To read the minutes of the 2007 meeting of the Folklore & Education Section, click here.

Folklore and Education panels

The section sponsored two panels at the 2007 AFS meeting. The first, "Intersections of New Media, Folklife, and Education," featured four papers about ways in which technology can be put to use to bring folklore to life both for those who collect it and those who teach it. Lisa Falk explained how a group of University of Arizona students created podcasts based on fieldwork they'd done that were then made available to visitors to the Arizona State Museum's exhibits about the "Masks of Mexico" and "Las Super Luchas." Sean Galvin talked about the moving ways in which students and faculty at his campus used digital storytelling to open up a dialogue about religious belief and cross-cultural misunderstandings. Bonnie Sunstein discussed the uses and misuses of the Web site she created to accompany her textbook Fieldworking, and Alysia McLain talked about a collaborative podcasting project involving local teachers, students, and the Juneau-Douglas City Museum in Juneau, Alaska.

The second session, "Making the Intangible Tangible," invited participants to browse the very "tangible" folklore and education materials that the participants brought to the meeting. Maida Owens discussed the Louisiana Folklife Program's kit, "In the Wake of the Hurricanes," designed to help students work through responses to Hurricane Katrina by doing interviews and fieldwork. Anne Pryor gave an update on the Wisconsin Teachers of Local Culture project and the ways its participants have implemented ethnographic work into their classrooms. Lisa Higgins brought her Missouri Folk Arts and Folklife Educator's Guide, and Gwen Meister, Pat Kurtenbach, and Steve Swidler brought along a couple of the themed "cultural encounter kits" they send out to schools through the Nebraska Humanities Council. The kits allow the Nebraska Folklife Network to extend its reach into more remote parts of Nebraska.

Saturday workshop: "Translations: Folk Arts Across the Curriculum"

The section's 14th annual Saturday workshop focused on a challenge folklorists frequently face: interpreting our field to non-folklorists. In K-12 settings we are often perceived as professional storytellers or “folk musicians,” not as scholars of dynamic, living cultural expressions. Yet the content and methodologies of our discipline are invaluable pedagogical tools that acknowledge students as cultural experts and teach critical-inquiry skills across curricula.

The 2007 workshop kicked off with a presentation by Luc Gugliemi (French Program Coordinator, Department of Foreign Languages, Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA) on using oral tradition in classroom activities across curricula: not just in language arts classes, but in math, sciences, social sciences, and even physical education.

Amanda Dargan (Education Director, City Lore, New York, NY) then spoke about her highly successful artist- and teacher-training projects that help traditional artists work in schools. Since artists-in-schools programming is now routinely expected to address state standards, orienting artists to those standards and helping them integrate them into curricula and classrooms can be a challenge not only for the artists themselves, but for for folklorists and teachers as well. Amanda's presentation addressed ways to aid the "professionalization" of teaching artists.

After a resource-sharing session, the workshop concluded with a session on ways to get students doing field research in their home communities by Greg Sharrow (Director of Education, Vermont Folklife Center, Middlebury, VT). Greg illustrated multiple ways in which students can use fieldwork techniques to create community podcasts, personal "audio journals," and other sonic documents that allow students to investigate topics of interest to them.

As always, both the section's panels and the Saturday morning workshop provided participants with lots of inspiration and concrete ideas to take back to their own work.

Greg Sharrow discusses ways to connect with teens through fieldwork and digital storytelling.

Participants review resources and exchange ideas during a workshop break.

Some of the many folklore & education resources on display.