fanfic forensics

remarkable pedagogical and artistic approach taken by Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, the Artistic Director of the Mixed Magic Theater. Ricardo worked to get incarcerated youth to read Moby-Dick by having them rewrite and update Melville's novel for the 21st century

I had an opportunity--and this was probably the best part of the experience for me--as a teacher to release their imaginations. Boy oh boy, no matter how much I write I'll never be able to fully capture the degree to which their imaginations were released and they released me, too, to say you don't have to play by the ABC game. You don't have to go by the numbers. You can rethink these characters and it's okay, and you can honor them and rethink them at the same time. When we started the writing process, I started by saying, "Pick a character and write a story about the character." They all chose their favorite character in the novel and wrote a story about just their character.

First, Epstein, a psychologist, has found that there are four different skill sets that he says are essential for creative expression.

The first and most important competency is "capturing" - preserving new ideas as they occur to you and doing so without judging them. ...

The third area is "broadening." The more diverse your knowledge, the more interesting the interconnections - so you can boost your creativity simply by learning interesting new things.

I'm just as firmly in the "oh, youbetcha academia is the enemy" side of the road.

What seems not to be understood is that academics don't study and write articles in order to Validate the object of their study. Academics study and write articles in order to Validate themselves. As more and more people become academics, they must look further and further afield for subjects, and lo! suddenly Science Fiction isn't genre trash anymore; it's a way to secure tenure.

The message that many take away from their English teachers is that the only Right Way to read is by the Analysis Method, and yanno? after a long day? Much too fatiguing. Wanna watch a Jackie Chan movie?

This is a really good example of why Socratic inquiry really works. Because the first step in analysing any media product is to look at things like age and gender and race, but the second step is to examine the underlining factors that create our biases about those very things.