Dorothy Howard: An Annotated Bibliography
1.
This annotated bibliography of the work of folklorist
and educator Dorothy Howard (1902-1996) provides information on Howard’s contributions
to folklore and education and celebrate her vision and efforts in the classroom.
Dr. Howard taught in elementary and secondary schools
from 1923 to 1967 and researched and documented children’s folklore throughout
this period. While her work is well known in the field of children’s folklore,
her pioneering work in folklore and education is relatively unsung.
The bibliography has two parts. The first is a biographical sketch of Dr.
Howard based on information provided by Howard, Sylvia Grider’s biography
of Howard for the Children’s Folklore Review, and my conversations with Dr.
Howard in 1989. Embedded in the sketch is an analysis of Howard’s contributions
to the field of folklore and education. The second part is the bibliography
itself with annotations related to each work’s contributions to folklore and
education from both a classroom and a social point of view.
This project benefited from Traditional Arts Growth assistance
from the National Endowment for the Arts. I would also like to thank the staff
in the Rare Books Division of the University of North Texas library system.
Additionally, Paddy Bowman, Sylvia Grider, Eileen Knott, and Joey Brackner
provided advice, information, and hospitality that helped to propel this
project. All thanks, no blame
2.
Dorothy Gray Mills Howard was born 8 July 1902, the fourth
child of Leonidas and Lou Florence Mills. Having two sisters and a brother
helped to break the isolation of life in the Texas Sabine Bottom, and Howard
documents a rich play life with her siblings in her book Dorothy’s World:
Childhood in Sabine Bottom, 1902-1910.
Howard started school in 1908 already able to spell and
write her name and the ABCs – forward and backward. This precociousness stood
well for her when at age 17 Howard was hired to take over the class of a teacher
who had recently died. Not to clamp on what can be called a creative brake,
Howard included her students in their learning by having them do such things
as write letters to their new teacher using lessons learned in a class on
letter writing. She would respond to these letters one by one, with the kind
of respect for childhood that teachers today do not always have time to express.
In 1920, Howard enrolled in the North Texas State Normal
School. There she undertook a course of study that culminated in a B.S. in
education in 1923. At that time she also received a permanent teaching certificate
from the State of Texas.
Throughout her life, Howard was an intensely private
person. As a result, we know little about her personal life as it relates
to her professional development. It is the tone of her intensely descriptive
writing that sheds clues onto her beliefs about education, society, and folklore
studies.
As a teacher, Howard claimed one of her pedagogical purposes
was to be “to open doors for children to the joys of literature in books,
and to self-confidence and pleasure in developing their own power over language,
manipulating and playing with words.” (1977:289) She wrote of herself:
As a wandering school teacher, Dorothy in 1930 became a
teaching principal in a consolidated rural school in New York State. One problem
that soon became her great concern was the fact that most of the children,
especially the boys, reached the junior high school grades “hating” poetry.
Looking for the causes, she learned that their elementary classroom experiences
with poetry had included: (1) homework memory assignments of (2) poems chosen
by the teacher (a woman) for (3) didactic purposes and (4) memorized as a
chore to escape punishment.
Then one spring day at noon she stood
at an open classroom window pondering that problem, casually watching the
children play on an unsupervised playground. Skip ropes were turning; marbles,
rolling; balls, bouncing, Gradually she became aware of metaphoric, rhythmic
language accompanying the body movements of the children …
By the time the bell rang calling the
children in, she had counted on her fingers more than a dozen rhymes and
formulae; and when the children came to class, rhymes, rhythms, and metaphors
of the playground language were discussed, The next day, self-assigned homework
was brought in, and by week’s end, the class had a collection of more than
two hundred playground rhymes.
It soon became clear to Dorothy that their
joy in poetry came from orchestrated body movements, including the voice.
One class discussion led to another: metric and cadenced rhythms; kinds of
rhymes and sound –meaning … Discussions led to dramatic choral reading activities,
to group creative verse writing, to individual creative writing, and to reading
poetry in books, first to limericks then to “Jabberwocky,” and gradually to
serious poems. (Howard 1977:287-288)
It was in 1933 that Howard learned of folklore. In a
conversation with English professor Dr. Walter Barnes at New York University,
she learned that her research on children’s speech play had a rich 19th century
history with the work of Newell, Gomme, and others.
Howard’s continued interest in children’s speech play
led to her 1938 NYU EdD dissertation on the Jingles of American Children,
a detailed study of children’s speech past and present. She never confined
herself to rhyming speech. In 1936, for example she described a class in New
Jersey exploring language by studying their last names and family history.
(Howard: 1936: In another instance Howard worked with a student, Tony,
on a creative writing piece describing him and his mother making ravioli using
his mother’s traditionally learned recipe.(Howard: 1941: ) Ever sensitive
to children’s culture, it seems that Howard developed a kind of empathetic
spirit with her young students. She furthered children’s learning by remembering
her own childhood. She had “been there,” and showed that side of herself
to her students.
In 1944 Howard left public school teaching and moved
to Frostburg State Teacher’s College in western Maryland. There she taught
courses in literature, and she also taught a folklore class in which students
were required to prepare a childlife autobiography documenting daily life,
including play. She also established a small museum of western Maryland folk
culture that did not sustain.
By the 1950s, Howard was thinking about the relationship
of folklore and education. In 1950 she published an article on “Folklore in
the Schools” for the New York Folklore Quarterly. This is what she said about
folklore and education:
Folklore has a justifiable place in the schools, not as a separate subject,
or for the purpose of making folklorists out of children, or as an academic
book exercise but as an integral part of a co-ordinated program for child
growth and development. (Howard:1950:99)
Folklore was something to be documented, yes, but it
was also to be made a part of the curriculum. You use folklore to teach subject
areas, you use students’ folklore to teach subject areas and to inspire self-esteem
and cultural awareness. The two happen together and without conflict for they
can be nestled into curriculum standards and demands.
