The end of the semester often focuses on reflection, and Ali Ebrahimpourlighvani and Sam Arthur have taken shared activities that encourage students to put their design skills into practice while sharing about themselves and their experiences.
Ali’s activity, “My Life’s Two-Minute Snapshot,” gives students the opportunity to take the floor in mini oral single-slide presentations. As students present, Ali is able to get to know students and their design skills, building class climate and preparing for future learning.
As a part of a discussion of how memes can be used to satirize society, Sam challenged his students to make memes to satirize their experience in his class. Sam says, “It was interesting the issues they articulated with the memes. They are hilarious (even though I became a subject of their satire), and I enjoyed the activity.”
Below, you can find Ali and Sam’s activities as detailed lesson plans.
Ali Ebrahimpourlighvani: My Life’s Two-Minute Snapshot!
Description: In this activity, students have two minutes to share a snapshot of their lives. They can talk about their hobbies, favorite sports, personal experiences, successes, hardships, travel adventures, or their journey to university. The key is to present themselves as real individuals with unique stories. This activity works well for reflection and as an introduction to multimodality.
Objective: The purpose of this activity is to validate students’ social and emotional perspectives. It encourages them to express themselves authentically, regardless of any labels or stereotypes that might otherwise be prescribed to them. By sharing personal narratives, students connect with each other and build empathy. Furthermore, instructors will understand the needs of students and adapt lesson plans based on the students’ design and presentation skills.
-Takeaways:
Community Support: Forming a cohesive community
Motivation and Commitment: Fostering a positive learning environment.
Validation: Learning about each other’s lives, experiences, and interests.
Judgment-Free Zone: Expressing themselves without fear of judgment.
Friendship Building: Building strong friendships.
Respective collaboration: Actively listen, respect, and learn each other’s perspectives.
-Assessment Aspect: This activity allows you to evaluate students’ presentation skills, creativity, and ability to communicate effectively. It also provides insights into their design choices when sharing their life snapshots.
-My Own philosophy:
I felt that an important piece was missing in the class, and I was looking for something to reconcile with the needs of the students and the course. To create strong bonds between students and instructors, you don’t need to plan for different icebreakers. Constructing consistency in your class can build up strong bonds during the semester. There is culture, language, personal desire, and a whole bunch of things that you want to bring together, but if you don’t catch the core of the problem, none of these will work. For me, the solution was creating a small support community with strong roots in socio-emotional learning, and I came up with introducing “My Life’s Two-Minute Snapshot.”
Sam Arthur: Making Memes
Purpose
Memes are part of the visuals used in Everything’s an Argument, and they are very powerful yet simple and effective ways of communicating in this social media era. Also, recently, they have become arenas for satirizing sociocultural issues, and there is no better way to get students to be open and creative than to let them satirize the things around them.
Prompt
1) Use any meme generator to create a meme about your current mood or mind
2) Pick two of the options below and create a meme on them
I) Feeling reluctant to go to class
II) Having a terrible nightmare
III) Selling a cheap product
IV) Any fascinating idea you want to express
V) Miscommunication and its effects