This fall many school librarians are being asked to locate resources for the presidential election. Faced with a political landscape in which competing and even contradictory claims will be backed by evidence of varying strength and dubious trustworthiness, school librarians have an opportunity to use this election cycle to both model information literacy practices and build bridges toward deeper professional collaboration.

Curation as Professional Learning 

While curation can be used to accomplish a variety of traditional functions: maintain current awareness; keep track of one’s own topics; to share ideas and resources with other librarians; communicate or market ones’ expertise; guide readers; and promote resources and services (Valenza et al. 2014, 7), school librarians also curate to augment teaching and enhance learning. According to Kristen Lee, a middle school librarian in Palo Alto, California, co-curation can build long-term professional relationships with faculty. Her library’s curated pages acknowledge collaborative partners and market her skills and services to other teachers (http://libguides.pausd.org/profile.php?uid=27523).  

Co-curation involves a shift from being expert to actively seeking to understand your partner’s expertise. Rather than presenting a teacher with your “best guess” resources, have an exploratory conversation about the assignment. Listen, rather than proscribe:

Ask questions that invite the teacher to go beyond goals and methods [of the assignment] to professional values and beliefs. Don’t proffer advice, redesign the assignment, or promote the library skill you believe is missing…by listening with empathy, asking rather than interrogating, you hope to peel away the assignment to gain insights about gaps in knowledge and the teacher’s own learning affinities and capabilities (Abilock 2012, 352). 

Use plural, tentative nouns (e.g., hunches vs. hunch, plans vs. plan) and tentative language (possible, might) to indicate your nonjudgmental interest. Collaborative dialogue serves a very different purpose than a “training” session (“From a Foot in the Door” in press). By seeking to understand deeply before you curate, you target what is essential to student learning rather than just what’s relevant to a unit or lesson. 

Curation Is Selective

Election resources serve many goals. Some are created to provide background on campaign issues and candidate positions. Others focus on helping educators determine an organization’s publishing stance or helping citizens identify the influence that lobbying organizations and other advocacy groups might have on candidates’ positions. One often sees LibGuide “landscape scans” created by college and university librarians. They are meant to “cover” rather than target. However a school librarian’s curation shouldn’t devolve into “just-in-case” aggregations.  

Don’t simply replicate what can be found in Google search results. For a class investigating the history of voting rights in the United States, one might include Adam Liptak’s analysis of the Supreme Court’s decision to eliminate federal oversight of election requirements in the 1965 Voting Rights Act. For a class looking at first-time voter participation, perhaps the most pertinent source is Michael P. McDonald’s statistical data that break down voter turnout by race and ethnicity, age, and education. To follow public opinion polls in order to predict election results, display an interactive tool that allows students to test how changes in voter turnouts in five different demographic groups could change the election results (Bycoffe and Wasserman 2015). Selectively provide substantial content in relevant formats. As a result you will make analysis of, rather than finding within, the students’ thinking task.

Curation Adds Value

Curation is more than selectively gathering and insightfully organizing displays of sources. A list of links, no matter how thoughtfully chosen, does not fully convey the type of thinking you expect students to do. Curriculum curation must add intellectual value by modeling the analysis and judgment essential to an information literacy inquiry. Compare these actual annotations for a single site to see what this entails.  

Curation Models Information Literacy

These exhibit little or no critical judgment, nor do they model the critical thinking expected of students in an annotated bibliography. Even further, none of these entries answer the most important question: Why is OpenSecrets valuable—indeed essential—for evaluating influence in politics? 

The Center for Responsive Politics uses the Federal Election Commission (FEC) campaign finance data to populate the OpenSecrets database. By adding this to the annotation, we provide some justification of the source’s “authority.” To complete our analysis, we also need to explain why Open Secrets is better to use than the original FEC resource: OpenSecrets adds the total campaign donations from a company’s employees, whereas you have to add them yourself in the FEC data, and OpenSecrets adds value by triangulating campaign contributions with lobbying expenses and earmarks. Thus you can investigate money’s influence by seeing both how much money is being earmarked for companies by members of Congress who have, in turn, benefitted from donations by company employees and by political action committees (PACs) supported by that company.