In 1954, Howard’s interests became comparative. She was
curious: what was children’s culture like in another English- speaking country?
She chose Australia as her point of entry, and received Fulbright funding
to go to Australia for 10 months to explore children’s folklore Down Under,
sponsored by the University of Melbourne.
Howard traversed the country and documented children’s
play in all of the Australian states. What she found was that children’s folklore
in Australia was rich and unattended by adults who were convinced that there
was no such thing as Australian folklore, but rather that it was all British
folklore. Howard’s articles on children’s folklore in Australia worked hard
to debunk that “myth,” and to a certain extent she succeeded. Today Howard
is credited with spearheading the children’s folklore study movement in Australia,
and in 2004 her efforts will be celebrated on their 50th anniversary.
Back at Frostburg, Howard continued to teach courses
in folklore that required the childlife autobiography. Most of the explorations
are actually catalogues of play activities with little or no analysis of their
significance. Perhaps Howard was contemplating doing that on her own. She
never did.
Howard maintained a keen vision of folklore as a source
for educators. She always considered herself an “eclectic school teacher”
and worked assiduously to hold tight her connection to education through folklore.
She was working at a teacher’s college after all. Over the years, especially
after retiring from Frostburg in 1967, shewrote an autobiography of her own,
Dorothy’s World: Childhood in Sabine Bottom 1902-1910, documenting her own
child culture for the first eight years of her life. She also ventured to
Mexico to learn about the childlife of a child, Pedro of Tonala, whom she
originally met in 1962 while on a trip with anthropologist Francis Gilmore.
Between 1967 and 1968 she served as a visiting professor to the University
of Nebraska where she consulted with teachers on the uses of folklore in the
classroom.
After 1977 Howard stepped back from the limelight. She had moved to Roswell,
New Mexico and kept busy writing her memoirs (never published), poetry, and
preparing to have her materials archived at her alma mater, now the University
of North Texas. She passed away in Massachusetts at the age of 96.
Howard’s contributions to folklore and education are
many. She was a progressive educator in a public school environment,
treating children as children with a great respect for the age of childhood.
Like her private school colleagues Lucy Sprague Mitchell, Elsie Clapp, Caroline
Pratt, Arthur Perry, and John Dewey, Howard saw the child as his or her own
best resource when it came to learning about the world through subject areas.
These educators knew that learning was not confined to the classroom, that
it was a long term endeavor that thrived through many environments. Howard
chose the environment of students’ play as her teaching tool, while others
chose geography and history.
Dr. Howard was a maverick, looking at education from
a child’s perspective. Her work deserves attention in a day and age when
teachers need skill-building authentic resources to achieve state-
mandated standards and objectives. Hence this bibliography.
3. An Annotated Bibliography
Books
1977. Dorothy’s World: Childhood in Sabine Bottom, 1902-1910.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. An intensive documentary of the
childlife and play of one female child, Dorothy Howard.
1989. Pedro of Tonala. Roswell, NM: Hall-Poorbaugh. An intensive documentary
of the childlife of a boy from Jalisco, Mexico.
1938. “Jingles of American Children: A Collection of Rhymes Used by Children
Today.” New York University: EdD dissertation. A study of children’s
rhymes, their antecedents, and significance. Very much like the Opies’ Lore
and Language of School Children.
Articles
1936. “Kite With Rainbow Tail.” Clearing House 10 (8): 451-455.
A description of how children’s vernacular poetry can be composed and used
in a public camp.
1937. (with Morris Bishop) “Onward and Upward with the Arts: Songs of Innocence.”
The New Yorker 13 (November 13) 32-42. A collection of rhymes collected
and culled by Howard to demonstrate children’s creative resourcefuness.
1940. “The Bell Always Rang.” Elementary English Review 17 (7):
262-264. The bell always rang refers to how there was never enough time
in class to work on a project, Specifically, a study of children’s last names
with accompanying family history that the class turned into a book for library
display.
1941. “’Our Own’ in the Classroom” Story Parade (October) 5-6.
Students use traditional foodways to explore creative writing.
1950. “Folklore in the Schools.” New York Folklore Quarterly 6:99-107. A
discussion of how children’s folklore can be used part and parcel of the class
curriculum.
1968. “Folklore in the Elementary Schools.” Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Curriculum Development Center [ERIC # ED-045-679]. A treatise on
(1) children’s folklore (called “childlore”) and (2) children’s rhymes and
customs and how they might be applied in the classroom.
n.d. “Odyssey of A Country School Teacher.” A memoir of growing up
and turning to teaching in the early 1920s.
ESSAY REFERENCES
Factor, June. “A Forgotten Pioneer: Dorothy Howard.” The Educational
Magazine (Australia) 37 (1980): 22-24.
Grider, Sylvia. “Dorothy Howard: Pioneer Collector of Children’s Folklore.”
Children’s Folklore Review 17:1 (1994) 3-17.
Howard, Dorothy. “The Bell Always Rang” Elementary English Review 17(7)
(1936) 262-264.
_________________. “Our Own in the Classroom.” Story Parade
(October) (1941) 5-
________________. “Folklore in the Schools” New York Folklore Quarterly.
6 (1950) 99-107.
_______________. Dorothy’s World: Childhood in Sabine Bottom, 1902-1910.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall 1977.
_____________. “Odyssey of a Country School Teacher.” Unpublished
manuscript, n.d.
Rosenberg, Jan. “A History Lesson in Folklore in Education: Dorothy Howard.”
Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Folklore Society, Oakland,
CA, October 1990.