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Why Heather Can Write

Why Heather Can Write. Media Literacy and The Harry Potter Wars. Carolyn Levine and Lydia Sheehan. “The Potter Wars”.

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Why Heather Can Write

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  1. Why Heather Can Write Media Literacy and The Harry Potter Wars Carolyn Levine and Lydia Sheehan

  2. “The Potter Wars” • Religious Struggle: Teachers, librarians, book publishers, and civil liberty groups stood up against religious groups that tried to have the Harry Potter books removed from school libraries and book stores • Intellectual Property Struggle: Warner Brothers tried to control fans from creating their own Harry Potter stories because they infringed on the studio’s intellectual property • “From a purely legal standpoint, the first constitutes a form of censorship, the other a legitimate exercise of property rights.” • From the perspective of the consumer these struggles both place restrictions on “our ability to fully engage with a fantasy that has taken on a central place in our culture.” • Media Literacy: Being able to use and create media

  3. Hogwarts and All • Heather Lawver created “The Daily Prophet” • The sites goals: Bringing literature to life, open minds to exploring books, diving into the characters, and analyzing literature. • Writers created characters that were some how related to characters in the original stories. • Suggests important cultural competency: “role playing both as a means of exploring a fictional realm, and as a means of developing a richer understanding of yourself and the culture around you.”

  4. Rewriting School • Affinity Spaces are informal learning cultures; i.e.: fan based websites like “The Daily Prophet” • Affinity Spaces offer powerful opportunities for learning because they are sustained by common endeavors, people can participate in various ways according to their skills and interests, they depend on peer to peer teaching, and they allow each participant to feel like an expert. • http://www.sugarquill.net/ • In a participatory culture, the entire community helps new writers find their way • http://fictionalley.blogspot.com/

  5. Defense Against the Dark Arts • At first J.K. Rowling and Scholastic supported fan writers because they wanted kids to expand their imaginations and find their voices as writers. • When Warner Brothers bought the film rights in 2001, they believed that they had a legal obligation to police sights that emerged around their properties. • They would suspend sites until they could determine how the sites used the Harry Potter franchise. • Warner Brothers reserved the right to shut down sites if they found them inappropriate or offensive. But, they underestimated how interconnected the fandom was. • http://harrypotterguide.co.uk/ • Fans banded together and Warner Brothers finally had to negotiate with them. • The studio developed a more collaborative policy for engaging with Harry Potter fans, much like Lucas did with the Star Wars fan filmmakers. • “In the short run, change is more likely to occur by shifting the way studios think about fan communities than reshaping the law, and that’s why the collaborative approaches we’ve seen across the past two chapters seem like important steps in redefining the space of amateur participation.”

  6. Muggles for Harry Potter • Harry Potter books have been at the center of more textbook & library controversies over the past several years than any other book • In 2002 they were the focus of more than 500 “challenges” at schools and libraries around the US • Conservative critics attacked transmedia storytelling saying that it encourages us to spend more time mastering the details of a fictional world and less time confronting the real world • Two groups fighting the books being banned: • Muggles for Harry Potter – fight for students and teachers to use the best books available even when parents object. Changed its name to SPEAK! http://www.kidspeakonline.org/ • The HP Alliance – encouraged young people who learn to read and write from Harry Potter to also use the books as a platform for civic engagement, they also work with participants in the fan community. Read the books as allegories for real world issues. • Fundamentalists claim that the fantastical representations of violence or the occult shape the reader’s beliefs and actions in the real world. Defenders of the books say that it’s the immersive quality of the books that make them “such a powerful catalyst for creative expression.”

  7. What Would Jesus Do With Harry Potter • Discernment: “an ability, by God’s grace, to creatively chart a godly path through the maze of choices and options that confront us, even when we’re faced with situations and issues that aren't specifically mentioned in the Scriptures.” • Many Christian groups defended the books. What’s a Christian to Do with Harry Potter by Connie Neal • Recommends giving children media literacy skills, and to interpret popular culture through their Christian background • “Pop Culture: Why Bother?” Denis Haak • Discernment advocates regard the Harry Potter books as the perfect openings for parents to talk with their children about the challenges of preserving their values in a secular society • Fans for Christ and Anime Angels

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