This book was absolutely fantastic. I've already added it to our library collection and will recommend it to students.

This book was a bit heavy on the scholarly information and analysis of fandom, but it still has a lot of useful information on how to use fandom to draw teens into their work and engage with the classroom, their peers and teachers.

As both a scholar and a fan, I've read many sociological and psychological studies on fan culture. However, this book expands that study into how fan culture and the methods fans employ can be used in the classroom from a pedagogical perspective. The series of articles provide a fresh approach to teaching methods, and I was particularly excited by the out-of-the-box techniques of using fan-vidding, Tumblr, and writing fanfiction to explore texts. What really set this book apart from others, though, was the student reactions to the methods that were included in each chapter. It is easy to present a new technique and hypothesize about the benefits, but the students' reactions showed how these techniques can be used to expand student understanding and engagement in real-world ways.

I enjoyed the practical aspects of this book tremendously. The mix between scholarship and practical classroom experiences was slightly heavier on scholarship than I had been hoping; however, the student response chapters made up for it. It was very helpful to read student responses to fandom studies and related assignments, both positive and negative. I will definitely refer back to these chapters as I adapt teaching ideas and assignments to fit the needs of my students and curriculum. I appreciated that the ideas in Fandom as Classroom Practice were oriented to college classrooms. I finished the book feeling invigorated and inspired to change up an assignment or two in my own classes in the near future.

Written by scholars and their students, this collection explores various ways in which fandom can be used in the classroom. Among others I found instructive: Anna Smol writes about having students create fanworks of their choice, letting them express themselves in ways otherwise unavailable in a literature classroom, and Shannon Farley writes about using vids to teach criticism/deconstruction (although I have to say I disagree with her that the Doctor Who Handlebars vid isn’t a reading against the grain; she says it’s just saying what characters like Harriet Jones say in the show).

Rukmini Pande writes about using racebending and fancasting to create productive discomfort about race in students (and tells a striking story about how her class initially fan-cast a live-action Lion King with almost all white actors right after studying articles about Hollywood bias). “The students had so far been rather quiet, but they suddenly became a lot more vocal in arguing the fact that the exercise was a direct product of their own prejudice. One student said quite heatedly, ‘There are white people in Africa, too, you know!’ I agreed, and then pushed her to justify why this specific narrative—that of a royal family that seemingly drew from indigenous customs and languages—should be enacted by white people.”

Paul Booth writes about teaching different waves of fan studies that in some ways recapitulate students’ own journeys. Also, a teacher who used assignments on Tumblr found that “the community environment created by both the peer-to-peer elements and the low-stakes writing assigned on Tumblr became especially important to nonnative speakers of English enrolled in the class.” Feedback was also better: “Even when students knew the icons and usernames of their peers, the level of imagined anonymity that such usernames and icons afforded enabled the students to offer authentic opinions and lengthy reviews of their peers’ work that they otherwise would not have offered if forced to confront their peers face-to-face.”

I love the ideas in this book. I think that fandom is an excellent way to counteract students' writer's block.

Yes, it's a lot more academic than a lot of people would enjoy, but I loved it.
Given the growing amount of fan fiction, of texts that include fangirl/ fanboy characters, and even studies done on fanfiction, this is definitely a great book for the moment. Anything that encourages students to engage is brilliant, and given the types of fanfiction out there, both "curative" and "transformative" it can actually help marginalised or minority student to find themselves and representation within otherwise difficult texts.

Thought this would be an interesting read (even though I'm not a teacher or educator of any kind) to see the possible benefits of fandom in an education aspect as I've long been a participator in making video/photo edits, cringe fan fiction and the like on Tumblr but this book is definitely a niche market for teachers specifically as it outlines specific courses and fandoms.
So, i definitely would have enjoyed this if i had some way to apply it but alas i do not.