In this move, students are asked to gather (collect) material from a site, an environment, or their lives and represent it (curate) through writing/creation. Students not only produce whatever material they can find; they carefully select what information needs to be presented to achieve the assignment’s goals and also to think critically about the way the material will be presented. Assignments emphasizing collecting and curating ask students to focus on objects, experiences, and ideas from their surroundings, environment, and/or experiences, and to visibilize them through the process of collection and curation. We might think of the ways museums and galleries curate work and artifacts, for example (and the ethics of curating existing work).
Collecting & Curating Learning Objectives
- Create a search strategy
- Identify key terms
- Define scope of the project
- Explore and create connections between collected data or artifacts
- Determine principles of selection and organization
- Examine how archives are assembled, managed, controlled
- Determine provenance of sources
- Develop ethical practices for curation and representation
- Acknowledge and document use of sources
- Create a meaningful assemblage using collected artifacts
Information Literacy Threshold Concepts
- Information creation as a process
- Searching as strategic exploration
Habits of Mind
- Curiosity
- Engagement
- Creativity
Examples
| Genre | Writing goals | Collect | Curate |
| Collage | Recognizing environs as “texts” | Photos from a particular location | Assemble photos into a meaningful organization |
| Soundscapes assignment | Searching as strategic exploration | Sound assets from an environment | Describe and analyze what the sounds mean in a PowerPoint |
| Literacy narrative | Understand how genre influences the ways texts (memories) are collected or engaged with | Memories of literacy learning | Present in narrative form |
| Discourse community map | Engage with texts (interviews) beyond reading for information | Interviews with professionals in a discipline | A map describing the features of the discourse community |
Resources
Scholarly Bibliography
Matalene, Carolyn. “Experience as Evidence: Teaching Students to Write Honestly and Knowledgeably about Public Issues.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 10, no. 2, 1992, pp. 252–265.
Mihailidis, Paul, and Cohen, James N. “Exploring Curation as a Core Competency in Digital and Media Literacy Education.” Journal of Interactive Media in Education, vol. 13, no. 1, 2013.
Sunstein, Bonnie S., and Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater. Fieldworking: Reading and Writing Research. 4th ed., Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012.