My Agency, Meme Style

I constantly tell my students not to disregard what is unfamiliar or what they don't understand. I enjoy quoting John Coltrane's wife who said something along the lines of, "not everything must be embraced with open arms." Some things are difficult to understand; other things seem of little consequence. To be a learner means to look at these things. To look again. And again. To resist the temptation to shrug and walk by.

And so it is with memes.

Before this week long dive into memes with #CLMOOC, I paid very little attention to this form of internet communication.  In general, they did nothing for me. I have come across some clever ones, but I was always turned off by the limited visual language: the baby holding up his fist, the tyrannosaurus rex, the line drawing of the deformed head. Ultimately I saw these like text messages with a picture. In many ways, I still feel this way.  I think what it comes down to is agency. Kevin Hodgson mentioned this in a Google+ post, and it really stuck with me. The memes that I am drawn to most are the ones where I see the most agency being employed by the creator.

Having just led a workshop on creating student agency in the classroom, this word was already on my mind. In that workshop, we brainstormed what agency truly meant. Here's a part of the list we made --->>

"Having a story," "Control," "Joy": these are so crucial to the creative process. And there can be no creative process without autonomy for the creator. As I worked on my own memes, I found myself drifting into a "flow" state. Probably not as deeply as what Csiksentmihalyi describes in his work. But present were the deep focus and mindfulness. As I meticulously cut out figures in Pixlr Editor, I could feel my breathing change and eyes narrow.

For me, the meaningfulness of the exercise did not come from inserting a phrase into a generator that limited the visual options of my message. With a meme, in fact, the visual structure is crucial. As far as digital writing is concerned, memes are a great example of how the interplay of text and image produce a message. Going back to the list, I did not want to cede control of half of my work.  Of course, I could upload my own image into a meme generator, but there was still a limitation on how it could look.


Perhaps I'm missing the point. Maybe the great thing about memes is that they do have this limited visual vocabulary out of which hundreds of thousands of statements are made. I don't know. I'll need to consider this further.

After a week of experimenting, however, what I do know is this: given the time to play and experiment with tools and choices, I want to know that the meme I create and the story I tell has as much of me in it as possible.

How To Ignore A List

At the suggestion of #clmooc, I offer a reflection on the first week of making in list form. Here's what I had planned on doing this past Saturday:

First

De-moss the brick patio.

Second

Finish mulching the side plot.

Third

Flagstone path maintenance: Fill in material that has washed away.

Fourth

Weed!

So how much of that did I accomplish? None. Why? Because I started to work on a "How To" video instead:

I thought I would take an hour to look over the footage my son helped me shoot the day before and start to piece a video together in YouTube Editor. Sure enough, three hours later, suddenly I realized. . that three hours had passed, and I was still working on the video. While those other tasks are important, and, each in their own way, enjoyable (even the weeding), I could not stop editing until the project was done. As my attention and focus became deeper and deeper, it shot to the top of the list.  It became the most meaningful and relevant challenge for me on that Saturday morning. 

Now, here comes the educational tie-in: I just presented at the Midwest Chromebook Institute. The thrust of the workshop I led was the need to establish a classroom culture based upon student agency and meaningful learning experiences. With more and more schools going 1:1, including my own, I suggested that teachers early on challenge students with quick creative challenges aimed at having students reflect on and create multimedia statements about themselves.

The hope is that these kind of projects immediately introduce to the students a few critical ideas:

1. They will use their devices to create,
2. They will consider what is meaningful to them,
3. They will share their work.

Making my video reinforced what happens when relevant making enters the picture. We want to continue to explore, shape, craft, and, eventually, get feedback in order to continue the iterative process. The trick is to carve out time for this work in the classroom.

It was a Saturday well spent.

Now it's time to get the mulch.