Curation Pedagogy for Media Studies: (Further) Towards the Inexpert

Abstract

An educational ‘model’ for participatory learning and media literacy in the contemporary context of digitally mediated lifeworlds is emerging (Jenkins, 2010; Gauntlett, 2011; Fraser and Wardle, 2011). The critical problem, we argue, for its ‘adequacy’ is the privilege granted to curriculum content and skills over pedagogy. Elsewhere, we offered a ‘pedagogy of the inexpert’ as such a model for textconscious disciplines such as, but not restricted to, Media Studies. This strategy removes ‘the media’ from our gaze and looks awry to develop new ways of working with students – to ‘show and tell’ textual agency and more reflexive deconstruction of what it is to read and make media, and to ‘be’ in mediation. In this article, we develop this approach further towards a model of ‘curation’. Understood in this way, students ‘show’ media literacy in new spaces – not by recourse to skills, competences or analytical unmasking of the properties of a (contained) text, but by exhibiting, by curating a moment in time of textual meaningmaking and meaning-taking, but with a mindfulness – a critical acceptance of such an attempt to hold and curate the flow of meaning as an artifice.