The outside of the Getty Center in Los Angeles, one of my favorite museums for inspiration. Image courtesy of Max Pixel via a Creative Commons Zero – CC0 license.

Museums are some of the most consistently fascinating and generative spaces for me, for they remind me that we can tell endless stories about the artifacts that define human life. From paintings and sculptures, to everyday objects like kitchen supplies and clothing, our histories can be told and re-told in variations that make the material traces of our existence continually wondrous to behold.

At first blush, it can seem like a lot of museum artifacts are organized in the same kind of story structure: chronologically. The first thing you see in the museum is the oldest thing, and the things thereafter get newer. Or if you are at an exhibit for a single artist, we start with the artist’s earliest work and move to the artist’s latest. But a lot of museum exhibits can be curated by theme, like “drama” or “women” or “science.” Other museum exhibits are curated by medium or mode; the sculptures are in one room, the mosaics in another, the paintings in yet another. Others still are curated by one concept, like “translation,” and each pairing of pieces to follow riffs on the execution of “translation” work. In other words, curatorial possibilities in a museum are expansive and often defined by how the curator herself would like an audience to navigate through and understand the works on display.

Curation has become an increasingly useful metaphor for me as of late because it has really helped me to understand what I’ve been struggling with as an educator and writer. When I design a class, I can often articulate my learning goals; I’m good at coming up with big ideas. But where I get stumped is how to curate the kinds of activities that might help a student accomplish the learning goals. I can be a bit of a “kitchen sink” thinker when it comes to learning: I can come up with all different kinds of ideas or how a certain concept can be taught (“what if we used Play-Doh for brainstorming research-based essay ideas?” was a question I thought about just last week) and like to imagine all of the possible permutations. But when it comes to making choices, or when it comes to determining how that “learning story” gets told, I often feel overwhelmed and stumped. What’s the best way to help communicate the learning goals? What’s the best order of the ideas? What are the pieces of the lesson we must include above all of the others?

It’s easy to take curation in lesson design for granted. After all, in subjects like literature or history, it can be easy just to assume that organizing materials chronologically makes the most sense. In subjects like biology or chemistry, it may be equally as simple to assume that we begin with one fundamental concept and build up to greater complexity from there. Even in something like a first-year composition course, we tend to start with definitions when we design our courses – What is rhetoric? What is audience? What is purpose? – and then organize by applying those definitions to readings and writings thereafter. In other words, our classes can often wind up replicating the same narratives – offering the same “learning exhibit” over and over again, if you will – because we’re repeating the learning stories we’ve been taught OR we’re following an order that feels easy and predictable.

But what if we thought more like museum curators? Yes, sometimes, the predictable ways of curating content make the most sense, but what if we tried something new? What if we changed the story? What if we organized the materials in a new way? What would happen then?

In some ways, I’m riffing on what James Lang refers to in Small Teaching as interleaving (an amazing book, by the way, that has given me tons of inspiration for workshops I’m offering in the coming quarters). Interleaving refers to the spacing out of learning sessions over time and mixing up those lessons rather than dividing them into “chunks” of time. So, for example, we might imagine a class moving from one concept to another in concentrated periods of time. But an interleaved class moves iteratively through those concepts, introducing Concept A first, then Concept B, but returning to Concept A again, before moving on to Concept C. By the time we finish Concept C, we might return again to Concept A and Concept B before repeating Concept C and finding ourselves at Concept D. Sounds pretty loopy (and, yes, it kind of is!), but it also sort of makes sense to return to ideas and repeat them continually. Lang even has the neuroscience to prove it: students who study concepts in an interleaved way find it more frustrating and challenging at first, but by the end of the term, often remember more for exams than students who learn in chunked and segmented ways (also known as massed learning).

To return to curation, then, what if we imagined designing a lesson that not only interleaves learning concepts, repeating them and inter-weaving them alongside new ideas, but that also explores a particular theme, idea, or story? What if we imagined that, as a student goes through a class, they are following the traditional story arc, with an introduction, a rising action, a climax, and a conclusion? What might that do for our ability to introduce new concepts? How might that make learning more engaging?

Big questions for a Friday, I know! But I’m excited to end the week on this note of imagining myself as the curator for learning: what do I want to shape next? What stories do I want students to experience with their learning? I would be curious to know what stories others aim to tell with their teaching too, to glean from others’ good examples and inspirations.