Writers in the Secret Garden

“Writers in the Secret Garden will be a significant book for several sets of readers. For those in fandom studies, the book provides a substantive examination of mentorship within fan fiction writing communities, merging ethnographic research with data-rich considerations of fan production. For those in the learning sciences, the book offers a bold new model for how mentorship operates in a networked community, one that. has implications far beyond our understanding of fandom as a site for informal learning. And for all, the book challenges easy dismissals of how time spent by teens online comes at the expense of more 'valuable"'forms of learning and socialization.”

Henry Jenkins, coauthor of By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism

“Work on learning outside of school has left out teaching. This crucially important book remedies that mistake with a vengeance. Aragon and Davis introduce us to a form of teaching uniquely suited to social networks: distributed mentoring.”

James Paul Gee, Regents' Professor, Arizona State University; author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy

“Charting new methodological and theoretical territory, Cecilia Aragon and Katie Davis's Writers in the Secret Garden incorporates data science, interactive visualization, and qualitative analysis to offer an unparalleled account of how mentoring takes place in online fanfiction communities. Aragon and Davis's comprehensive theory of 'distributed mentoring' is uniquely well suited for understanding how teaching and learning takes place in networked fan communities. More important, however, is the potential that this theory offers for transforming how we think about and design formal writing experiences in order to facilitate social, intellectual, and personal growth.”

Rebecca Black, Associate Professor of Informatics, University of California, Irvine; author of Adolescents and Online Fan Fiction