Paper short abstract:

This paper revisits the concept of curation after digitalisation has enabled it to relocate from the craft of museum people to a learning strategy for students in a history class.

Paper long abstract:

In my ongoing research I re-visit the concept of curation as a practice that transcends from behind the scenes in museums into the everyday lives of students. For this, I depart from a very familiar activity to school teachers and students: the museum visit. After visiting a museum, students unfolded bits of historical phenomena by presenting a few artefacts and artworks found online. This case study is drawn from my ongoing dissertation research undertaken in upper-secondary schools in Finland. In the students' short assignments, I found commonalities with the craft of museum curators: keepers of the artefacts in an institution's collection who assume the responsibility to construct an exhibition around a few of them.

Curation is a concept that has been borrowed as a metaphor to describe how young people construct narratives and identities online. Distanced from its original meaning, two aspects make curation more helpful in the context of the youth and digital literacies: the internet as a space of inquiry, and the 'self' as subject of exhibitions. However, other aspects of museum curation also resonate with the tasks that students engage with in class: the importance of recognising the context of the digital artefact and a shared sense of authorship of exhibitions. In my presentation I will examine closer these aspects and show how digitalisation enables to relocate practices traditionally anchored in memory institutions.