ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights a digital literacy unit Amber, a ninth-grade teacher, created when schooling switched to online learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic, recognizing the impact social distancing, misinformation, and the collective power digital texts have on high school students. Moreover, this chapter focuses on using memes for rhetorical analysis, thus, challenging the global interference COVID-19 had on her teaching and her students’ learning. The chapter begins by discussing critical and multiliteracies as the guiding framework and the affordances memes have in the classroom. Next, it provides a description of the Meme Museum assignment highlighting common core standards applied in the unit. Then, it showcases students’ work housed in a collaborative Google Slides repository, including successful, minimal effort, and self-created meme examples. It also critically analyzes students’ exploration of their meme choices and responses to them. The chapter ends with future suggestions to improve the Meme Museum and ways to include it in other subject areas.
