Can We Teach Memes to Engage Students?

Ronan Gruenbaum, Global Director of Undergraduate Learning & Development at Hult International Business School

Ronan Gruenbaum, Global Director of Undergraduate Learning & Development at Hult International Business School

Higher educational institutions around the world, as I have heard at different conferences and read through different online and offline publications, have all noticed a difference in behaviours and attitudes from their latest cohorts of students. It is as if the pandemic had an unintended side-effect of changing the behaviours of young adults such that their attention spans were reduced and their willingness to show respect (or identify what that might be) has been curtailed.

This shouldn't come as a surprise, of course. With nothing to do for months on end at crucial developmental stages of their lives, with social interaction locked down to online chats and sharing memes, our young people have accepted this as normal. We can tell our children and our students that they shouldn't look at their screens, but which of us doesn't sneak a peak at emails or Teams messages on our daily commute, perhaps checking our personal interests around the breakfast table (be it the news, sport, recipes or new hacks on how to clean vegetables and stains with bicarbonate soda - or was that one just me?). In the 70s and 80s, many of us were told that we were watching too much TV and that it would turn our eyes square. Our students' future children might be harangued for plugging their brains into their virtual environment to go out for the night rather than looking at the screen of their handheld devices.

What goes around comes around.

But what is apparent is that we have a choice with our students who move away from home to join undergraduate institutions and learn what it is to be a young, independent adult. We can impose strict rules with stricter sanctions to ensure they behave in certain ways - always my solution of choice in the short term. Or we can think about how to engage those students in new ways, cognizant of the expectations they have brought with them from a lockdown in their bedrooms at home. If attention spans are shorter, should we change activities and topics more often? If students are using handheld devices in class (and not answering polls and quizzes in class), what can we, as educators, do to make the classroom experience, the educational experience, more interesting? This isn't about professors learning the latest Tik-Tok dance and performing it while explaining the elements of doing a Net Present Value calculation, although I would love someone to try that and see if students recall it better. It's not about gamifying everything where we use positive reinforcement (through points, grades, sweets or similar) to reward students who are mirroring what we consider good behaviour.

"As educators, we should accept that perhaps we need to change a little, not just our style of teaching and our choice of activities in the classroom, but also in how we deal with wandering attentions."

But the truth, no doubt, lies somewhere in the middle of all these extremes, using different techniques to engage our students and not assuming that simply by the mere fact that they have decided to come to our institution and sit in our class, that we can expect them to give 100 percent of their attention. That would be nice, but it's not realistic. No instructor goes into teaching to entertain, but no student actually wants to be talked at for hours. And, yes, to a certain extent, they want to be entertained.

So we, as educators, should accept that perhaps we need to change a little, not just our style of teaching and our choice of activities in the classroom, but also in how we deal with wandering attentions. Are we able to take the feedback and realise, in the moment, that we are losing our audience? Are we able, in such circumstances, to pivot and adopt a different teaching style, to switch topics, to get students up and being active in the room?

To a certain extent, perhaps, we need to copy the experience of scrolling through memes. Go from one thing to another, to another, and yet another, which is, after all, what good pedagogists have been doing in the classroom for decades.