To read the minutes of the 2008 meeting of the Folklore & Education Section, click here.

Saturday workshop: "Local Learning: Honoring the Commons in the Classroom"

The section's 15th annual Saturday workshop focused on the "common"--and yet extraordinary--cultural experiences that groups share, and the ways teachers can draw on these experiences to bring communities to life in their classrooms.

Judy Sizemore, Outreach Director for the Kentucky Arts Council, started the workshop by describing a program that brings 4th and 5th grade teachers to the biennial Kentucky Folklife Festival a day prior to the teachers' bringing their students. During this "preview" session, teachers meet with folk artists and performers and receive a contextual orientation to the Festival that helps them better guide their students through the experience on the following day.

Community scholar and folk artist Jennifer Rose Escobar of Berea then demonstrated the teacher-workshop strategies they've used with teachers using the Folklife Festival as curriculum and classroom. Teachers in these workshops produce PowerPoint presentations, short films, or other documents focusing on a specific community tradition that they can take back to their classrooms with them. To show how she's engaged in this process herself, Jennifer played several traditional tunes on the dulcimer and even got the crowd up and dancing on an early Saturday morning to show how her interest in Appalachian music and dance grew into a research trip to experience traditional music and dance in Spain.

Emily Coffey, recipient of the 2008 Robinson-Roeder-Ward Fellowship, took the mic to describe how her participation in the Kentucky Folklife Festival program led her to create a folk-arts curriculum with social-studies and music teachers in her small, rural Kentucky school district.

Jeff Hooper of the Ohio Arts Council joined the group to talk about grant opportunities and links between folk-arts educators and arts educators.

In the final session, Sarah Milligan (Kentucky Oral History Commission Program Coordinator) and Ashley Jackson introduced the "Kentucky Remembers" project, which trains teens too interview Civil Rights Movement veterans, develop community projects, and be human rights activists. To put theory into practice, community scholar Alfredo Escobar led the entire group in a communal mural project, asking indivuduals to document their own history in a piece of art, and then link it to the artwork of others in their group to create a "mural." As you can see, there were many colorful stories in the room!

Jennifer Rose Escobar gets ready to play her dulcimer.

Dancin' folklorists take to the hotel's hallways!

Dancing in the aisles at the Saturday workshop.

Emily Coffey, the 2008 Robinson-Roeder-Ward Fellow, discusses her use of folk arts in the classroom.