[Original post Jan. 23, 2019, updated (postscript added) Jan. 30, 2019]
When I was teaching a course in Contemporary Political Theory a few years ago, I wrote a few posts about getting students to translate theoretical work or abstract concepts into more practically accessible registers (see here, here, here, and here). I did something similar in the Politics & Mass Media course today.
Today was the last class in the introductory section on “theories” (or “lenses”) of mass media. We covered four main theories, spending one class each on Marshall McLuhan (“The Medium is the Message”), Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky (the “propaganda model”), and Stuart Hall (“Encoding, Decoding”). Between Herman & Chomsky and Hall, we took a bit of a break from theory to talk about contemporary journalism in Canada, including reading Selena Ross’s Feb. 2018 article about “news poverty” (lack of local journalism) in Thunder Bay, ON. Today we spent half of the class talking about “hegemony,” based on reading a chapter from Todd Gitlin’s book about media and the 1960s New Left, The Whole World is Watching.
For the second half of the class I asked students to work in groups to create memes that explained or illustrated the four media theories we had read and discussed. Here are some samples of their work:
Marshall McLuhan
Herman & Chomsky
Stuart Hall
Todd Gitlin
Miscellaneous?
Postscript:
A few hours after initially posting the above, I was on Twitter and saw and retweeted the following:
See here if you want to read the whole thread. I then realized that my post also published content produced by others (students), and I hadn’t asked for their permission to do so. So I did, and gave them the option for their work to be removed from the post (no questions asked). As I told them, my reason for posting things like this is to (hopefully) spark some ideas and conversations about pedagogy. I’m not making money off of it, but if you are seeing ads around the post, then WordPress is.
I’m not sure what to do about the earlier posts that have similar student-generated content. Those students have now graduated, I don’t have contact information for most of them, and in most cases it would be difficult if not impossible at this point for me to connect individual students to particular images. Students are never individually identified in these posts because learning requires being willing to take risks and make mistakes, and that is less likely to happen if they think their mistakes will follow them outside of the classroom.
BTW in the end none of the students in this year’s class asked for their memes to be removed.
andrewbiro 