Adapted from both museum and classroom practices, this series of activities combines the pedagogies of physicality, narrativity and materiality to turn your class into curators and your classroom into a gallery.

“Class as Curator” Pedagogy and Praxis

Class-as-curator is a specific subset of problem-based learning; it offers students a structure in which it is up to them to:

1. Decide what is important from larger pool of material
2. Make choices about what narratives that content tells
3. Organize that content to convey a particular story
4. Practice explaining and justifying those choices.

This ability to distill meaning from a large amount of information, and to interpret and explain that meaning for others are skills that span multiple disciplines.

Further, our methodology harnesses the contemporary practices, skills, and social identities that many students are familiar with from social networking, where each of us is the curator of our own life, and the art critic of others’.

Our Outline

Our “Class-as-Curator” lesson plans outline modular and scaleable sequences of activities that you can use during a single class period or over an entire semester to engage your students in an active, scaffolded process of reviewing, analyzing, synthesizing and presenting key course content.

Materials on our two Class-as-Curator lesson plans incorporate many of the museum-based pedagogical activities described elsewhere on this site.