Memes are cultural units, or ideological discourses, that circulate throughout society, spreading and remixing ideas about who we are and how we behave; internet memes are digitally-mediated viral media, usually a combination of text and image, that circulate particular discourses about social issues, groups of people, politics, etc. (Wiggins, 2019). Internet memes have been shown to demonstrate shared cultural identity (Mortensen & Neumayer, 2021) and to challenge or reinforce dominant paradigms (Gbadegesin, 2019).
I used the genre of a particular internet meme, "What People Think I Do / What I Really Do" (Regnier, 2012), as a way to elicit TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) graduate students' perceptions of their identities as student teachers. Drawing on the conception of identity as shaped by both how one thinks about oneself and how one is perceived by others (Gee, 2000, 2015), I invited student teachers to choose images/text that represented both how they saw themselves and how they perceived that influential others-such as their practicum instructor, supervisor, students, or family members-saw them as student teachers. As part of a larger ethnographic and discourse analytic study on student teacher identity development during the TESOL practicum, eight transnational, multilingual, focal student teachers created these "identity memes," which they shared with each other. I then engaged the focal student teachers in a descriptive review process (Kapadia-Bodi, 2016), wherein they analyzed the images, patterns, and questions raised by their individual and collective identity memes.
In this paper, I describe the arts-based methods (creating, sharing, and analyzing the identity memes) that I engaged in with the student teacher participants, then highlight some of the themes that emerged from their collaborative analysis, such as: how student teachers' perceptions are influenced by societal expectations of teachers, students, and classrooms; how the images reflect multiple and confluent sources of stress and pressure on student teachers; and how student teachers' expectations for themselves do not always match with their realities. I conclude with reflections on the possibilities and constraints of using a well-known meme genre for identity-focused research within language teacher education.
References
Gbadegesin, V. O. (2019). Gender ideology and identity in humorous social media memes. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqz039
Gee, J. P. (2000). Identity as an analytic lens for research in education. Review of Research in Education, 99–125. https://doi.org/10.2307/1167322
Gee, J. P. (2015). Discourse, small d, big D. In K. Tracy, T. Sandel, & C. Ilie (Eds.), The international encyclopedia of language and social interaction (1st ed., pp. 1–5). John Wiley & Sons, Inc; Wiley Online Library. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118611463.wbielsi016
Kapadia-Bodi, M. (2016). Stories of our working lives: Literacy, power, & storytelling in the academic workplace [PhD Dissertation]. University of Pennsylvania.
Mortensen, M., & Neumayer, C. (2021). The playful politics of memes. Information, Communication & Society, 24(16), 2367–2377. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2021.1979622
Regnier, T. (2012). What people think I do / What I really do. KnowYourMeme. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/what-people-think-i-do-what-i-really-do
Wiggins, B. E. (2019). The discursive power of memes in digital culture: Ideology, semiotics, and intertextuality. Routledge.
