Drs. Greta Freeman and Brooke Hardin from USC Upstate presented at the 2020 Lilly Conference on Text Sets. Freeman and Hardin are both faculty in the School of Education with extensive experience as teachers and in literacy. I didn’t know about text sets, and as the name suggests, these are collections of texts on a topic. Text sets can include media formats beyond traditional primary literature and textbooks. The presenters defined text sets based on published literature. Of note, the collections can be on a topic or addressing a question, and text sets have been around for decades but defined by different terminology. An anchor text or launch text is usually the bigger text followed by additional, supplementary texts. The point behind text sets is to engage and inform, and text sets also provide a diversity of perspectives, voices, representation. Thus, text sets in a way improve access and representation if curated intentionally and carefully. The presenters have compiled an extensive list of types of texts used in text sets. For a particular lesson, you may collect resources to expand the perspectives and dig deeper into a topic. Hardin also mentioned having graduate students in education curate text sets and explain the reasoning and affordances and challenges of each item, for example. This made me think about using text sets in BIT 295 and combining with social annotation guidelines! We could dig deeper and have rich conversations. Graduate projects could be to create text sets with rationale and “teaching notes” to use in another course. It would be a great way to go beyond the traditional reading list!
