Navigating a defining moment: COVID-19 and curatorial thinking

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has engendered a critical moment in education. Questions of equity, engagement, and interaction have been brought into sharper focus as students’ homes became their classrooms. There is a demonstrated need for interdisciplinary thinking, enabling students to work with the resources they have at hand, and helping learners orient themselves in place and time. Defining Moments Canada/Moments Déterminant Canada, using the interdisciplinary framework of curatorial thinking, encourages students to make sense of information, more effectively create a meaningful story, and build a stronger sense of social responsibility and awareness. This framework is operationalized using the S.A.S.S. pedagogy—Selecting, Archiving, Sense-Making, and Sharing—through which students find their personal way into a research question and demonstrate their learning while considering narrative intent, evidence limitations, and their own role as a historical actor. This integrative, critical, and interdisciplinary focus is an approach to a (post)pandemic world that prioritizes creative student responsiveness to upcoming challenges.