Happy to oblige. In my introductory class to discourse analysis I wanted the students to understand how, within a given cultural form, the grammar of a text dictates what is possible to express. It was important that students understood how framing encouraged certain statements whilst making others unsayable was political because it established an agenda which seemed natural when the text was taken on its own terms.
This was in 2020 when the Twitter tl was mostly just people riffing on Swole Doge vs Cheems which was perfect for two reasons. Firstly, my students would be very familiar with it, and secondly, it had a very rigid grammatical structure that expressed a very overt political position.
So...
To begin with I got my students to all pick their favourite examples of the meme and post them in the class Discord. Then I got the class to look over all the examples, break down all the most common elements of the meme and describe them which led to observations like:
- Always begins by referencing a thing
- Two dates one past and one present
- Swole doge is associated with the past and is big strong and happy
- Cheems is associated with the present and is small, weak and sad
Once we had broken down the elements I asked the students to look at the relationship between all these elements and imagine that these memes were answers to a common question. I then left the students to discuss what they thought the common question that linked all these answers could be. They came up with something like:
How is the present different to the past?
After we had the question, I noted that even though the details of the answers are always different there is a common sentiment running through all the examples which expresses a specific opinion about the relationship between the past and the present. I asked students to identify this common sentiment and they came up with something like:
The past was really strong and impressive and the present is weak and sad.
Once we had this I got the students discussing how such an opinion intersected with political frameworks. This led to a long debate about how the meme made trad conservatism seem natural and logical and actively undermined the idea of present day social progress as something which makes us weak and sad.
Hey presto my first years had just conducted a discourse frame analysis without even realising it!!!
From here we could have fun with it so in class I got the students thinking up statements which were unsayable by the Swole Doge vs Cheems discourse frame and then I asked them to do whatever it took to corrupt the template so they could force it to say these things it wasn't supposed to. Students then presented their corrupted meme subversions and we had a long and interesting chat about what you needed to do to the grammar of the original to make it say things it didn't want to.
For homework students had to pick a meme template then liked, collect a bunch of examples and conduct their own discourse frame analysis to present at the beginning of our next workshop.
I am with you there, learning is a totally personal experience, if it is a revelation for the individual it is absolutely valuable knowledge!!
This all sounds incredible, I am feeling super inspired reading this!! I what ways did you feel like this didn't work? It sounds like it was not jut incredibly successful as a group but productive to boot. You generated some really important theory concepts and interesting experiments.