Memes in the classroom
memes - critical reading - didactic material
This memorial refers to an ongoing research in the Professional Master’s Degree in Letters (PROFLETRAS), at the Federal University of Bahia, where I present the path I have taken, highlighting facts that guided my personal and professional constitution in the area of teaching. This study aims to reflect on the characteristics that make the meme a suitable textual genre for critical reading practice, through the extension of the student's textual world. For that, it uses the research methodology of a qualitative, interpretative and documental nature. Its theoretical bases are multimodality (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001; Rojo, 2012; Ribeiro, 2021); critical reading (Antunes, 2003, Marcuschi, 2008, Kleiman, 2013); multicultural education (Candau and Moreira, 2013); Internet memes (Shifman, 2014, Knobel and Lankshear, Chagas, 2020) and humor studies (Possenti, 1998, Raskin, 1985). The partial results of this research demonstrated that, despite the apparent insertion, arising from the BNCC, of memes in the classroom through Portuguese language textbooks, the approach is superficial, failing to explore all the richness of the genre. The creation of the didactic-pedagogical workshops resulted from this research, based on the theories mentioned above, aiming to propose activities using the meme in a critical perspective that contributes not only to the formation of critical readers, capable of questioning what is placed in the texts and in the world, but also trying to produce changes in the way of approaching a textual genre that talks directly with the multicultural context of the students.