Case studies
Improving English pedagogy through use of ICT - Poetry memes
Background Multimodal texts are now common on the Internet and pupils are used to texts that use more than one method of communication. All over the web there are short films, animations and combinations of words, sounds and images that convey ideas.
A group of teachers and their consultant decided to use some of these new texts to enliven the teaching of poetry for GCSE. They researched examples of powerful multimodal texts and discovered a library of them on the Internet. The authors referred to them as ‘memes’, naming them after the term invented by Professor Richard Dawkins to describe a theoretical unit of cultural information that can be passed from person to person, eventually changing the way we think.
The teachers developed this approach to enable pupils to become more creative in their response to poetry. They believe that the process of transferring ideas from one medium into another encourages pupils to be more analytical and, by linking the poems with the web, it can also to make them more aware that poetry reflects ideas that are current and alive.
