Education Curation as Self-Curation
There are a few things I’ve heard quite a bit while working on this project. “I didn’t realize I had this much stuff.” “I would love a way to look back at the early signs of my career path.” Another is, “Parents would love this,” referring to a service or app that would help them save and storify their child’s creations and incidental learning moments. And then it’s,“Can we curate me next?” That one really stands out to me.
There's something special about reflecting on our own learning artifacts--especially ones that have been all but forgotten. It's a unique personal history that seems to contain special elements of who you are. The artifacts of our learning might not define us. I certainly wouldn’t want any single artifact (a photograph, exam, essay, painting, performance, etc.) to stand in for who I am. And certainly any one of them might resemble anyone else’s version of the same thing. But a collection of them, intentionally storified and reflected upon, can reveal a distinctive reflection of formative experiences, interpretations and thinking. When we look at how all that thinking fits together, especially when it’s from disciplines that call on different ways of thinking, we’re bringing it all into our center and saying, “This is the role this played. It mattered this much or in this way.” "That thing I really want to do now for a living? There's an early sign of it."
Many people I grew up with talk about our major in college as if it were a decision in who we would become as people. I think career changers get a shocking sense of how much our work impacts our sense of self. A career change is a life change. But there’s a strong connection between what and how we learn early on and our sense of who we are. It starts very early. If we’re shaped to any extent by our education (by our parents, our teachers, our media and culture, and by our own decisions throughout it all), then it seems like curating the content of it would be to some extent the curation of who we are. Education curation is definitely about content--about math, science, the arts, etc. But it’s also a process of self-direction in the place where they all meet.