I don't think the relevance is all that dubious: classic ed theory from the 60s come up, with some regularity, in conversations about peer-educational communities and intellectual memecultures. Among the books that I referenced whilst setting up our first meme studies community in 2015 was Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969); the community was then called "Collectivized Memetics". I've since moved away from most of the radically egalitarian educational theories when it comes to community design, because they usually weren't effective (let alone efficient) in most scenarios.
How did you gauge whether a meme was working or not, especially when it comes to helping students "think more critically about the politics of memes and internet culture"? I think it's safe enough to assume that nuance and deconstruction generally lead to more self-aware and critical understandings; but the major memetic phenomena of the past decade have all come from deconstructive methodologies being repurposed for uncritical ends.
Chess & Shaw put it excellently when they point out that GamerGate "bears resemblance to "counterknowledge", which acts "as a means for oppressed people to articulate fears that stem from cycles of persecution":
https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2014.999917
In his thesis, @fern traces back the cultural lineage of leftist Twitch streamers back to right-wing radio talk shows, going through online gaming and liberal infotainment along the way. It makes me wonder whether classrooms form similar "communicative circuits" which the streamer and the chat (or GamerGaters and games journalism) seem to have formed, within their respective metagames.