CHAPTER S ative processes Rethinking Reading What It Means to Curate the Curriculum ‘Some old-school English teachers believe that its less important for students to be engaged and more important fr them to know the story of To Kill ‘a Mockingbird. 's knowing the story of To Killa Mockingbird important for cultura literacy? Yes, but would that time be better spent... ? There are so ‘many important standards to teach, whatif you could hit those standards while they're coming out oftheir seats with excitement, recognition, and identification with the text over Estressing] cultural Iteracy? Eliott Johnston, second-year high school English teacher in 2 Title One high schoo! with a diverse student population in rural eastern Colorado In common parlance, a curator is “one who has the care and superinten- dence of somethings especially: one in charge of a museum, 200, or oth er place of exhibit” (Merriam-Webster). That's because the word “curate” originates from the Latin word curare, which means “to care.” When we think about what curators in a museum or an art gallery do as they assemble ‘materials for an exhibit, we see five key components. Caring curators: research relevant content on a particular subject they care about; select the best of those materials for sharing with others; organize the content so it’s easily accessible to users; contextualize the content for users by annotating it, adding information, providing commentary, evaluating the information's usefulness, and so forths and ‘+ share their collection with users, sometimes via digital means. Like Elliott, the early-career teacher whose quote opened this chapter, as ELA teachers all of us wobble around the same questions caring curators face, though our materials are the texts we assign and our “users” are our students: Out of all the texts we could teach to a given group of students, which texts are best? What combination is the most likely to inspire stu- dents into “coming out of their seats with excitement, recognition, and iden- tification"? Because we know the reading, sharing, and discovering of ideas through traditional and multimodal texts is such a large part of the work 89ve a ov 90 Pose, Wobble, Flow: A Culturally Proactive Aporaach to Literacy Instruction we do as ELA educators, this chapter broadens the notions of “text” and “reading” to highlight the wobble teachers face in repositioning themselves as critical curators in their classrooms, schools, and districts Poking she recent emphasis in national standards and high-stakes tests on infor: mational texts in ELA classrooms and across content areas.Jwve present a ose that emphasizes purposeful, critical reading of diverse texts, secondary sources, and modes. Screereeced 4 TURATOP: INCREASE POWERFUL, ‘CULTURALLY PROACTIVE READING CHOICES WITHIN THE CLASSROOM BY: > disrupting traditional, essentializing, or culturally inaccessible curriculum (sometimes by pushing against the canon); > fostering student choice in reading; > helping students persist through challenges inherent in the act of reading; and > cultivating your own passion for reading. Although museum curators work in a specialized context, for the rest of us the activities of curation aren't so specialized anymore, but are part of everyday life in today’s texting, eweeting, sharing, posting, pinning so- ciety. When we forward a link, post and comment on an article in a social network, build a collection of inspirational images on sites like Pinterest, or share book recommendations on websites like goodreads.com, we are actively curating online content for our peers, friends, family, and even un- seen readers on the Internet, How might our teaching and our students’ en- gagement with all texts—digital and print—change if we adapted the same mindset of curation and exercised a similar disposition of care in planning fe __opeeurriculum? ~xve% In ELA departments and districts, the process of selecting texts that teachers will teach is so routine that we often forget that it is also deep- ly political. The books available in your school’s bookroom, for exam- ple, constrain your students’ reading choices in school. Whether of not an Mth-grader reads The Autobiography of Malcolm X—a text she conceiv- ably might not pick up on her own—can often depend on whether or not an English department has decided to offer, or curate, this textual selection for all L1th-graders to read. Although compiling a list of district-approved texts might seem like objective work for a curriculum committee to per- form, viewing the process as an act of curation shines a light on the subjec- tive nature of the task. Districts and schools are active curators of the texts that their students read, a fact that has political importance. Lewin’s (1943) notion of “gatekeeping” captures well the politically fraught nature of se~ Jecting and disseminating texts within classrooms. As noted by Case (2007), Rethinking Read “a gatckeeper shaping, emph Recognizir jective, critical to ideas within ‘we must curat within classro. texts to teach tion of materi proactive teack DEFINING 7 ‘What “counts! might have bee Core State Sta text that inclu encoded on ot of the reading evaluate conten and quanttati teachers are in curating the ms media like gam: course, that’s n as wel. As the: The field 0: New London G broaden the un they signaled ‘Othe ability to search has co “multiliteracies Group wirtes, variety of texe nologies” (199% Group's empha documents to : equally strong: text of our cule societies; to ac plurality of text ‘When educ equally temptecLiteracy Instruction of “text” and joning themselves os feomsidesng s gests on infor fe present a exts, secondary xe, but are part 1B pinning so- ele in a social like Pinterest, jsccom, we are ‘and even un- students’ en- ic is also deep- ym, for exam- cher or not an srict-approved ittee to per con the subjec~ of the texts Lewin's (1943) nature of se- g Case (2007), Rethinking Reading: What It Means to Curate the Curriculum “a gatekeeper is one who controls the flow of information over a ch. shaping, emphasizing, or withholding it” (p. 300). Recognizing both the digital ease of 2Ist-century curation and the sub- jective, critical role teachers can play in blocking or enabling student access to ideas within schools, we look carefully in this chapter atthe kinds of texts, wwe must curate for students in order to encourage critical consciousness within classrooms. This is not simply about making a list of the “right” texts to teach in your classroom, but about assembling with care a collec- tion of materials that deliberately reflects your commitment to culeurally proactive teaching, DEFINING TEXT AND THE ACT OF READING IN THE 21st CENTURY ‘Whar “counts” as text today? Admittedly, the list gocs far beyond what might have been considered valid in schools even 20 years ago. The Common Core State Standards, for instance, clearly offer a more expansive sense of text that includes words on paper, images on digital screens, and messages encoded on other surfaces like canvases, sculptures, and billboards. One of the reading standards requires that students in all grades “integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse formats and media, including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words.” Even this directive indicates that teachers are in fact obligated to consider the contexts of students’ lives when curating the materials they will read: Words, images, music, and interactive media like games, websites, and social media all qualify as “texts” today. Of course, that’s not to discount the vast majority of print-based literary texts as well. As the above standard points out, words count, too. ‘The field of literacy is indebted to a powerful 1996 publication by the New London Group, a collective of literacy researchers who collaborated to broaden the understanding of literacies. By making the word fiteracy/plural, rO the ability to read and write) bore expansion. ‘Neatly“ZO years lace, their Fesearch has continued relevance for the ways today’s teachers understand. ~multiliteracieS"\jind the texts that constitute them. As the New London Group writes, “literacy pedagogy now must account for the burgeoning variety of text forms associated with information and multimedia tech- nologies” (1996, p. 9). Digital literacy scholars point to the New London Group’s emphasis on how multimodal texts are becoming more prevalent documents to read and write, yet they sometimes disregard the Group’s ‘equally strong argument that literacy pedagogy must “account for the con- text of our culturally and linguistically diverse and increasingly globalised societies; to account for the multifarious cultures that interrelate and the plurality of texts that circulate” (2000, p. 9). ‘When educators typically discuss “21st-century” texts, we are often equally tempted to invoke only the technology-driven aspects of the New