Sharing Meme Final Projects

It's important to keep promises. When I was at IMLRS6, I promised the attendees at my table talk that I would share with them my slide deck and the final products created by my Grade 6 social studies students. 

The major project for social studies in the second term was to create a meme based on an issue related to Canada's Interactions with the Global Community. I was a little worried that I was expecting too much of my middle school learners; when I researched meme use in education, all the examples came from classes at university, college, or high school. Would they be able to understand the nuances and different levels of meaning to convey a sophisticated global issue using a meme format?

Here are the results:

To elaborate a little bit - I had fifteen students in the class, as they were the Grade 6 students in a combined Grade 6-7 class. (Yes, I said 6-7. Trust me, we've been through the reaction a lot.)  Two of the students did not complete or submit a meme. Don't worry; it didn't mean that they failed the course. I was pretty impressed with how they were able to use memes to communicate their ideas. The Drake meme was used twice but for different issues. The students tackled some challenging topics, from AI, COVID, immigration, child labour, climate change, tariffs and trade relationships between countries. 

The students really deserve a lot a praise for their work. Social studies lessons were disrupted quite a bit in April and May because of EQAO preparation, field trips, and other barriers. Yet, they completed the assignment and actually seemed to care about having social studies class. (In June, I "gave away" some of my social studies periods so that my fellow teacher could squeeze in the fifth and final unit of science before the end of the school year.) 

I think I did a better job using memes as part of this social studies unit than I did in the past. It was helpful to spend time going over how memes operate, as well as co-creating the single-point rubric with the success criteria and modelling how the students could approach the work. (They could either select a meme and then search for a global issue that fit it, or they could select a global issue and then locate a meme that matched the message about the issue.) If I had to do this project again, I would work in some time for students to view everyone else's memes and share feedback.