Focus on Policy: The Right to Be a Fan

Reading experts have consistently cited the importance of independent reading, reading for pleasure, and fostering “a love of reading.” Unfortunately, fanning the fire of fan readership is not so easy in the service of our clear-cut and standards-aligned curricula, except perhaps in small, carefully channeled doses. Moreover, the impetus for such a project is innately contradictory in terms of the promises that fandom makes to youth. As educators, we want students to be fans, but we want to restrict it to the palette of choices that we assemble for them. Such an impasse helps explain why there currently exists an uneasy truce, a kind of intellectual demilitarized zone, between the worlds of fandom and education, with the latter extremely suspect of the former. This article addresses fandom as the best chance of uniting in-school and outside-of-school literacies, not to mention helping students develop critical thinking skills and a host of media and “new literacies”—that is, empowering them to become “readers” in the broadest, most meaningful sense of the word.