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).
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