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"Fantasy feeds a hunger we didn't know we had. "
-Jane Langten (1973)
Felix, Lucas, Chesley, and Lenaye sit in a tight circle in the classroom library of Room 306. Lenaye can barely contain her excitement. She wiggles as she clutches her book to her chest, waiting to announce her discovery to her club. "But listen, you know how we've been arguing about what the quest is? Well, I was thinking that maybe the quest doesn't have to stay the same through the whole book. Maybe quests can change," she says. Her fellow club members sit silently while they think about this new possibility.
Across the hall in room 305, julienne, Chris, Rosie, and Gabe settle in a secluded spot for one of their famous debates. Every day for a week they have met to discuss the nature of evil. "Is a villain really evil? I know what Rosie is saying, but just because he wants different things from our hero, is he really evil?" asks ju lienne.
"Yeah," agrees Gabe. "After all, don't villains think they are doing the right thing? I mean, if they didn't think they were doing the right thing for at least them, then why would they be doing it?"
Just as Lucy pushed past fur coats hanging in a dark wardrobe and stumbled out of her world into Narnia, our students leave the predictable world they know and enter into a world of magic when they read and study fantasy fiction. At the heart of a genre study in fantasy is the collision of students' notions of the world around them with their inherent fascination for al) things magical. Jane Yolen (1997) wrote, "As a child I had imaginary playmates, spoke to my dolls and heard them answer, played Knights of the Round Table on a pile of rocks in Central Park. I could easily believe six impossible things before breakfast" (p. xi). In this place where the fantastical blends with reality in our students' lives, powerful teaching opportunities await.
AN OFTEN-OVERLOOKED GENRE
At first we thought of fantasy as a fun, albeit somewhat shallow, genre. We thought that it lacked the seriousness and depth of more respected genres such as memoir and historical fiction. However, when we had...