Curation Is Transparent about Point of View

If your curation is a “text set”—curated readings about an issue—add editorial value by describing them as a range of opinions worthy of being considered by open-minded students: “Political turmoil in the Middle East, a shrinking middle class, and stagnant wages—all valid issues—have fueled the election debates this fall.” If you curate a series of organizations that monitor factual accuracy (e.g., FactCheck.org, Politifact, PunditFact, Media Matters, NewsBusters, and Fact Checker), note that you’ve included blogs from both nonpartisan and partisan nonprofits.

Curation Establishes Our Authority

Fact checking, evidence weighing, and critical analysis are essential to understanding political issues and candidates’ arguments—and not just during the 2016 election cycle. Big data, search results, and social media discussions will be proffered as objective evidence, even as we learn that editorial judgments permeate every platform, shape every result. 

Take time to curate strategically and selectively. Discriminating curriculum curation is a “mindspace” in which we establish the kind of thinking students will do and the kind of teaching we are prepared to do. Intellectual “added value” establishes our authority as instructional experts and curriculum leaders.

Works Cited:

Abilock, Debbie. "D.C. al Coda." Growing Schools: Librarians as Professional Developers, edited by Debbie Abilock, Kristin Fontichiaro, and Violet H. Harada, Libraries Unlimited, 2012, pp. 351-63.

"All Critical Thinking Resources." Annenberg Classroom, Annenberg Public Policy Center, www.annenbergclassroom.org/page/all-critical-thinking-resources. Accessed 16 May 2016.

"From a Foot in the Door to Being There: Leadership along a Professional Development Continuum." The Many Faces of School Library Leadership, edited by Sharon Coatney and Violet Harada, 2nd ed., Libraries Unlimited, in press.

Bycoffe, Aaron, and David Wasserman. "What Would It Take to Turn Red States Blue?" FiveThirtyEight, edited by Nate Silver, ESPN Internet Ventures, 3 Dec. 2015, projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-swing-the-election/. Accessed 16 May 2016.

"Compare 2016 Presidential Candidate Positions: A Side-by-Side Comparison between Candidates on Key Issues." ProCon.org, 2016election.procon.org/view.source-summary-chart.php. Accessed 16 May 2016.

Darrington, Jeremy. "Elections and Voting Data Guide." Princeton University Library LibGuides,  25 Apr. 2016, /libguides.princeton.edu/elections. Accessed 16 May 2016.

"Influence & Lobbying." OpenSecrets.org,  Center for Responsive Politics, www.opensecrets.org/influence/. Accessed 16 May 2016.

Kukreja, Charu. "The Big Issues of the 2016 Presidential Election and Where the Candidates Stand." KQED, 14 Jan. 2016, ww2.kqed.org/lowdown/2015/12/04/the-big-issues-of-the-2016-campaign-and-where-the-candidates-stand/. Accessed 16 May 2016.

Lee, Kristin. “LibGuides Kristen Lee.” Palo Alto Unified School Libraries, PAUSD, libguides.pausd.org/profile.php?uid=27523. Accessed 17 May 2016.

Liptak, Adam. "Supreme Court Invalidates Key Part of Voting Rights Act." New YorkTimes, 25 June 2013, nyti.ms/1FUpwx5. Accessed 21 Jan. 2014.

McDonald, Michael P. "Voter Turnout Demographics." The United States Elections Project, www.electproject.org/home/voter-turnout/demographics. Accessed 23 June 2016.

Valenza, Joyce Kasman, Brenda L. Boyer, and Della Curtis. "Introduction."  Social Media Curation, spec. issue of Library Technology Reports, vol. 50, no. 7, 2014, pp. 5-10.