Enchanting Tales and Imagic Stories: The Educational Benefits of Fanart Making

Cosplaying while Black: The Transgressive Pleasure of Blacktivism

“…As a teacher, being a cosplayer helped me provide students with a greater sense of freedom, with permission (and a model) for experimentation and play. Marjorie Manifold (2013) observes that "[a]dolescents and young adults become fans of stories they intuitively or consciously recognize as profoundly relevant to their everyday lives as they are or as they wish them to be" (p. 13). Further, Manifold describes "fanart" production/performance as increasingly "entrenched and pervasive," noting adolescents desire to intensify their engagement with resonant texts and stories, co-constructing responsive, interactive, living texts that demonstrate "how youth are coming to see themselves and interact with others in the 21st century" (p. 18).…”

“…These interactions inevitably turned into discussions about favorite movies, tv shows, anime, and fandom of all kinds. Manifold (2013) asserts that such "play with popular stories increases the size and diversity of the community that can access knowledge, exchange differing worldviews, debate critical ideas, engage in aesthetic explorations, and improvise upon an original narrative" (p. 15). Using cosplay provided a way to demonstrate my knowledge of and commitment to contemporary and popular stories and characters, and to use myself as an active agent for visually re-storying these previously-exclusionary texts.…”

Transforming Art Education into Visual Culture Education Through Rhizomatic Structures

“…The range of cultural sites is extensive, including second life (Han, 2013;Lu, 2010); video games (Gill, 2009); graphic novels (Carpenter & Tavin, 2012); Argentinian telenovelas (Christopoulou, 2010); Barbie dolls (Amburgy, 2011); on-line image galleries (Carpenter & Cifuetes, 2011); animated film (Madrid, 2012); shop window displays (Christopoulou, 2011); popular images of the Buddha (Shin, 2010); family snapshots (Baxter, 2012); heritage tourism (Ballengee-Morris & Sanders, 2009); graffiti, tattoos, and public and private memorial shrines (Bey, 2012); adolescents own webpages (Bae, Anadolu Journal of Educational Sciences International, Art Education Special Issue, November 2015 51 2011); commercial brands (Danker, 2014), Tamagotchi electronic pets (Ivashkevich, 2011); the parody news program The Colbert Report (Derby, 2013); political advertising activism (Briggs, 2013); fan art (Manifold, 2013;Chung, 2011); and advertising and newspaper cartoons (Chang, Lim & Kim, 2012). For my part, I have recently explored unsolicited youth productions on YouTube (Duncum, 2013).…”