This year’s Saturday morning Folklore and Education workshop again featured diverse speakers, student participants, and plenty of hands-on (and feet-movin’!) activities.

One of the key presenters at the workshop was Tamera Newman of Tremonton, Utah, the first recipient of the Robinson-Roeder-Ward Fellowship. Given in memory of Beverly Robinson, Bea Roeder and Vaughn Ward, whose vision, scholarship and activism inspired a generation of folklorists working in K-12 education, the fellowship provides a stipend of $300 to allow a teacher who is actively using folklore in the classroom to attend the AFS conference.

Newman has had her high-school English students conducting oral-history interviews with local veterans, with a special emphasis on WW II vets. She has compiled many of these transcribed interviews into a self-published book, allowing students to share their work with others. Two student participants, MacKenzie Petersen and Elizabeth Thayne, joined Newman to discuss their experiences working on the project.

In keeping with the veterans’ history theme, Peter Bartis of the American Folklife Center’s Veterans History Project led participants in an activity using WW II-era photographs and discussed the ways in which historical can be used in the classroom to spark research and writing activities.

Other workshop presenters included Craig Miller of the Utah Arts Council who took us on a music and dance tour around the state, focusing on dance traditions of Mormon pioneers. Craig taught us a dance and wowed us with his instruction. Lucille Hunt (Navajo) shared stories and dance with us as well.

Tamera Newman, a teacher from Tremonton, Utah and the first winner of the Robinson-Roeder-Ward Fellowship, presented at the Saturday morning workshop along with her students, MacKenzie Petersen and Elizabeth Thayne.

 

Lucille Hunt (Navajo) presented at the Saturday workshop as well.

Craig Miller of the Utah Arts Council led workshop participants in traditional regional dancing.

The conference itself also featured two panels devoted to issues in folklore and education: one, “Taking Folklife in Education Into Post-Secondary Schooling,” included papers by Gregory Hansen (Arkansas State University), Rosemary Hathaway (University of Northern Colorado), Sean Galvin (LaGuardia Community College), and Amanda Dargan (City Lore), who discussed various ways to integrate folklore into college curricula.

A second panel, “Folklore and Education: Culture and Practice,” focused on ways folklore can be employed to teach writing and to explore cultural diversity. Speakers were Deborah Anderson (Blach Intermediate School), Rachel Gholson (Southwest Missouri State University), Chris-Anne Stumpf (Aspect Language School), Mutuota Kigotho (Macquarie University), and Deeksha Nagar (University of Northern Colorado).

ANNOUNCEMENT!

During this fall's AFS meeting in Atlanta, Gail Matthews-DeNatale will be conducting a morning-long workshop on digital storytelling. Gail is Senior Instructional Systems
Designer at Simmons College in Massachusetts where she works on a variety of computer applications for educational development. Gail also holds the PhD in Folklore from Indiana University and has completed significant work in South Carolina. The Digital Storytelling Workshop will be dealing with strategy making for digital storytelling work. This is not as much a "how-to" workshop as it is a "how-to-think" workshop.

The workshop is open to all who will be attending the 2005 AFS meeting. It is free of charge.