Hopefully, you all have heard of lolcats -- if not, let me direct you to here
Recently, I was thinking about the "messages" these sorts of image send, and thought they might be a viable method to teach rhetoric -- the pictures do indeed try to "sell" things through their appeals, which are usually at least try to be humorous (pathos-like, if you will).
I created an assignment that involves students creating their own lolcat image -- for this particular iteration, any portion of the ICHC could be leveraged, and that included the "Pundit Kitchen" portion, which applies the same concept of lolcats/ICHC with "political" images.
The creation of the image isn't the main exercise; rather, the thought involved in the process (the actual selection of the image to the captioning) was. The main goal was to get students thinking about the why's -- why do they pick a particular image, what step do they take to caption it, and how accurate it is in "selling" their point of view.
The results were pretty interesting, especially whether such images could be used as a rhetoric tool. A concern of some people were that the images would just be seen as humorous/lacking educational value, a concern echoed by those who feel teaching in conjunction with new media will only dilute the process. However, some people found this humor to be a major selling point -- each image does indeed try to "persuade" the viewer by its overall cleverness, the total package of the right image and the right quote. Some responses simply think it depends -- a well-crafted image could be very much persuasive versus a hastily created image. A caveat in one response is that seeing too many of these images may increase the "immunity" one has to the images -- the more one sees the "same," the more likely they are to establish a fixed way of reading and thus nothing new may be uncovered.
Overall, I think teaching with lolcats could be awesome as long as the direction is known -- lolcats would be especially helpful in describing the emotions of an article -- I don't think these can necessarily fully represent ethos (while logos may be sufficiently shown, depending), but these types of images can get viewers in the right frame of mind to see what kind of moves an author makes in order to hook a reader in emotionally. What is also cool about using lolcats as a tool is that it can be used to give the students more responsibility into classroom content -- you can have each person create (anonymously) a lolcat image and submit it -- from there, a few can be selected and given to the class to get them to investigate how well each image works.
A post is forthcoming with specific types of questions/ways to lead such an activity.
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2 comments:
What is so academic about taking internet trends and applying them to the classroom?
It's the fact of taking discourse that may be more familiar with a student, a sort of "comfort," and leverage it to teach them something associate with the mainstream discourse.
While these may be simple "fads," if you catch them at the right moment, the student is already aware and able to "read" the text, so a lot more can be gained by teaching using this versus forcing a foreign concept onto them with an even foreigner (not the band) method.
Think of the debates circa early 1990 concerning the use of AAVE/Ebonics in California (I think, Oakland) classrooms -- its what the students knew -- however, it was deemed too alternative or faddish to warrant serious consideration. The point wasn't to necessarily corrupt the English language, but to meet the students where they were and leverage their existing code for good.
It's about maintaining some sort of controlled sense of academics, but allowing those traditionally unresponsive/indifferent to such things an entry way to participate if they want. Think of these fads as "new" mnemonic devises -- I can't for the life of me remember my circle of fifths without knowing that Fat Cows Get Down and Even Boogie.
I could see how they could be distracting/unproductive (and those against them point to the very nature that these things are not academic/seen simply as entertainment), but leveraged properly they really can open doors.
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