[1] Over the past two years, I have attempted, with some successes and some failures, to bring Tumblr—a major social media platform used by fans—into my fan studies classroom. I have sometimes asked my students to curate individual Tumblr accounts and at other times asked them all to contribute to a class Tumblr account. In both versions of this assignment, the students were expected to follow both fan and professional users posting about their media text and to use work they found on the class Tumblr as a resource when writing their papers. At the end of the semester, students wrote about the experience of Tumblr as a "community of voices," and analyzed their own participation within the social media space.
[2] Ultimately, the goal was for students to follow organically how a fandom Tumblr is created and shared. My hope was that the class Tumblr would serve a number of pedagogical functions: it could be a storehouse of content that students could refer to in their papers as evidence of fan work; it could be a way to become involved in a fan community; it could serve to both reflect and augment students' own ideas about their topics; it could be a place for students to create GIFs, GIF sets, GIF fics, and so on. Specific assignments were intended to help students acquire these skills: papers referenced specific Tumblr posts from the class Tumblr(s), while class presentations used examples from the class Tumblr to augment their arguments. However, as I will show in this essay, while the successes (including students' bringing contemporary fan discourse into our classroom discussions) were compelling, the failures of using Tumblr in the fan studies classroom stemmed from a number of sources: an assumption that students were well-versed in using Tumblr, an expectation that students would intuitively "get" Tumblr, and, most importantly, a troubling of the balance between fandom and fan studies in the course itself.
[3] I have taught this fan studies course for nearly a decade (e.g., Booth 2012; Booth 2015). In this class, I both take students through a history of fan studies and ask them to "become" fans of a media text at the same time; they write fanfiction, make a vid, study a community, and—with Tumblr—investigate the multitudes of conversations that fans have online. In effect, I ask students both to perform fandom and to analyze fandom in the course. Thus, the class exists in a precarious balance between teaching fandom and teaching fan studies. Tumblr, I have found, has failed precisely because it illustrates this balance and, in doing so, throws it off.
[4] If I want my students to explore fandom as it happens, then including Tumblr within the class becomes something of a necessity. When they read through the class Tumblrs, my students were able to bring contemporary fan discourse into our classroom discussions: they could cite fan work being made at that moment. Fandom became a lived reality for them, which is a goal of the course. For many of my students, as fandom has grown, it has come to be nearly synonymous with Tumblr (for students, Tumblr is more well-known than other well-trafficked fannish sites like AO3 and FanFiction.net; see Stein 2015, 157). Tumblr has become a social media hub of fan activity. At the same time, many of the practices that everyday Tumblr users carry out can also be considered fannish—that is, they appear akin to work done by fans, whether or not the users would self-identify as fans. This type of work—posting GIF fics and user-created images or trading behind-the-scenes information—can be reblogged, tagged, and shared many thousands of times by fans and non-fans alike. To try to teach about contemporary fandom without using Tumblr would be a disservice to the lived experience of fans today. At the same time, formalizing Tumblr into a classroom experience (and, thus, grading based on Tumblr) may have had a detrimental effect on the way students interpreted the technology. Exploring the ways that my Tumblr assignments have failed reveals both the difficulty of using this particular technology in the fan classroom, and also the importance of failure in and of itself in the classroom.
[5] Failure is an important aspect of teaching, even if we are discouraged from exploring it. As an instructor, I am encouraged to share my successes with colleagues, write up my positive lessons for peer review, or put my best class activities in my annual review file. The contemporary higher education classroom promotes success—as Halberstam (2011, 1–2) notes, this stems from larger Western culture concerns with positive thinking, success, and capitalism. But as Halberstam goes on to describe, failure can be a productive way of critiquing social norms: failing "may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world" (2–3; see Hay 2016 for the application of failure in creative classrooms in general).
[6] The fan studies classroom lends itself to teaching with different technologies, because fans use multiple technologies to articulate and practice their fandom. But the use of technology also reveals one of the most complex aspects of this course: the balance between fannishness and scholarship. Students never quite know how to position themselves theoretically within the course. Are they supposed to be fans? (In which case, why get a grade?) Are they scholars? (In which case, how far to take their fanfiction assignment?) As Geraghty (2012) has noted, students are shy about writing slash not just because it is about sex, but because it's for a professor—for a grade. Fan studies literature has debated for decades the positionality between fans and scholars (Jenkins 1992; Hills 2002; Jenkins et al. 2011). My classroom has embodied this debate; and Tumblr has actualized it.
