Context
Tommy Tester often dons disguises. However, they are not of the fake nose and wig type; rather, he adapts to his surroundings by changing his personality in order to travel and survive beyond his Harlem neighborhood. In this activity, students explore and play with each disguise, identifying elements of the disguises as well as analyzing the disguises’ functions.
Learning Objectives
Student will:
Rationale
Students will create starter pack memes for each disguise. A starter pack meme is a collection of photos that express the essential items a person needs to be a member of a specific group. Memes are a vital part of what Henry Jenkins describes as a participatory culture, which is a culture “where there are relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, [and] where there is strong support for creating and sharing what you create with others” (Jenkins, 2007). Effective engagement in today’s participatory culture require students to develop new literacy skills. Play, or “the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving” (Marsland, 2017), is one such skill. Another skill is appropriation, which is “the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content” (Marsland, 2017). Creating, analyzing, and sharing memes develops a student’s sense of play and appropriation, further improving their participatory culture literacy skills.
The lesson itself is designed to maximize a student’s cognitive load by decreasing extraneous load and keeping germane load high. I’ve decreased extraneous load in two ways: I’ve provided an example of a starter pack meme, and I’ve made a screencast in which I explain how I created the meme. The model meme follows the design guideline of the worked example principle; the screencast capitalizes on the design guideline of the modality principle (Van Merriënboer & Sweller, 2010). With extraneous load decreased, students are better able to manage their intrinsic load while increasing their germane load. This latter goal is targeted through the very nature of the assignment. Almost all my students regularly discuss and even produce memes in and out of class. The activity thus takes advantage of their prior knowledge, extending that knowledge in a novel way that keeps germane load high as they apply that prior expertise in a new context.
References
Jenkins, H. (2007, June 25). What Wikipedia can teach us about the new media literacies (part one) [Web log post]. Retrieved from: http://henryjenkins.org/2007/06/what_wikipedia_can_teach_us_ab.html
Marsland, B. Digging into the social and affective aspects of new media [D2L page]. Retrieved from https://d2l.msu.edu/d2l/le/content/585444/viewContent/5298589/View
Van Merriënboer, J. J. G., & Sweller, J. (2010), Cognitive load theory in health professional education: Design principles and strategies. Medical Education, 44(1), 85–93. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2923.2009.03498.x