The Lectorate of Inclusive Education had its official start at the inaugural speech by Aminata Cairo on January 17, 2018. Since then a team of dedicated people have given shape and form to the lectorate. Some have come and gone since then, each contributing in their own way. Inclusive Education is an elusive term. It is not clear-cut and many people do not know what it means. Inherently it is linked to diversity issues, which have become associated with "having to deal with the other", discrimination, exclusion, and more of such bothersome issues. Inclusion is about doing it however, about making it happen. Inclusive education is about creating optimal learning opportunities to accommodate students of all backgrounds, but requires dealing with those difficult issues. The language is not available, the level of comfort is not available, and so here is a whole lectorate dedicated to dealing with this pesky implication that somehow we are not doing something right. That is one way of looking at it. There is some truth in that as well. As successful as our educational systems have been throughout hundreds of years, we now acknowledge that it has not been successful for all who attempt to partake and not necessarily due to their lack of effort. So, somehow we have fallen short. Who wants to talk about that? We need to talk about that, but how? We need to have the sensitivity that the conversation might be difficult and complex. We need to acknowledge that the conversation might require us to open up and be vulnerable. We need to be brave, but the conversation must happen. In this volume the members of the knowledge circle and student branch have taken a first step. The assignment was to write about their involvement with the lectorate, but to share where their passion came from. There is a reason why you are so passionate about this (difficult) topic, something about your story that drives you to want to do this. Share that. It was not an easy task for all, even if only in one paragraph. After all, it requires one to open a window into one's soul. We cannot expect and lead people into the difficult conversations if we are not willing to lead by example. As you will see, they lived up to the task. Hoping that our first step will be an inspiration for you to take the next.
In today’s era of content abundance, a huge amount of resources is available digitally, from research articles to news items and from online courses to YouTube videos. As a result, lecturers in higher education have an endless supply of crossmedia materials that they can present to students as learning materials. This presents lecturers with the challenge of selecting those materials in such a way that they match the course topic and prior knowledge and proficiency level of the students. Additionally, they need to consider how to structure resources and how to make connections between them in order to support students’ learning (Kallenberg, et al., 2009). It is often recognized (e.g. Anderson, 2015; Siemens, 2008) that this task is remarkably similar to the task of curators in museums, who expertly make selections and organize and contextualize artefacts (Bhaskar, 2016). Considering those similarities, surprisingly little is known about how lecturers conduct this task. This study investigates how lecturers in Dutch higher professional education select, structure and present crossmedia resources for educational purposes, from the perspective of curation. This paper aims to provide an overview of relevant research regarding “lecturers as curators” in the context of higher education. It will share the outcomes of a literature review, for which articles were identified in three databases (ERIC, Web of Science (WoS) and Catalogue Plus), using the search word “curation” combined with filters for the field of (higher) education. Only articles published in English in peer reviewed journals, institutional research reports and conference proceedings prior to November 2018 were selected. This led to a selection of 64 articles that focused on curation within higher education. Of these, 17 focused on curation of learning materials done by lecturers. Findings show that there is relatively little research into lecturers’ curational processes. Although most articles identify the notion of curation as a useful approach in teaching, they fail to describe overarching processes or criteria for succesful curation. Five of the reviewed studies describe curational practices by specific groups of lecturers, teaching a specific subject such as maths or music. Seven other studies focus on the outcome of lecturers’ curation processes, describing the curated collections that are the result of it. Additionally, two articles present a conceptual model of educational curation; namely Wolff & Mulholland’s (2013) Curational Inquiry Learning Cycle and Deschaine & Sharma’s (2015) 5C Model. Both models approach the process of curation as a sequential multistep model, in which steps cannot be seen independently: meaning is added with every step of the process. Although they use different terminology, steps such as collecting, selecting, organising, and presenting resources are identified. However, both models have not been tested empirically. The authors acknowledge the importance of this, by stressing that more research into the topic is necessary. The proposed paper will present a complete overview of the findings, summarize the two models, and indicate how these models can be a starting point for further empirical research.
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