[7] Tumblr is situated in a middle ground between the fannish and the scholarly for my students. And, to complicate matters, for most of them, learning Tumblr is yet another new skill set they have to complete at the start of the quarter. Despite the "digital natives" moniker applied to the millennials I teach (see Palfrey and Gasser 2013), in my experience most of my students have never posted to Tumblr. They visit the site but do not know how it works. They are all aware of it, but few would consider themselves regular users. For example, in a class of twenty-five students in 2016, only two of my students had Tumblr accounts of their own, and although both of them posted to the site, they did not feel comfortable teaching others how to post. In final course evaluations, students reported feeling that Tumblr was "unfamiliar" and "more complicated than what it should be." Learning to use Tumblr for the course became another task to complete in order to pass the course—it wasn't "fun" (re: fannish) because it was prescribed.
[8] But Tumblr should be fun, and the fans that use it do it because it is fun. The affordances, or the "possibilities and constraints that structure conversation" on Tumblr include the ability to create posts through image, video, animation, text, and audio uploads; to "reblog" content (effectively, sharing content that one finds online), to "tag" content with original hashtags of meaning, and to create links between posts and the outside web (Petersen 2014, 90; see Perez 2013). In other words, Tumblr users "interpret the affordances of Tumblr in a certain way, and respond by applying a specific cultural logic through their fan-centric activities" (Petersen 2014, 91). Tumblr becomes an outlet for fan practices.
[9] In my first attempt at using Tumblr in the class, I blindly attempted to have each student make their own Tumblr account and blog, and post to it each week. My assumption was that they would get caught up in using Tumblr, love it, and continue to post throughout the course. In my class, students follow a particular fandom for ten weeks (it is usually something they are already a fan of, so it is not much of a stretch for them). For this activity, they were to cultivate a Tumblr for the duration of the class focused on this one particular fandom (examples ranged from the typical Walking Dead and Game of Thrones that I have in most classes to more unusual fandoms like DragonAge, Until Dawn, and Hey Arnold!). Students were supposed to follow both fannish and corporate Tumblr accounts related to their text. I asked students to maintain this Tumblr throughout the course and to check it at least once a day.
[10] I'm sure more experienced and wiser instructors could have told me how this would fail to demonstrate an organic use of Tumblr—instead, this merely demonstrated how effective at school the students were. Tumblr became one more box to check, one more assignment to complete. Students tended not to explore how fans used Tumblr; rather, they focused on how fan studies scholars and students can make use of Tumblr. Although they did learn something, it wasn't the fannish nature of Tumblr, which had been the goal. Students interpreted Tumblr as an assignment, quite naturally, and visited the site academically, not as a fan.
[11] Following on from this, I contacted Melanie E.S. Kohnen, who has written about Tumblr in the classroom (2013). She recommended that I create a single Tumblr page curated by the class, a pedagogical strategy she has expanded upon for a chapter called "Tumblr Pedagogies." As she writes in a later piece for the Wiley Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies, "the Tumblr interface allows for the easy sharing of multiple types of media, which can create a vibrant backchannel or platform for multimodal assignments. Specifically, the interface and fan practices on Tumblr focus on the archiving and circulation of visual media" (Kohnen 2018, 353). I have found this in my class as well. One curates their own personal journey through their fandoms, and "this focus on curation, literally built into Tumblr's infrastructure, is one of the central ways that the site facilitates the cultivation of analytical skills"—a crucial function of Tumblr for fannish pedagogy (Kelly 2015).
