The SCP Foundation’s role in the development of academic literacy and the promotion of reading and creative writing

Abstract

This article analyses the international creative writing project SCP Foundation as a constructive hyperfiction based on the creation of fictional scientific articles. The objective of this study is to specify the formative aspects of this literary practice and explore the implications for planning innovative educational activities in the classroom. To do this, a selection has been made based on the relevance principle - the 25 SCPs with the highest impact and the best scores - and a qualitative analysis has been performed employing thick description and textual analysis. The findings show that the SCP Foundation is an affinity space in which important literacy-based learning is developed. In addition, it is noteworthy that a highly heterogeneous formal-academic linguistic register is used in the selection of the topics, the resources employed, the complex hypertext structures and the multimodal elements. Furthermore, in this literary practice, information disorders such as fake news, data manipulation, research ethics and aspects related to literary reading, like urban legends and creative writing, generally converge. Therefore, these are unique texts that promote Media and Information Literacy in informal contexts as well as being works that have the educational potential to encourage reading.