Fandom, Digital Literacies, and Language Learning: What Educators Can Learn from Participatory Culture

Fandom is often treated as peripheral to formal education, yet it constitutes a rich site of language learning, literacy development, and identity work. Across online spaces, fans read, write, translate, remix, subtitle, meme, comment, and interact around shared cultural texts in ways that are highly social, affective, and linguistically meaningful. These practices create opportunities for vocabulary growth, pragmatic development, intercultural awareness, translation sensitivity, multimodal meaning-making, and sustained engagement with language beyond the classroom. This seminar examines fandom as a productive context for understanding contemporary language learning in digitally mediated environments. Drawing on research on fan translation, fanfiction, memes, and participatory cultures, I explore how informal learning unfolds through affinity-driven practices and how these practices challenge narrow distinctions between entertainment and education, consumption and production, or formal and informal learning. Particular attention will be given to the pedagogical relevance of fandom-related practices for language and teacher education, especially in relation to digital literacies, learner agency, creativity, and critical reflection. Rather than proposing that classrooms simply “import” fandom, the seminar argues for a more thoughtful pedagogical engagement with the forms of participation, collaboration, interpretation, and resemiotization that fandom makes visible. By foregrounding what learners already do with language in online cultural spaces, educators can better understand how meaning-making, motivation, and identity intersect in contemporary language education. The session will be relevant to scholars, teacher educators, and students interested in digital literacies, multilingualism, popular culture, and language learning in the wild.