This meme-making assignment is a great way to teach genre and encourage students to get creative to understand terms in a challenging reading.

Before giving the assignment, students should have background knowledge in what “genre” means. See Dirk’s “Navigating Genre,” an accessible read that introduces students to the concept of genre.

Then, students can engage in a short discussion to collectively define the genre of a “meme” before starting the activity.

Finally, students can be put into groups to create memes that define terms in a reading.  For example, the example assignment below asks students to create a meme to describe terms from Gee’s “What is Literacy?”

Here is an example meme class activity prompt:

Find a meme app of your choosing (meme generator, meme maker). Use it to generate a meme that concisely explains what Gee means when he uses the following term: Discourse (capital D) 

Save your meme as a .jpg file and upload it to the Discussion Board topic “Language Innovation Term MEMES”