Twelve Days of Giving Reason Three – We Support Teachers!
NANO Fiction’s mission to publish and promote flash fiction means that we also care a great deal about both expanding the critical discourse surrounding the genre and building interest in the form. We know that much of the interest in the flash form starts in the classroom, and we want to help students and teachers with lesson plans and essays on craft.
Three years ago, we began our State of Flash (in the classroom) series. Since that time, we’ve published over twenty essays online and in print, and this year, we’ve given away nearly 300 books for course materials to be used in classrooms of all levels, from elementary school to graduate fiction writing classrooms.
This commitment to supporting teachers and students stems from our abiding belief that the arts are an essential tool in education. Flash has a particular appeal to teachers, because the brevity of the form makes it more accessible to students than longer works. We’ve heard from teachers who use flash to engage students with low literacy skills, to challenge advanced writers to tackle the art of compression, and to train students enrolled in courses on literary editing. From Pennsylvania to Oregon, Wisconsin to Florida, students across the United States are reading flash fiction from our pages. We’re delighted that NANO Fiction has so many different applications in classrooms, and we’re proud to contribute to the form and to arts education efforts nationwide.