[12] For my next class, then, I created one single Tumblr that the class itself would curate as fans might, by creating "a vibrant backchannel." The intent was for everyone in class to reblog content or create original posts based on their fandom. The class would use this Tumblr to share news, art, and activism about and involving digital media and fandom. Everyone shared the same username and password—and this meant that everyone also took responsibility for curating the posts and reblogs that appear on the class's Tumblr account(s). For the posts that each student created or reblogged, they were supposed to tag them with their name or a pseudonym. Using Tumblr in the classroom in this way allowed students to follow fan culture while also placing it within larger scholarly contexts. The balance between fandom and fan studies was supposed to be maintained, as students "experience critical fan culture while they are still students so they can see how the concepts they study in class resonate and have meaning outside of class as well" (Kohnen 2018). Students rarely come to class unfamiliar with the fandoms they are a part of; but putting their fandom in a Tumblr blog helps contextualize it within the larger culture of the class, and reframes their experience of fandom given the history and scholarly criticism that fan studies has developed.
[13] Results for this use of Tumblr were mixed, although it seemed to me to be slightly more successful than the first use. As with the earlier class, students seemed to be split between those familiar with Tumblr's interface and usability and those for whom it was a foreign country. Had I spent a class period teaching the students how to use Tumblr, those students who originally were left behind would have been caught up, but those with the experience of Tumblr would have had their time wasted. Looking back, holding an additional out-of-class session to teach students how to use Tumblr would have been an effective strategy.
[14] Regardless of their experience with Tumblr, students stopped adding to the class Tumblr after the first few classes. I noticed that in their papers they continued to reference the same posts rather than building an argument on the different posts that could be reblogged over time. In an email conversation with me, Kohnen suggested assigning students a minimum number posts per week, although I've also found that, given the many other limits on students' time (other classes, full-time work, internships, etc.), the temptation for students to limit engagement to the minimum is strong. To re-engage students in the assignment requires not just changing the parameters of the assignment (e.g., spreading their posts out throughout the semester), but changing the way we view Tumblr in class. Rather than being illustrative of the divide between fandom and scholarship, we need to see Tumblr as a bridge between the two.
[15] Tumblr is a space for sanctioned play—it is fannish in that participation through Tumblr takes on the appearance of fandom. We play at being fans in class throughout all the assignments—writing fanfic and making vids are equally foreign to most of my students. By learning to participate with the media as a fan might, through creative expression, students develop a different set of skills than if the class were focused more on media theory or critical analysis. Students learn fandom by doing fandom. But in the classroom, Tumblr only simulates fannish practice. The past two years of using Tumblr in the fan studies classroom has shown me that assigning a grade for Tumblr means that students see it as part of class, not as part of fandom. And yet not assigning grades for Tumblr runs the risk of students not completing the assignment at all. By situating Tumblr within the classroom, it reveals the uncomfortable balance between fandom and fan studies.
[16] This, however, can be a strength—assuming the assignment follows through. Whereas academic writing strives for depth and complexity, Tumblr posts and fans' engagement with Tumblr can be very deep or very shallow. I could imagine an assignment that compared Tumblr/fan criticism to scholarly criticism, or an assignment that asked students to create critical Tumblr posts using just memes and GIFs. This might make room for and value both modes of engagement.
[17] My ultimate goal is for students, then, to see Tumblr itself as a site of fandom and of fan studies: as a symphony of voices rather than a single fan interpretation (Booth 2016). But my students treated it as a blog that was rarely updated: a static text. This may in part be due to the timing of the class. DePaul is on the quarter system, and ten weeks simply isn't long enough to do everything I was asking them to do (and that's on me). But partly this is also because Tumblr, as a concept, is hard to pin down for students. What is it? A blog? A creative outlet? An archive? It is all of these things and more, so for students exploring fandom for the first time, it can be overwhelming. Not only do they have to learn a new system, they also have to learn a new language for understanding it. As Petersen (2014, 101) describes, "As fan conversations enter Tumblr they are moulded by the media logic and affordances that Tumblr offers, but that this process happens as fans interpret the website's media logic and make use of Tumblr's affordances to serve their purposes in a continuous non-linear process." In other words, becoming part of Tumblr requires becoming part of a community that students may not have an awareness of or the facility for. It's not that this can't be learned, but it must be factored into the pedagogical space of the class.
[18] Learning through pedagogical failure can be a humbling experience but, importantly, it reveals lapses and lacunae in an instructor's own methodologies. But given the importance that Tumblr holds in fan communities today, it becomes even more crucial for students and instructors to develop the technical and cultural skills of this technology.