teach a unit of fan fiction where the rhetorical situation of writing a Star Wars and Titus Andronicus "crossover" might be matched with a letter writing activity where students write George Lucas and William Shakespeare for the permission to use their characters in their story. I think Titus would qualify as crazy enough to fight, and even take, Darth Vader.