Through the Schoolhouse Door

Folklore, Community, Curriculum

Utah State University Press

Copyright © 2011 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-859-6

Contents

Foreword: How to Begin to Know What You Didn't Know Bonnie Stone Sunstein....................................................................................................ixIntroduction: Through the Schoolhouse Door Lynne Hamer and Paddy Bowman......................................................................................................11 "I Didn't Know What I Didn't Know": Reciprocal Pedagogy Paddy Bowman.......................................................................................................192 A Tale of Discovery: Folklorists and Educators Collaborate to Create and Implement the Louisiana Voices Educator's Guide Maida Owens with Eileen Engel.....................473 Here at Home: Learning Local-Culture Pedagogy through Cultural Tours Anne Pryor, Debbie Kmetz, Ruth Olson, and Steven A. Ackerman..........................................684 Art at the Threshold: Folk Artists in an Urban Classroom Amanda Dargan.....................................................................................................995 From "Show-Me" Traditions to "The Show-Me Standards": Teaching Folk Arts in Missouri Classrooms Lisa L. Higgins and Susan Eleuterio........................................1206 Every Student Rich in Culture: Nebraska Folklife Trunks Gwendolyn K. Meister with Patricia C. Kurtenbach...................................................................1397 Folkvine.org: Exploring Arts-Based Research and Habits of Mind Kristin G. Congdon with Karen Branen........................................................................1518 "When Lunch Was Just Lunch and Not So Complicated": (Re)Presenting Student Culture through an Alternative Tale Lisa Rathje..................................................1689 Turning the University Inside Out: The Padua Alliance for Education and Empowerment Lynne Hamer............................................................................192Conclusion: Learned Lessons, Foreseeable Futures Paddy Bowman and Lynne Hamer................................................................................................217Works Cited...................................................................................................................................................................226Appendix: Selected Folk Arts in Education Resources...........................................................................................................................236

Chapter One

"I Didn't Know What I Didn't Know" Reciprocal Pedagogy Paddy Bowman

Ask someone to tell you the most important thing he or she has learned, and you will be told a story. Deep learning takes the form of a story. The most important stories in education often aren't the ones we are told—they are the ones we live. To be deeply changed requires a quest with our emotions and desires engaged, so a powerful education is necessarily an adventure that can be narrated. —Michael Umphrey, The Power of Community-Centered Education, 15

This chapter chronicles the arc of my development as a teacher educator. Documenting my teaching comes from the natural habit of a folklorist. I take notes and photographs and hang onto teachers' assignments, evaluations, and artwork. My original chapter concept took me to thick files in my informal archive. I planned to appraise teachers' assignments accumulating since 1994 to illustrate the powerful promise of folklore and fieldwork for K–12 educators' understanding the deep connection between traditional culture and formal pedagogy. My research revealed more than I had anticipated— one of the gifts of writing, of course. Reviewing teachers' work and my field notes exposed how much I had needed to learn about teaching teachers. This personal account describes how and why I came to love working in education and believe so strongly that folklorists in academic and public programs gain from such engagement. I have learned firsthand the transformational impact of teachers and students learning from and with each other—"emotions and desires engaged"—an event that is powerful enough to be narrated. I call this reciprocal pedagogy to highlight the deep collaborative relationship that good teaching involves, whether within the traditional or the academic sphere.

In her 1994 presidential address to the American Folklore Society, Sylvia Grider chose folklore and teaching as her theme, urging folklorists to take teaching seriously because "teaching is so fundamental to the function and process of folklore that tradition cannot exist without it" (1995, 179). Both folklorists and educators are intimately concerned with the transmission of knowledge, but we are engaged with different realms of knowledge and methods of transmission. Finding ways to meld these ways of knowing profits folklorists as well as teachers. I hope that my journey inspires other folklorists to engage in education and with educators and students as teacher, collaborator, and fieldworker. Perhaps my evolution as an educator who began by modeling her graduate-school pedagogy for K–12 teachers may serve as a cautionary tale, allowing others to avoid mistakes that I made.

I also hope that educators will learn more about the perspectives of folklorists and the potential educational gifts of our discipline, for example, culturally authentic resources and ethnographic fieldwork methods. Such research can shift perspective and suspend judgment, which in turn can positively influence the teacher-pupil connection for the dozens of new students whom teachers face each year. "Through modeling and encouraging the development of fieldworker skills and attitudes, teachers foster an environment in which children are enabled to be both the resource and the analyst for the study of expressive human behavior. The student and teacher are placed in a cooperative relationship" (Haut 1994, 56). Finally, as Grider said, "The act of teaching is the connection between the formulaic classroom exercise and the age-old process of tradition. In both instances, the precious materials that provide essential cultural continuity are transmitted from the masters to the neophytes, from one generation to the next, in what we hope will be an unbroken chain but which, in reality, is only a frayed and tangled thread" (1995, 179). Again folklorists and educators are bound by their love of knowledge and its transmission.

