The meme does not end the conversation: semiosis and curriculum in teacher educator development

Abstract

This theoretical research article asks under what conditions memes can become formational languages in teacher educator development. The problem arose from a scene experienced during the author's doctoral journey—the “meme battle”—revisited as implicated memory rather than an empirical corpus. Methodologically, it brings this memory into a multireferential conceptual elaboration grounded in Lucia Santaella's semiotics, research-formation in cyberculture, curriculum acts, and Brazilian and international scholarship on memes, authorship, teacher identity, and multimodal composition. It reproduces no testimonies, names, private conversations, or participant images and does not reanalyze thesis data. As its main result, it proposes the notion of the meme in a formational relation and an analytical matrix composed of five inseparable dimensions: semiotic condensation, situated indexicality, authorial remixability, curricular interpellation, and ethical-circulatory responsibility. The formulation rejects both the instrumental use of memes as motivational resources and their automatic celebration as emancipatory authorship. It argues that formational potential does not reside in the isolated artifact but emerges when circulation enables participants to interpret, respond to, contest, and transform both the educational process and those who organize it. It concludes that working with memes in teacher educator development requires environments in which laughter remains open to semiosis, responsibility, and curricular consequences.