Description/Setup
In the spring semester of 2019, I taught an Honors section of a general education course entitled Survey of Biblical Literature. In my initial planning for the course, I knew I wanted to experiment with three things: 1) I wanted to think creatively about how students could demonstrate a growing sense of “biblical literacy”—that is, an awareness not just of the content of each book of the Bible, but a broader awareness of each individual writing as a distinct literary unit with its own particular rhetorical goals—2) I wanted to encourage collaborative work that wouldn’t feel like the ominous “group work” that every high achieving student dreads, and 3) I wanted to include students in the course design process by empowering them to design their own assignment. It is the intersection of these three desires that ultimately produced an assignment we called “The Meme Bible.”
On the first day of class, when we went over the syllabus to discuss course requirements, I showed students a blank spot on the assignments page that was simply labeled “Collaborative Project” and assigned a certain percentage of the overall grade. After explaining my reasoning behind this amorphous project (the three things described above), I invited the students to brainstorm ideas with me about what that project might look like. Students were initially reluctant to make suggestions—after all, this class was primarily comprised of first-years—but after I got the conversation started with a couple of prepared suggestions of my own, they quickly jumped on board and let their creativity flow. After ten or so minutes of brainstorming, we had five or six solid suggestions for a collaborative project, any of which would have met my initial goals. Then I gave the students until the next class period (three days) to think it over. At our second class meeting, I reminded the students of the options by writing them on the board, and then we voted. The near-unanimous choice was the “Meme Bible,” in which the students would split up all the books of the Bible among themselves and create a meme for each book.
The second order of business was to hammer out assignment details. Again, I wanted to encourage student ownership over the assignment (and thus over the course material), so I asked them to come up with the list of requirements. Collectively the students drafted the following three parameters for the assignment:
1) The “caption” on the meme needs to be original (don’t just take something from the internet)
2) Options for what the meme should represent:
-communicate something about the overall theme/content of the book
-represent a reaction to the book
-depict a particular scene/verse from the book
3) Each meme should be accompanied by a brief explanation from the student who created it (explain your thought process behind creating it in 1-2 sentences)
The students were also responsible for coming up with the best means of collaboration/delivery. Ultimately, they chose to create the project in two installments as a shared Google Slides presentation: The Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, which corresponded with the first half of the semester and was submitted before midterm week, and The New Testament, which corresponded with the second half of the semester and was submitted before finals week.
Finally, we needed to discuss evaluation. I told the students that I would take their suggested parameters for the assignment and convert them into a rubric, which I would then give to them to grade their own project. The rubric included a category for assessing the overall quality of the project and a separate category for assessing their own contributions. I distributed this rubric to the students after each installment was submitted, so the assignment was assessed twice over the course of the semester (50 points each time for a total of 100).
I told the students that the project needed to be totally student-driven, which meant that they were responsible for splitting up the books of the Bible on their own and communicating with each other to complete the assignment. The students took the initiative to randomly draw for books of the Bible and then recorded the results in a shared Google Sheets document. Then, they created a shared Google Slides presentation and shared it with each other so they could begin creating their memes.[1]
Examples of Submitted Work
Overall, I was very pleased with the quality of the submissions I received. Below are a few examples of the students’ work (all with permission granted by the students). I have also included their descriptions that accompanied the meme.
First, one student noted that all of the content in Deuteronomy sounded familiar:
“Before entering into the Promised Land, Moses chooses to retell all of God’s Laws. He does this to remind the Israelites of who they are, where they came from, and the relationship that they have with God.”
Another student picked up on the dramatic moment in the book of Job when God finally responds:
“After losing his livestock, house, and family, Job finally complains to God. However, he soon realizes that this was a horrible decision, because God easily puts him in his place.”
Another student noted the seemingly limitless options for assigning a meme to the Song of Songs:
“Song of Solomon is a song between a bride, groom, and others expressing…. Excitement…. For their wedding night. It is an Erotic poetry book using many metaphors to express the affection between lovers and to show the beauty of physical, spiritual, and emotional attraction. The memes for this book are endless.”
Moving on to the New Testament, one student tries to work out Paul’s difficult argument about the Law in Romans:
“The book of Romans is a theological argument that discusses salvation being attained through faith in Jesus Christ. One theme that is made is salvation through faith versus through works and the adherence to the law. But if love is the fulfillment of the law as said in Romans 13:10, then how does the law bring about wrath as said in Romans 4:15?”
Likewise, another student tried to summarize Paul’s reaction to those “foolish Galatians”:
“In Galatians, Paul writes a response letter to the Churches in Galatia, frustrated by the fact that they are falling away from Paul's preaching. The people believe that they are only saved by works of the law, and perplexed, Paul adamantly states that it is by the grace of Christ, not the law that we are saved, therefore works of the law are meaningless to Christ who died for us.”
And just for fun, one student couldn’t help but submit a meta-meme about the whole assignment:
Assessment
Overall, I was pleased with the quality of the results. Some descriptions were more in-depth than others. The submitted results showed creativity and real engagement with the content of each book. As mentioned above, I allowed the students to assess their own work, both as a whole project and their own submissions. Here is an image of the rubric I gave them for self-assessment:
To my surprise, the students were actually quite critical of their own work. In order to assign a single grade to all the students, I added all the scores they assigned in their self-evaluations and then took the average. For the whole project, the average self-assigned grade was an 87 (B+ on our scale). I was pleased that the students did not see this as an opportunity to simply assign themselves an A on an assignment that they knew counted toward their total grade in the class.
Looking back over the submitted assignment and my initial goals, I was very happy with the results. Whenever I get the chance to try this assignment again, I will likely try to do a little more training at the beginning of making memes using some examples of my own creation that we can discuss together in class.
James E. Walters is Assistant Professor of Religion at Rochester College (Rochester Hills, MI)
[1] Note: I also quickly walked them through an example for how to make a meme by showing them a meme generator website: https://imgflip.com/memegenerator. While it is safe to assume that most students will be fluent in reading and interpreting memes, it’s not necessarily a safe assumption that they all know how to make one.