Join Local Learning staff at the American Folklore Society Meets Oct 28-31, 2026 in Asheville, North Carolina. Learn more about this meaningful gathering of folklorists, culture workers, traditional artists, educators, and affiliated colleagues here.
In partnership with the AFS Folklore in Education Section, we have pulled together this listing of the robust series of sessions you will want to bookmark in your own programs.
AFS 2026 EDUCATION SESSIONS
As of September 8, 2026
WEDNESDAY, October 28
Hands-On Learning in the College Classroom: Creativity and Care through Collaborative Teaching
9:00 AM -10:30 AM [Time Tentative]
Center for Craft, 67 Broadway St
Chair: Marcus Cederstrom.
Presenters: Anna Rue, Jason Schroeder, Christine Widmayer.
Successful hands-on learning requires thoughtful experimentation and collaboration. Hands-on teaching visits allow instructors to teach in other instructors’ courses, thereby introducing students to multiple instructors in engaging ways, and demonstrating how courses relate to one another. Folklorists in this roundtable will present their hands-on learning pedagogy and the cooperative teaching model they use to construct bridges between embodied and abstract learning and between different college courses. Presenters will describe the workshops and discuss the process and logistics of hands-on activities, the challenges of building hands-on learning into courses with varying learning goals and content focuses, and, importantly, student impact.
Persistence through Learning: Folklore Archives and Library Instruction
10:30 AM – 12:00 PM
Alexander
Sponsored by the Archives and Libraries Section.
Chair: Joshua Youngblood
Forum Panelists: Lauren Willette, Sara Barclay, Virginia Siegel, Joshua Youngblood
Many special collections, archives, and other research libraries are fortunate to have records and other collections documenting both folklore and the history or folklore collecting and legacy programs. This forum will share examples from the University of Arkansas Libraries’ instruction, outreach, and community partnerships that leverage folklife archives to grow student engagement and greater awareness of digital initiatives. Within a multifaceted special collections division in an R1 university library, which includes a state folk arts program, rare books and ephemera collections, and extensive manuscript collections, there are also institutional records and significant personal papers.
Folklore and Education Section Business Meeting
12:15 PM – 1:15 PM
Windsor Ballroom A
Folk Arts and Multiliteracies: Crafting an Adolescent Ecosophy
2:00 PM – 2:30 PM
Reading Resource Room
Teresa Youngblood
Fayetteville Public Schools
The New London Group argued that literacy education must engage the full range of modes through which meaning is made: linguistic, visual, spatial, gestural, and embodied. This paper engages that theory in the Ozarks, where a seventh- and eighth-grade reading resource room became a site for multiliteracies practice rooted in ancestral folk knowledge. Reading intervention students engaged Ozark craft traditions, built shadow puppets in a scrolling crankie theater, read widely in Ozarks lore, and wrote their own ecological philosophies. Drawing on multiliteracies theory and Næss’s concept of ecosophy, I argue that regional folk knowledge is not peripheral to literacy education but constitutes one of its most powerful and undertheorized foundations.
Archival Futures: Community Persistence and Primary Sources
4:00 PM – 6:00 PM
Grand Ballroom B
Sponsored by Local Learning, Oklahoma State University, Vermont Folklife, and the Library of Congress.
Local educators welcome!
Presenters: Autumn Brown, Lisa Rathje, Paddy Bowman, Guha Shankar, Andy Kolovos
Through guided discussion and hands-on activities, attendees will engage with curated primary source sets that illuminate community persistence amid social, political, and cultural change. The workshop will also offer practical frameworks for building similar resources within participants’ own institutional and community contexts. Participants will explore how educators, archivists, and community partners collaboratively develop primary source sets that center regional histories, local knowledge systems, and underrepresented voices. This session demonstrates how place-based pedagogy can serve as a tool for both historical reckoning and future imagining. Relatedly, this session will reckon with the idea that when we understand the roots of music, we can better understand ourselves.
THURSDAY, October 29
Incorporating Folklore Techniques in the Classroom
8:00 AM – 10:00 AM
Windsor Ballroom A
Sponsored by the Folklore and Education Section.
Chair: Mary Sellers
Presenters: Mary Sellers, Debra Lattanzi Shutika, Sean Galvin, Linda Deafenbaugh
As educators, we have been reckoning with change causing us to ask, “What we should we prioritize and value in our classrooms?” Should we focus on a set of state-mandated outcomes or the latest findings of the Higher Learning Commission? Should we focus on lived experiences of our students and their communities? This session provides tools to equip educators with folkloristic approaches that celebrate culture and stories while fulfilling the mandated curriculum. We will focus on how to connect with folklorists, how to interview, and how to use multiple ethnographic approaches.
Looking Back/Looking Forward: Play as a Vessel of Culture Change
1:30 PM – 3:00 PM
Windsor Ballroom B
Chair: Anna Beresin
Presenters: Anna Beresin, Mira Johnson, Holly Dalferes, Shannon L. Blady, Lauren Hemard, Paddy Bowman
Play serves as a vessel for complex cultural messages. If “play is a primary resource,” how can we preserve it now and in the future? We return to archived recordings and images through Local Learning’s Folk Sources Project. Then we address the “relearning a culture of play” in embodied adult learning. The Reggio Emilia approach frames our third presentation, linking family folk culture to child-centered activities through a museum in Louisiana. Finally, our panel presents a book on the making of playful objects in England’s changing industrial region. Together, they raise questions about protecting children’s culture and the paradoxes of ephemera.
FRIDAY, October 30
Youth in the Present Tense: Play, Memory, and Agency in Folklore
10:30 AM – 12:00 PM
Victoria
Chair: Kennedi Johnson
Presenters: Carrie Danielson, Sarah Craycraft, Kennedi Johnson
This panel brings together scholars in folklore and ethnomusicology to rethink youth as dynamic sites of agency, collaboration, and cultural production. Rather than positioning young people as future-oriented subjects, we center them as present-tense actors shaping cultural worlds through play, performance, memory, and refusal. Drawing on ethnographic work with Black girls, refugee youth in Scandinavian arts programs, and young people in post-socialist Bulgaria, contributors demonstrate how youth navigate and reshape social structures, unsettle cultural expectations, and move across shifting categories of age, belonging, and care. In doing so, we advocate for more collaborative, accountable approaches to research with young people.
Children’s Folkstories and Games in Pakistan, the United States, and Tanzania
1:30 PM – 3:00 PM
Windsor Ballroom B
Sponsored by the Children’s Folklore Section.
Chair: Brandon Barker
Presenters: Twalha Abbass, Gwyn Harris, Gul E Zahra
Discussant: Clai Rice
Children’s stories and games change and adapt as do all forms of folklore, but something about human development—something about being a youth—continues to give rise to strong threads of cross-cultural similarity. This panel provides the rare opportunity to consider three children’s folklore case studies from three international areas: Punjab, Pakistan, the eastern United States, and Bukoba, Tanzania. Concluding comments from discussant, John McDowell, whose children’s folklore book Children’s Riddling (1979) won the Chicago Folklore Prize.