Materials from AFS Undergraduate Education Project Available

Print Page | Contact Us | Your Cart | Sign In | Join AFS

AFS Review: News

Email to a Friend

Materials from AFS Undergraduate Education Project Available

Thursday, October 6, 2011 (1 Comments)
Posted by: Tim Lloyd

Share |

We have posted two documents to the AFS website in preparation for "Lay and Expert Knowledge: A Workshop on Teaching Undergraduate Folklore" (session 13-09 at next week's AFS annual meeting), a report from the participants in AFS's Big Questions and the Disciplines project, supported by the Teagle Foundation.

This project brought together a group of folklorists from a variety of academic institutions across the country to engage with the Big Question "What is the relationship of lay and expert knowledge in a complex society?" and, based on that engagement, to create courses and course units to strengthen undergraduate education in folklore studies.

The first document is a handout that provides examples of the learning objectives and assignments with which Teagle project participants have been working. (Hard copies will be available at the annual meeting session.) Syllabi, assignments, and other commentaries from the project will be published soon in the Working Papers of the Center for Folklore Studies collection in The Ohio State University's institutional repository.

We have also posted Jay Mechling's essay, "You Can't Teach Folklore," also produced for the project. This will be published as part of the Working Papers, but Prof. Mechling has requested that we also place it on the AFS site to invite commentary and discussion.

Comments...

Robert D. Bethke says...
Posted Thursday, March 1, 2012

On Jay Mechling’s “You Can’t Teach Folklore” Bob Bethke University of Delaware (retired) Though it nearly lost me in some of the detail of theoretical grounding, Jay Mechling’s “You Can’t Teach Folklore” certainly accomplished one of its goals: thinking about what I was up to while regularly teaching my version of “Introduction to Folklore and Folklife,” for thirty years, at the University of Delaware. I retired from that endeavor eleven years ago, but as Jay so aptly demonstrates, some distance offers perspectives...(to read more, click here: http://www.afsnet.org/blogpost/592230/132257/Materials-from-AFS-Undergraduate-Education-Project-Available#comment97002).