Teaching: As Curator

My own background includes work experience in some wonderful culture and heritage organizations, from county museums, to state historical societies, to small historic houses.  Since then, I have done research and consulted with dozens of cultural and heritage nonprofits.  I realized recently that there is a strong connection between my teaching and my museum background.

From the Merriam-Webster's dictionary, curator means "one who has the care and superintendence of something".  Museum curators are storytellers; they select pieces from a collection to tell a story about a person or event.  They decide what pieces, what documents, what artifacts will best tell this story in an engaging way that pulls people into the story, that invites them to learn and participate.  That is how I feel as a teacher.

I sometimes get asked for my teaching philosophy so I have been thinking about the words that best describe my philosophy. Curator is definitely one.  With the advent of the Internet and the ubiquitious "Google" at our fingertips, teachers do not have any special access to content. You can learn how to speak Chinese or fix a dishwasher from a YouTube video.  You can see photos of the finest art collections in the world online.  You can read original letters from the 18th century describing a war battle in detail.  I don't hold the keys to a special vault of books.  Content is everywhere.  What I bring though is an understanding of how the knowledge was created, its quality and value, and the strings that tie those ideas together through years of study.  I am a curator of content for my students and we are on this learning journey together.