Since 1993 I have had the satisfaction of coordinating a network funded by the National Endowment for the Arts Folk and Traditional Arts Program to advocate for the inclusion of folk arts and artists in the nation's education. Now called Local Learning, we began as the National Task Force on Folk Arts in Education after a roundtable that the Folk and Traditional Arts Program convened to assess the state of the field of Folk Arts in Education (FAIE) and bring FAIE advocates together with Arts in Education (AIE) leaders. My position as director keeps me in touch with folklorists, folk artists, and educators who work in many settings. I gather and disseminate information on FAIE resources and training opportunities, provide technical assistance, coedit a national newsletter called CARTS (Cultural Arts Resources for Teachers and Students), and manage locallearningnetwork. org, our new Web site first launched in 1996 as CARTS.org.

The network's founding coincided with the inception of the Arts Education Partnership (AEP)—a national coalition of almost 150 organizations. 1 I have served on the AEP steering committee since its beginning and often work with AIE colleagues and projects. Articulating the differences between these related fields is an ongoing conversation in which I point to the emphasis on ethnography and learning within traditional folk groups in everyday life as FAIE hallmarks. In addition, I develop FAIE curriculum, lead workshops, and direct teacher institutes around the country. Since 2004 I have been teaching in the more formal structure of a university master's degree program for teachers. It is in this role that I have come to appreciate— and communicate—better the "so what" of our field in the context of social foundations of education. I have not stopped learning about teaching since I first stepped onto this path by accident, not by intent.

The Thrill of It All

Two time zones away from home, I stand in a roomy school library where the hands on the wall clock point to five o'clock and survey a new cohort of graduate education students. A typical class of eighteen teachers—mostly women, mostly white—gaze expectantly from their chairs around tables crowded with large drinks, cracker boxes, candy bags, spiral notebooks, and laptop computers. Containers brimming with art supplies spill onto the floor. Even after teaching all week, somehow they are ready for class on this Friday evening. Outside dusk is well under way. By the time we adjourn at ten o'clock, I will have learned a great deal about my students and this place that is brand new to me. Although the teachers have been together in a master's program for almost two years, and many are teaching where they grew up, they, too, will learn new information about one another and their community throughout the weekend.

I have spent the day bustling around in search of local businesses where my students can document occupational culture on Saturday morning. My day of hasty fieldwork has involved plenty of U-turns, but my introduction to this small city has given me clues about neighborhood boundaries, the economy, architectural styles, arts facilities, new immigrants, established residents, and a list of sites to check out further: a mural in progress, a small Asian market, a community garden. A phone call to a folklorist in the state capital prior to this visit did not turn up much because she had never conducted fieldwork in this region, but by the time I leave Sunday night, I will have a notebook filled with field notes and my students' lore that I will later share with her.

My peripatetic pedagogy delights me time and again as I engage in similar routines in new towns—more than twenty in the past seven years. I relish my discoveries about a place and my students. They start to see their community differently through my outsider's eyes, and we weave a trusting learning environment, which will allow me to choose appropriate ways to take them across new cultural boundaries when I return in a month to finish the course. In the meantime, they have a lot to digest, plus assignments to complete, on top of their classroom teaching, and I will return to my regular work back East.

Everything I've Learned Began with Kindergarten

My initial desire to investigate folklore in K–12 education sprang from my daughter's enrollment in kindergarten in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1988. Her teacher was new to northern Virginia and public schools and did not connect well with students and families. I volunteered in the class in the hope that I might deepen her cultural understanding and engagement with students, parents, and the neighborhood. I trekked to the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress to review FAIE resources and shared them with the teacher. Soon she urged me to "teach the children about folklore," so I developed a unit for the young students on cowboy culture. This caught the notice of the district social-studies curriculum specialist, who got excited about folklore in the classroom and hired me to conduct a workshop for the school system's annual in-service training day. I thought that I knew all about workshops. I considered myself a serious scholar who knew her way around libraries and MLA citation formats. This would be Folklore 101 in two hours.

My early attempts to teach teachers replicated my graduate-school experience. I wrote lengthy definitions on a chalkboard to support my lecture. Not only did I write "folklore" and "fieldwork" on the board, but I wrote LOTS more terms along the lines of "emic," "etic," "liminality," and "variant." As twenty teachers settled into desks, I straightened my pages of notes on the podium and began lecturing. Occasionally I referred to the chalkboard and underlined a word to drive home a point. Eyelids began drooping. Teachers were napping. In my class! As I began sharing examples of my personal folklore to illustrate genres, however, people woke up and started chortling. The more they laughed, the more stories I told. I became a stand-up comic. Lesson learned: one must engage teachers, not merely inform them.

When I repeated my floor show at a parent-teacher workshop, evaluations brought me up short: "Ask others about their traditions." "Speaker needs to use hands-on activities." I felt defeated. There was no time in my already-truncated Folklore 101 lecture to elicit examples from participants. And how could I deliver complex theory and scholarly definitions through "hands-on activities"?

