This session gives faculty a practical, repeatable way to teach strategic thinking using the media students already live inside, such as memes, headlines, ads, trailers, and social posts, while solving a very real classroom problem: Gen Z students who are engaged mentally but not verbally.
Participants will learn an Artifact Lab method that moves students through three steps:
- Consume (quick observation: what do you notice?)
- Analyze (what’s the persuasion move? what’s the message strategy?)
- Create (how would you redesign it for a different audience, goal, or platform?)
The session models non-performative participation through micro-activities: silent annotation, quick partner swaps, small-group role prompts, and fast “choose-one” decisions (instead of open-ended whole-class discussion). Faculty leave with a plug-and-play structure they can use in any discipline, plus a toolkit of artifact prompts that turn attention and scrolling habits into strategic learning—without pandering.
