By Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel
I’m sure you have done this before or seen it in presentations: That funny meme on a slide to make it more engaging. My first thought would go to seductive details and how adding irrelevant, but funny details can hinder learning. We have blogged and talked about this before (here and here). However, I recently came across an article that looked at using content-relevant memes as a teaching tool (1). Hear me out because this is interesting. The authors essentially outline the benefits of memes that – when used thoughtfully – can be connected to strategies such as dual coding, concrete examples, and elaboration.
Dual coding: When using content-relevant memes, students are provided with visual and verbal content that is meaningfully connected to each other. A meme only works when the words and the image are linked to each other to create sense. This strengthens the comprehension in students.
Concrete examples: Memes are concrete examples of more abstract and complicated ideas or concepts. As such they help to extract the underlying ideas by transforming them into a more concrete format. This can support students’ understanding of the material.
Elaboration: To use Bloom’s taxonomy, memes invite elaboration in form of analysis and synthesis of the material in students. To understand, explain, or create a meme students will need to make connections between their knowledge and observations in the real world. They also need to be able to explain concepts or ideas in their own words and break down bigger ideas into their essential components. All these processes invite elaboration processes which are beneficial for learning.
The authors outline two ways on how memes can be used in the classroom as a teaching tool: Students explain memes and students create memes.
Explaining memes: For this approach, students are either provided with content-relevant memes or asked to source existing memes themselves and then explain how the meme connects to the learned content in their own words. This can be done as a peer activity or as a writing activity.
Creating memes: For this approach, students are asked to create their own memes by finding a picture and coming up with a caption that captures an essential idea of something that was taught in class. Again, this can be done in different ways, e.g., as an individual task or group task.
The authors suggest some ways on how a meme activity can be made into a graded, summative assignment. Personally, I do not think it works well as a stand-alone summative assignment. However, they suggest using it as part of a bigger assignment. For example, it could be part of an essay assignment for which students are asked to create and include a meme that captures the core of the essay topic. Meme activities will work well as formative assignments to be done during class or as non-graded homework assignments.
