Curating a Literacy Life

Curating a Literacy Life spotlights the idea of curation as a process for inspiring student-centered learning with digital media. In this book, Kist shows educators how to empower students as they make sense of all the books, videos, websites, and social media they access. Packed with ideas and activities developed at Glenville High School, the book presents a model for learning to learn. Using smartphones, a Netflix account, and access to a variety of YA, canonical, and media texts, the teachers created a vibrant learning community where students could pursue their own interests, from community histories to documentary filmmaking to social justice advocacy. Along the way, students learned a way of processing, making meaning, and repurposing the multimedia texts that are already deeply important in their everyday lives. Curating a Literacy Life is for both teachers and parents who are interested in helping young people harness, manage, and learn from the multiple messages and texts they encounter every day.

Book Features:

• A powerful model to help teens make sense of and even repurpose the texts they encounter daily.
• Ideas for making use of digital media in ways that are meaningful to today’s students.
• Strategies for bridging the divide between in-school and out-of-school literacies.
• Activities developed during the author’s years as an instructional coach at Cleveland’s Glenville High School.

William Kist is professor emeritus at Kent State University, an education consultant and coach, and the author of New Literacies in Action: Teaching and Learning in Multiple Media.

“The curation model is grounded in joy and relevance. This book may appeal to teacher educators who teach literacy courses, or to teachers in PLCs or other collaborative structures.”

—Teachers College Record

“William Kist has thoroughly and respectfully documented the innovative work of English teachers who value and enact culturally responsive pedagogy with project-based learning, inquiry-based lessons, meaningful use of technology, and multimodalities. Drawing on theories of social justice pedagogy and critical media pedagogy, Kist’s four-part model of curation is less of a formula than a model for a student-centered approach that can be adapted to any learning environment.”
—Ernest Morrell, Coyle Professor in Literacy Education, University of Notre Dame

“So much of students' lives today centers around the media. Many educators, not fully versed in new and old media, are not always comfortable bringing young people’s media into the classroom. But that is starting to change. Author Bill Kist has provided educators with strategies and stories of how teachers successfully managed to engage students in new literacies, a subject with which he is very familiar. Creative educators, he found, know how to take the media interests of their students and use them to meet teaching standards. Curating is the future, and 21st-century educators would be wise to follow this model—one that leads to better critical thinking, media literacy, and student success.”
—Frank W. Baker, media literacy education consultant, Media Literacy Clearinghouse

“’What is going on in these coffee houses that inspires people to sit for hours reading and writing, perhaps only getting up once for a refill?’ With this initial provocation, William Kist invites us to a journey and a potential blueprint to rethink education. Through the actions of Sharon Davis and Ga-Vita Haynes, this book shares with us how teachers and their students reinvented their classrooms through the idea of curation.
“The book’s journey through the collecting-organizing-repurposing-reflecting framework of curation is the ultimate invitation to look at education differently. Curating a Literacy Life is, in the end, a tribute to Bill, Shannon, and Da-Vita’s commitment to education. In this shared journey, they invite all of us in education to find better ways (already out there, sometimes hiding in plain sight) to engage our students and our teachers to dream of a better schooling—not only because we should or must, but because now more than ever, we can and will.”
—Raúl Alberto Mora, associate professor, Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana (UPB), Medellín (Colombia)