Short Description:
This assignment requires students to apply their knowledge of antisemitic tropes to tweets with the final outcome of the assignment being a short analytical paper and a presentation.
Learning Outcomes:
Students will gain: greater social media literacy (e.g. the ability to analyze the visual and textual aspects of tweets), the ability to identify antisemitic motifs on social media, and greater reasoning, writing, and oral presentation skills.
Course Context (e.g. how it was implemented or integrated):
This assignment was designed for the class History of Antisemitism (JWST 4375) in Spring 2018. Students worked in pairs and each pair was given a single tweet selected by the digital scholarship librarian and approved by the faculty member.
The criteria for the tweets were: 1.) they had to be clearly antisemitic, 2.) they contained a visual, e.g. a meme, 3.) there was something significant about the tweeter or the receiver (if there was one), or both. For example, the tweeter was a known politician, or the receiver was a known journalist.
Students were given a Powerpoint template that they were required to follow, the intention being to keep them from getting too bogged down in the slide creation process and to help them structure themselves more effectively.
To introduce the assignment, the digital scholarship librarian presented some background on antisemitism and social media and then went through all of the tweets that were selected for the assignment. During this time, students were asked to begin analyzing what they were seeing and to identify ways they might start their research.
Additional Instructor Resources (e.g. in-class activities, worksheets, scaffolding applications, supplemental modules, further readings, etc.):
Presentation template
