As the national arts service organization for folk arts and education, we share to the field our activities with the American Folklore Society. Find our 2024 Annual Report available at: https://locallearningnetwork.org/about-local-learning and below find our 2025 activities to date.

Resources

Announcing publication of Cultural Frameworks for Transformative Documenting and Learning, Naomi Sturm-Wijesinghe and Mauricio Bayona, of Los Herederos, are Guest Editors. This volume offers educators case studies, activities, and creative entry points to engage the art of documentation in our learning spaces.

Write for our upcoming issue on Teaching with Monsters: From Whimsy to Shadow.
The 2026 Journal of Folklore and Education seeks submissions that recognize monsters, cryptids, and the legendary beings of our family stories and community narratives as powerful communicative tools in the classroom and beyond. The exploration of monstrosity can serve as a medium that helps us to talk about topics that can be difficult to address in other ways. Considering the role that monsters play in informal modes of education within a diverse range of communities, this issue will provide models for thinking about how educators both inside and outside the classroom might engage with these expressions of folklife in their pedagogy.

We seek submissions that present case studies, programs, lesson plans, teaching modules, and research based in education through monster and legendary creature exploration. Examples might include:

• Stories and/or examples of diverse teaching approaches in classroom settings and beyond, in which monsters, cryptids, and legendary creatures serve as an educational tool
• Lesson plans and/or curricula that involve education through monsters, cryptids, or their related creatures–from the whimsical to the terrible
• Interdisciplinary approaches to monstrosity as a communicative tool to explore complex information through education, such as diverse art forms, narratives, movies, TV shows, podcasts, memes, TikToks, and other media

Access the full call and submission portal here.

Have a text, website, film, or resource that you would like to be considered for review in the Journal of Folklore and Education? Please contact our Review Editor Taylor Dooley Burden at reviews@JFEpublications.org.

Two websites published with your education needs in mind.
https://LocalLearningNetwork.org
The Local Learning website offers resources that include learning activities and research that are searchable by theme, topic, and subject. We have also continued to maintain and update our national and regional folklife listings–pointing visitors to organizations and individuals near them. We also invite all our visitors to learn more about why they might want to bring Local Learning staff and consultants into their school, museum, or community to build resources, learning activities, and deeper understanding of shared assets. You might even discover there is a Local Learning workshop planned in your region! Have feedback or updates you want to see on our website? Contact us.

https://JFEpublications.org
The Journal of Folklore and Education (ISSN 2573-2072) is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal published annually by Local Learning: The National Network for Folk Arts in Education. Housed in the website JFEpublications.org, you can search by author, find full citations for the articles, browse by theme and issue, and more easily sort by subject, theme, and topic.

Connect

• Culture, Community, and the Classroom offers targeted professional development to artists who are then partnered with teachers for direct applications of their new knowledge and offering teachers an opportunity to learn more about the cultural expertise in their own community. 2025 saw CCC on Long Island, New York and Madison, Wisconsin.
• New York Folklore continues to be a core partner and contributes to supporting Mira Johnson is our Director of Learning Networks and Training. (You can reach her at Mira@locallearningnetwork.org.) A special project that was started in 2025 is the NY Teaching Artist Roster with a special credential available to artists who have completed the training offered through CCC.
• Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) is the Library of Congress premier educational program, focused on helping educators enhance students’ critical thinking and analysis skills and content knowledge using the Library’s collections of millions of digitized primary sources. Local Learning is co-directing the curriculum and professional development project with the American Folklore Society and our partners Vermont Folklife Center, Oklahoma State University Library and the Oklahoma Oral History Research Project, and New York Folklore. Now in our 4th year, we have curricula and learning activities available for immediate use. Learn more, find the most recent news, and access resources as they are available at https://locallearningnetwork.org/professional-development/tps.
• Share your updates and new resources for the Regional Resources section https://locallearningnetwork.org/resources/regional-organizations/
• If you have news for our quarterly e-bulletins with a national audience, send us a 100-word summary with a photo to mira@locallearningnetwork.org with the subject line: For LL Quarterly News

Local Learning at AFS

Local Learning staff will be at the American Folklore Society Meeting in Atlanta. Specific events to highlight can be found at https://locallearningnetwork.org/afs-education-session-guide-2025

Please note that the Local Learning Workshop open to the public is happening on Saturday, October 18th. All are welcome. Please let us know you are coming, using the registration link.

Advocacy

Local Learning continues to take an active role in national conversations around advocacy for arts, arts education, and folklife.

Consultancy and Cross-disciplinary presentations to increase folklore visibility

If you want to bring us to your community or organization for professional development or a project (large or small), let us know. Some examples of projects we have been engaged in over the past two years include:

• As a named consultant in the REACH grant from the Department of Education to the University of South Florida and Arts Schools Network, Local Learning is continuing to ensure that folk arts are included in the development of culturally-inclusive arts integration curricula..
• National Arts Education Association presentations for national convention (March)