I incorporate visual and multimodal image work in most of my classes. In addition to writing prompts, I have students compose representative images and send them out on what I call curation events. I have described some of these in earlier posts where I have students curate playlists, strike out on visual journeys, and even attend live curation events where they create content for community partners. Image curation involves the processes of collection, selection, interpretation, creation, and sharing. The act of curation provides students with valuable skills that they can use in their academic, personal, and professional lives. It enhances critical thinking, creative composing, and is essential for digital writing where visuals are an integral part of the genre.
Like any act of composition, image curation is about understanding your rhetorical situation: Your subjects, audiences, purposes, and contexts. We use these components to filter our collections and shape our perceptions. As a curator, we need an open awareness of what is around us and the connections between things that make them collections.
Click here to see Sample Image Archive
We can use different parameters as we create our image assignments such as chronological or thematic arrangements. We can give students particular prompts to guide their attention or present opportunities for them to choose their own collections. I use them for the purposes of invention and brainstorming ideas, arrangement as they organize their thoughts, and drafting as they incorporate them into their final products.
Students already participate in acts of curation through social media where they collect, select, edit and distribute their images to tell stories. We curate and archive family photos, events, and objects that create systematic portraits of our lives over time.
If you ever have participated in any of these activities, you know that you must be organized to make it work. We have all searched hopelessly for lost files or that one image that is randomly assigned by our computers if we do not define the parameters. It sounds obvious but students often do not know the value of archiving and organizing content in a digital world. I find that teaching students about archive organization is time well spent.
I start at the beginning. File naming is important for easy retrieval down the line. Students do not really think about this as part of the process and haphazardly choose non-descript names such as “project one” or “my assignment.” I teach them to be specific and informative so they can glance at the file name and know something about what is inside. This might include their initials, title of the project, and dates among other things. I encourage them to think beyond the individual document, image, or file and see the bigger picture of how these things relate to and differentiate themselves from other things within their larger archival space. This often involves creating thoughtful folders and sub-folders to categorize their work.
I also benefit as a teacher when I build in consistent naming protocols for files and folders so that we are intentionally structuring individual and class archives of their work over the term. This helps with their own work but also helps me when I go to evaluate so I do not have to spend my time searching and opening randomly named files to find the right assignments. I also see my whole class as an archiving opportunity for collecting, reflecting, and sharing student work (as well as my own scholarly research). You can use any platform, but I like a class Google Drive where students create individual and team folders for all to view. This is especially important when students curate and archive for community partners because they can easily share these organized folders with clients (preparing them for strong professional communication). Google provides a free, universal archive space with easy access and plenty of online support.
I tried something new this semester and added Weekly Image Archive assignments where students showcase their work. Once again, I return to Google slides and have students choose one image from their weekly assignment to add to that week’s collaborative archive slideshow. They go through their own archives and select an image that speaks to the assignment and demonstrates strong visual composition. They include their name and a short description of the image and its meaning. We then show them to the class which reinforces that week’s lessons. It also gives students more ownership and pride in their work and helps us define quality by viewing strong work from their classmates. It does not take up too much class time as we create it together on the spot at the start of class. This activity raises the bar when students know they will be sharing their work with others rather than just turning it in to their teacher for evaluation. It is a time of both admiration and learning.
Archives give us the opportunity to go back and reuse and repurpose images for future projects and new content. They provide digital, historical spaces for us to store, preserve, and revisit our work over time. I usually have students reflect upon their archived spaces at the end of the term to articulate their learning which gives them an overview perspective to see their work as an interconnected collection instead of isolated individual assignments. Although archiving is a skill that we assume students already have, I find they benefit from dedicated instruction towards these organizational practices.
