From Satirical Cartoons to Memes: Teaching the First World War in a Visual Society – A Reflection and Response

This article reflects on the different ways of approaching cartoons in today’s history classrooms, using the links drawn between other forms of graphic humour familiar to students, such as memes.

We discuss strategies that allow students to develop their critical reasoning skills, in ways that are applicable both to the understanding of the First World War and to the global and digital world in which they live. Using caricatures created in Spain during the First World War, we address how the cartoons reflected the country’s complex position in the war, marked by its official neutrality and the social fracture between supporters of the Allies and those of the Central Empires.

The satirical designs form a window through which to explore both the mechanisms of representation used to portray ‘enemies’, along with tactics of a transnational nature such as animalisation or the use of racist stereotypes. We also explore the ongoing debates regarding the survival of these constructions today, especially in the context of current war, linked to changes in the forms of transmission generated by the rise of social media.

Therefore, we examine the problem of humour, understood as a social creation that changes over time, in historical sources and current societies, as well as the role of the teacher in guiding the complex process of analysing satirical vignettes. We consider the potential impact of new technologies such as GenAI in education and their possible interaction with learning methodologies that rely on caricature as a historical source.

The response to this piece focuses on the different ways that understanding and utilising humour can be useful in teaching spaces. It explores the use of ‘historical meme assignments’ as an avenue of engaging student understanding and interests through inventive assessment activities. It also examines how contextualising humour is an important way of understanding mindsets from the past and the ways in which people viewed, processed, and understood the world around them.

It also looks to frame the tensions between human or user generated humour and cartoons against those which can be created by online GenAI software. Jokes and comedy are inherently human but by attempting to replicate it through GenAI there is the danger of creating material based on racist stereotypes that have permeated online spaces.

Whilst the response to this piece features student assignments to create cartoons and memes, it also raises warning flags for teachers regarding what GenAI generated versions of this may look like.

Co-Authored with Berta Lillo-Gutiérrez