The Day in the Life of a Secret Agent: Bernie, his mittens, and some memes: Making learning relevant

Bernie Sanders and his mittens have taken over our live feeds on various social media platforms, and the global audience following this meme movement is left wondering where he will turn up next. I posed this question to students, and I immediately had a class full of engaged learners ready to tackle this challenge. After a quick Google search we had a variety of Bernie memes to discuss, thinking of design choices made by the creators.

I shared a picture of Bernie Sanders, sitting in the chair and wearing his mittens made by a fellow educator, sorority sister, and UVM classmate of mine. Students were also given a Google Drawing canvas to work on. They were tasked with creating their own Bernie Sanders meme to share with the class. The students were going to share stories of Bernie Sanders with each other, based on the image they created. Their classmates could ask questions about their stories too!

Students then set to work. Soon questions began popping up. They wanted to know how to remove Bernie’s background in the image I had shared and how to reorder images in a Google Drawing. Their inquiries drove the digital skills being taught. Students were introduced to remove.bg and ordering images. I heard laughter as students cleverly chose backgrounds. We spent some time as a class sharing our image creations, asking questions, and growing as community of learners. Each student wanted to share his/her/their meme with a global audience and be part of this Bernie Sanders movement.

Engaging students in storytelling and listening to their ideas reminded me we need to be designing lessons that are relevant to students. Some of the best teaching can happen in the moment! We also need to allow our students’ questions to drive the learning. Designing learning experiences that students will remember for a lifetime should be our end goal. My students might never remember the arduous hours we have put in to learn how divide, but I am sure they will remember creating these memes and the stories behind some of them.

Bernie came to visit us in our class Google Meet. This meme created also showed student's understanding of data privacy as we blocked out the Meet code, link, and names.