New Educational Resources
by Gregory Hansen, Arkansas State University
 

The Folklore and Education Section welcomes announcements of new instructional resources for teaching about folklore. Send word of completed projects as well as descriptions of works-in-progress to Gregory Hansen at ghansen@astate.edu.

The Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and Smithsonian Folkways Recordings has numerous new educational resources available.

The four-part DVD, White House Workers: Traditions and Memories, includes Marjorie Hunt’s 1994 documentary as well as additional videos and educational resources on the occupational traditions of White House staff.

Música del Pueblo is a new online exhibition from the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. It offers more than two dozen videos, each with interpretive text, representing many homegrown musical styles—from Chicago hip-hop to Mexican mariachi to Chilean nueva canción to ancient ritual matachín dance from New Mexico, and more. This virtual exhibition can be found at www.musicadelpueblo.org, and it will eventually include hundreds of tracks of music and detailed information on dozens of musical styles and instruments.

Smithsonian staff continually update Global Sound. This international network of music audio archives is an educational resource that delivers the world’s diverse cultural expressions in an informative way via digital media. New features, including ideas and resources for educators in history, geography, language arts, social studies, visual arts, and of course music and dance, are available at www.smithsonianglobalsound.org.

The Smithsonian Folklife and Oral History Interviewing Guide is available to download for free on the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage Web site: www.folklife.si.edu/explore/Resources/InterviewGuide/InterviewGuide_home.html.

Marjorie Hunt’s book, The Stone Carvers: Master Craftsmen of Washington National Cathedral, has been reprinted in paperback by Smithsonian Books, and it is available for $19.95 through HarperCollins Publishers. Call 800/331-3761 for individual orders. Her Academy Award winning documentary, The Stone Carvers, portrays the art of the Italian-American master carvers of Washington National Cathedral. Directed and produced by Hunt and Paul Wagner, the film is available in both DVD and VHS formats.

  

Nathaniel Johnson, Director of Education at New York’s Museum for African Art, offers a teacher’s guide for the exhibition "Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art." The guide is an educational companion to both the exhibit and the catalogue and available as a free pdf download from the museum’s Web site at www.africanart.org/uploads/resources/docs/gr.pdf. For more about the exhibit, visit www.africanart.org/current/17/grass_roots_african_origins_of_an_american_art.

Winnie Lambrecht recently completed an exchange project between teachers in Quebec, New York, Vermont, and Rhode Island. The project included a bilingual brochure which summarizes a history of Quebec and touches on musical and other folk traditions in Quebec and the Franco communities in NewYork and New England. For ordering information, contact Winnie at wlambrec@risd.edu.
Kathleen Jenks, a retired professor from Pacifica Graduate Institute, offers an annotated “Myth*ing Links” Web site on mythology, lore, ritual, sacred art, and folklore at www.mythinglinks.org. It includes ample reference and bibliographic materials that students may use in their own research and writing.
Riki Saltzman, Folklife Coordinator for the State of Iowa, announces the new Iowa folklife curriculum is available at: www.uni.edu/iowaonline/folklife_v2/.

“Iowa Folklife, Volume II” explores the traditional music, foods, dance, rituals and crafts of Iowa's diverse cultures. This online resource includes content pages, photos, audio samples, suggested readings, lesson plans, and a variety of online resources for students (k-12) and educators. It is a companion to “Iowa Folklife: Our People, Communities, and Traditions,” and the new resource represents many years of creative collaboration with traditional artists, their communities, museum and library educators, and multicultural curriculum specialists.
Jo Farb Hernandez, Director of the Natalie and James Thompson Art Gallery, has made available four films from the series "Forms of Tradition in Contemporary Spain." The four films can stand alone, although they are part of a series made to accompany a book and exhibition by the same title that Jo produced for San Jose State University in 2005-06. The films are case studies of four considerably different kinds of artists: a traditional potter, a couple that creates huge paper-maché figures for festival processions and dancing, a group of masked, costumed “devils” that enlivens traditional street theatre with modern pyrotechnics, and an idiosyncratic builder of one of the most spectacular “art environments” known worldwide. The four films are “Evelio Lopez Cruz” (potter, Mota del Cuervo);“Ventura and Hosta” (paper-mache artists, Navata);“Les Gargoles de Foc” (street theatre/performance artists, Banyoles); and “Josep Pujiula i Vila” (art environment builder, Argelaguer). For ordering information, contact Jo at jfh@cruzio.com.

Karen Ellis continues to add to “Educational Cyber Playground” at www.edu-cyberpg.com. She is revising the “Pennsylvania Folklore Standards,” and the publication will be available as a “print on demand” book through her Web site.

 

 
Marsha MacDowell and LuAnne Kozma of the Michigan Traditional Arts Program, Michigan State University Museum, announce the publication of Folk Arts in Education: A Resource Handbook II, a revision of the "Orange Notebook" Marsha published twenty years ago. It is available in CD version, hardcopy (in an orange notebook, of course) and at www.folkartsineducation.org. The project was funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs. To order, go to www.museum.msu.edu, then click on the link for the MTAP Store.
Natalie Kononenko, of the University of Alberta, has developed educational resources on her Ukrainian Bilingual Web site “Shkola” (Ukrainian for "school"). The Shkola Web site is aimed at grades 3-4 in the Ukrainian Bilingual Program in Edmonton. There are sections on “City,” “Village,” “Traditions,” “Children’s Games,” and seven downloadable workbooks. Each section contains pictures, videos, and Virtual Reality movies: www.arts.ualberta.ca/Shkola/.
Rita Moonsamy has helped to produce a new exhibit that includes virtual exhibit entitled “Culture in Context: A Tapestry of Expression” for the New Jersey State Museum. The on-line component can be found at www.cultureincontext.org. The Web site includes portraits of folk artists and a wealth of materials that can be used in classroom instruction.