You Be the Curator

This teaching guide (developed with the Virginia Museum of History and Culture) will help you facilitate a hands-on artifact analysis activity that invites students to step into the role of a museum curator by designing their own exhibit using objects from a real or digital collection. Working individually or in groups, students develop a focused topic, select a small set of artifacts, and craft a central claim supported by object labels and exhibit text. Through this process, students practice historical thinking as an inquiry-driven and argumentative act—making decisions about inclusion, perspective, and storytelling while exploring how meaning is constructed through curation.