In 1995 Elizabeth Simons, author of the notable book about folklore for teachers, Student Worlds, Student Words: Teaching Writing through Folklore (1990), reiterated the admonition to make my teaching interactive and involve participants. I had asked her help designing a syllabus for a three-week graduate education course called the Multicultural Folklife Institute, which the University of Virginia Northern Virginia Center had invited me to teach with funding from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (VFH). "I know you," Liz said. "You're great at talking, but you have to let others talk." I addressed this by inviting a host of colleagues from the area to give the lectures. I would share glories of my discipline, and teachers would see how vital folklore and fieldwork were to their classroom practice.

Except for Liz's book, my reading list featured nothing about K–12 education. I was teaching Folklore 101 again. I had turned to Liz because of her excellent demonstration during the first American Folklore Society (AFS) education workshop, cosponsored by the National Task Force on Folk Arts in Education and the AFS Folklore and Education Section in Milwaukee in 1994. Liz had modeled impressive in-depth activities, evoking naming traditions and memories of childhood play through writing. I decided to adapt these to open my course. Liz had also introduced me to the National Writing Project, for which she was a trainer, so I had become familiar with the process-method teaching of writing and the current trend of dialogue journaling with teachers. To make room for everything else that I had packed into the three-week syllabus, I chose to journal with teachers about their nightly folklore reading assignments to track their comprehension. Each day we heard from scholars and watched folklore documentaries. We occasionally ate in local Vietnamese and Salvadoran restaurants and visited the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, where teachers went behind the scenes to learn from program curators and participants. During the second week, teachers practiced interviewing, audio and video recording, and photography in preparation for individual fieldwork projects to present on the last day of class in the third week. I had failed to realize that it would be their fieldwork that would finally be transformative.

Breaking the Folklore 101 Mold

A turning point came when journaling began to feel like psychotherapy. Diligent teachers sat up night after night reading lengthy articles after a full day of class, and I sat awake responding to their journal entries. These intimate midnight dialogues exposed teachers' discoveries, but instead of the revelations about folklore and the classroom that I had anticipated, the teachers related personally to scholars' writing. For instance, Victor Turner's ritual theories inspired often-moving descriptions of their own liminal experiences, such as becoming a novice, pregnancies, miscarriages, betrothals, divorces, and a year of chemotherapy. I had witnessed the power of teachers applying folkloristic theory to personal-experience narrative, but I wanted to divert attention and make connections to their students, classrooms, and communities. To avoid becoming the accidental therapist, during class I began to frame readings with questions and brought discussion out of journals and into the classroom to make way for integrating folklore theory into classroom practices.

An anonymous class notebook also offered feedback on my pedagogy. Despite generally positive comments, my oversights emerged. One teacher admonished, "Ask us to draw instead of write. People can tell the stories of their drawings instead of reading their writing." Someone reacted to yet another guest scholar by writing, "Now that you know that most teachers in graduate classes come prepared to work, I think you might put more emphasis on our project presentations. The guest speakers are good, but we want to hear from each other." Tellingly, someone advised me to move the fieldwork earlier: "This is the heart of the course; we should be doing it at the front end." Another wrote, "Venn diagrams are good for comparing and contrasting information." Note to self: ask a teacher how to use a Venn diagram.

Phase two of my education about teaching began. Tackling individual fieldwork projects challenged the teachers, dramatically deepening their understanding of folklore. I did not line up places or people for them to document, and later I realized that—despite their initial anxiety—their choices were wholly organic to their personal interests or curricula. They eased themselves over their discomfort, but at the same time, they stretched themselves. For example, a former radio journalist who had become a middle-school media instructor eschewed audio to photograph neighborhood taverns in black and white. Others selected neighbors or places they had always wondered about or returned to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival to seek out specific artists about whom they were curious. Teachers were also designing curriculum units—a course requirement—and brainstorming some classroom applications in our group discussions. The course was starting to accomplish what I had anticipated.

I also learned of these teachers' preconceptions about folklore. Like the general public, most viewed folklore as antiquated or "other." In the class notebook, someone wrote,

When I mentioned to my friends that I was going to be in this course, they all chuckled and asked if I would be wearing gauze skirts and love beads and playing the guitar. I honestly wasn't sure. The course outline certainly helped me fine-tune my preconceived notions, but even those notions were redefined after our first class. The most significant realization that I walked away with is this: we live folklore every day, and I am starting to view my stories differently and am discovering how my students' stories of their lives will play an important role in the classroom.

Such observations reveal the challenges with which most American folklorists are familiar. People often see our discipline as marginal as well as static. By evoking teachers' folklore and supporting their fieldwork, I was witnessing successes, yet I wanted to motivate more transference from folklore to classroom. I was leaving connections too implicit, assuming that teachers would build the bridge from the course to curriculum.

(Continues...)

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