Channelling Artscience Through Fan-Fiction for Diversifying STEM Approaches in Participatory Learning in Malaysia

Abstract

Fan-fiction is proposed as a participatory and discovery-learning approach to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education; communication; and collaboration through the epistemic third space afforded by artscience. The objective is to increase the affective dimension in STEM instruction by allowing STEM to enter intimately into social spaces, all the while drawing interests from girls and women. There is strong female participation in fan-fiction creation, whether in the form of textual stories or other transmedia objects, that could be used to develop more multi-dimensional STEM-based experiential and imagination-centric learning without excluding the more technical aspects of the science – in fact, the technical aspects could be weaved in as a STEM problem or project to be collectively tackled through the communal experience of creating and responding to fan-fiction. Moreover, the world-building capability of fan-fiction, with its ability to bring together multiple fandoms such as multiple works from the same creator or different creators within similar genres, means that there is ample room for using fan-fiction during interdisciplinary engagement for STEM problem-solving or research creation approaches to learning and doing. In this article, some examples of activities are taken from workshops targeted at Malaysian audiences to explore the possibility of deploying fan-fiction approaches to STEM, or STEM through the lenses of artscience, within the culture of learning and doing in Malaysia. These workshops were not originally conceived with fan-fiction as method and medium in mind and yet, were found to share certain similar traits with fan-fiction. The world-building capacity of fan-fiction could be deployed to mainstream the incorporation of indigenous and cultural ways of knowing within Malaysia into the rubrics of institutionalized STEM education. However, the convergence and compatibility between fan-fiction and participatory design, which were featured in at least three of the four workshops depicted here, are the reasons for the choice, while the fourth workshop considers the practice of fan-fiction and its relevance to more informal practices in STEM publishing and communication at a meta level.