When 5th grade language arts teacher Marissa King shows her students an Instagram post with an image of a horribly askew haircut or a person with a broken umbrella being drenched in a deluge, she isn't just interested in snagging their attention. Sure, the kids might laugh, she says, but the combinations of images and captions also provide fertile ground for analysis. "We're trying to discover why writers make rhetorical or grammatical moves through examining Instagram posts."
Many educators use social media in the classroom for engaging lesson hooks or one-off activities, but teachers like King, a faculty member at Kendall Whittier Elementary School in Tulsa, Oklahoma, are pioneering methods to help young people think critically about the steady flow of content they receive on their devices.
Although some of what is shared on social media is trivial, students also consume content that addresses complex issues, affecting their perception and understanding in both positive and negative ways. "These [social media] are valid texts, and they are operating in the world and are a crucial part of contemporary literacy," says Stony Brook University professor Ken Lindblom, who coauthored Continuing the Journey: Becoming a Better Teacher of Literature and Informational Texts (NCTE, 2017). "If we're not studying social media with our students, we are abdicating our responsibility as literacy educators."
Memes and the Scientific Method
Internet memes combine images and words to efficiently spread a wide range of ideas, from cultural knowledge to humor to political commentary to celebrity news. Shared or mimicked across social media platforms, memes are often much more complex than sometimes meets the eye, says Lindblom. "They can be multilayered in ways that traditional texts are not," he adds, "as they have figurative layers that draw on core and canonical knowledge, pop culture, and deal with color and image."
In a first-year college course titled The Language of Social Justice, Lindblom and his students investigate issues surrounding race, gender, sexuality, and poverty, among other topics. They spend time examining the way memes can convey meaning about these issues while also adapting the scientific method for genre analysis. "First, we look at examples of social justice memes together, and students examine common conventions," Lindblom says.
During this process, Lindblom and his students scrutinize memes featuring Bill Lumbergh, a character from the cult classic movie Office Space. In the movie, Lumbergh often asks his colleagues to complete arduous or impossible tasks, accentuating his request with the monotone delivery of "that'd be great."
His students wrote down their observations about a set of Lumbergh memes, noticing the following consistencies: the background image was always the same, the "that'd be great" phrase was present, the first word of the mimicking statement was always "if," and the tone was usually humorous and paired with a seemingly impossible task. Search "that would be great" at knowyourmeme.com for examples.
Next, Lindblom challenged his students to make a claim about how effective memes function, then test their hypothesis by looking at additional examples to see if their observations hold true. In the case of the Lumbergh memes, the class discovered that many of the memes were not asking for the impossible, "but rather a contemptuous, sarcastically stated kind of thing," Lindblom notes. "We had to open up our hypothesis to include that kind of tone." Lindblom says analyzing this meme by putting it through a variation of the scientific method (gathering observations, raising questions, forming a hypothesis that can be tested, and then drawing conclusions from analysis) elicited plenty of discussion about the effect of using humor, sarcasm, and cultural icons to take on weighty subjects like racial tension and inequity.
Quixote and the Thirst Trap
Like Lindblom, King practices such co-investigations with her language arts students as a means of promoting deeper analysis of social media content. "So often, we're leading students to a conclusion, but why not leverage their knowledge of social media and model an inquisitive spirit that we often want them to have?" King asks. "My discussions and questions with students are so much better when I'm pushing to understand things myself."
King uses Instagram to support critical reading and writing skills embedded in Oklahoma's language arts standards by discussing the interplay between images and words. For example, her class recently examined the phrase "thirst trap," popularized by rapper Cardi B, in order to develop students' ability to describe an author's stated or implied purpose for creating a text (in this case, an Instagram post). A thirst trap, according to Merriam-Webster, "is often a photo used to entice a response, usually in the form of praise, compliments, or desire."
Through close reading and discussion of Instagram posts tagged #thirsttrap (for example, a person flexing in a gym selfie), students start to see behind the scenes of author-reader relationships, and how texts (including social media images) are designed to elicit a particular response from readers or viewers. Social media hashtags add a meta layer by calling out this author intent in a way that lets readers know the author is on the joke. Building these analysis skills, King says, helps students transition to formal texts.
When her 5th graders read about Don Quixote's first encounter with his lady love Dulcinea in Cervantes' 17th century novel, for example, they have difficulty with the archaic language, King explains. But they come to see similarities between Quixote's braggadocios tendencies and a #thirsttrap Instagram post. "They might note that Don Quixote seems to self-aggrandize: Wouldn't his lady love already know what a great knight he is without him going on about it? The context is oh-so-different from social media, but the critical reading skills are similar," King says. "Cervantes and #thirsttrap posters/commenters are both poking fun at unnecessary, somewhat delusional self-importance."
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YouTube Clips and Comparative Analysis
If educators are uncomfortable or unfamiliar with using social media content like memes or Instagram posts to practice critical analysis skills, YouTube's vast—and ever-growing—repository of videos is ripe for critical discussion. Julie York, a media and computer science teacher at South Portland High School in Maine, has her students compare thematic or topical videos.
In her media literacy course, students recently explored the intersection of comedy and free speech and debated where one should draw the line regarding censorship. "We talked about what students could find on YouTube that got close to or crosses the line [of acceptability]," York says. "We put samples up, all comedy, and the videos were theoretically supposed to be funny." Like having students analyze an author's purpose in various texts, York says it's important for educators to treat videos circulating on social media with the same close reading of content, delivery, intent, and effect.
First, they discussed the creator or source of each video, and any background knowledge they had on this person or group. Second, they unpacked the message and intent of each video. In addition, York and her students discussed how music and editing affect viewer understanding. This type of analysis, York contends, can help young people think productively about the content they consume—and create.
Evolving and Necessary Opportunities
There's little doubt that social media will continue to influence and engage young people. As Lindblom, King, and York attest, it's perfectly OK—and exciting—to embrace uncertainty and co-explore these texts with students. Leveraging social media by analyzing its content not only helps students transfer critical academic skills, but also helps them engage in productive discourse about society's most challenging issues.
