Resources
For Teachers, Folklorists, Academics, and Beyond
Folk arts contribute not only to students’ understanding of cultural traditions but also to their ability to think critically, gather and analyze evidence, and express their ideas and interpretations through personal creativity. Folklife and the tools of the folklorist can support learning in all subjects, including the arts. Folk arts are uniquely suited to explore the ways in which traditional art forms reflect the history, culture, geography, and values of different cultures and communities.
Everyone has folk traditions — expressive customs practiced within a group and passed along by word of mouth, imitation, and observation. Calling on the work of folklorists and the field of folklore in the classroom educates, motivates, engages, and fosters the creative expression of students and powerfully links them to their communities. Integrating the study of folk arts into existing curricula awakens self-awareness in students of their own roles as tradition bearers, their families as repositories of traditional culture and history, and their communities as unique resources.
(Text above adapted from: Local Learning: A Folk Arts Integration Handbook)
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Note: These resources are shared as a service and include historic texts that don’t always reflect the current views of Local Learning. Please contact us if you have any questions or concerns about the readings or activities in our library.
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Learning Activity and Lesson Plans
Artifact Inquiry
What is the difference between seeing and thinking? Use this worksheet to go beyond assumptions and look further into the significance of an artifact.
Insider and Outsider Reflection
What lenses are you bringing to encounters with new cultural experiences?
Mexican Puppetry
A Cross-Curricular Folk Arts Integrated Unit for Middle School English Language Learners With Veronica Ponce de Leon, Mexican Folk Artist.
Liberian Storytelling
A Sixth Grade Folk Arts Integrated Unit with Gbahtuo Comgbaye, Liberian Storyteller.
Yoga Curriculum
The second grade Yoga and Folk Tales Unit helps students experience the yoga movement tradition to learn the ways it emphasizes health. The 12-week unit instructs students in how to perform animal yoga poses while they hear, read, and discuss Panchatantra tales (fables from India) that go along with these poses. Students build strength, flexibility, and balance as they work individually and in pairs to master different poses. Students strive to execute a variety of poses by name without having the poses visually modeled and to hold each pose for at least 30 seconds. To demonstrate their understanding of this movement tradition, students create their own yoga pose and accompanying story. In a final synthesizing activity, students compare and contrast yoga with their choice of another movement tradition they previously studied: Tibetan Meditation, Qigong or West African Dance.
FACTS School-Wide Folk Arts Residency Spiral Curriculum
This folk arts residency curriculum has several unique features. First, it is a residency that occurs with the same visual artist every year. Second, the residency is structured to involve the whole school (more than 500 students) in interactions with the artist within classroom-sized groups of students. Third, the curriculum is designed as a nine-week unit of study, but it is delivered for only one week each year over a nine year period.
Culture, Community, and the Classroom: A Beekeeper's Journey
By bringing in a guest with an exciting tradition–beekeeping–and allowing students to use English to engage fully with him, this foreign language teacher provided a rich tapestry of experiences and new knowledge that gave students details they would be interested in translating as they wrote a story in Chinese. The teacher prepared students well to listen carefully and to interview the guest. Combining an agricultural tradition, interviewing, and collaboratively writing a story in Chinese offers an ingenious model.
Culture, Community, and the Classroom: Songwriting about Place with Elementary School Students
"Every story can become a song!" - Sara Milonovich, songwriter, fiddler, and singer
Culture, Community, and the Classroom: Beekeeping
Some of the most creative artist residencies come out of unexpected classroom collaborations. Not only does this set of lesson plans create connections between beekeeping and the art room, it also demonstrates how art can be a pathway to social emotional learning. Art teacher Sarah Edwards and guidance counselor Nina Muto worked with the Southern Tier Beekeepers Association to help students discover how they can work towards unity and community while still embodying their individuality.
Culture, Community, and the Classroom: Unlocking Inquiry through Mexican Traditions
Folk and traditional arts are a natural fit for the social studies classroom. They easily facilitate learning and conversations about diverse communities, both local and global. This residency demonstrates how music and social studies can dovetail. It also models how multiple subject areas–music, English Language Arts, and social studies– came together in a single artist residency. The tools of folklore–close listening, observation, interviewing–deepened student preparation for the residency and their engagement with the artists.
Culture, Community, and the Classroom: Learning from a Luthier
We love that this lesson builds on students’ interviewing skills over the course of two artist conversations. Students have a chance to think about follow-up questions based on what they retained from the first visit allowing their initial curiosity to deepen into inquiry.
Culture, Community, and the Classroom: Iconography
What happens when you bring students out of the classroom and into a working artists’ studio? This residency began in the classroom with a painting workshop led by a professional icon painter. Then, students had the opportunity to see the impact of the artist’s work when they visited the local church where his icons cover the walls and ceilings. Seeing his work in-person inspired students to ask questions about the intention of the icons and their role in communicating narratives to parishioners, leading to deeper inquiry and insights.
Culture, Community, and the Classroom: Afghan Kites
“Have you ever flown a kite?” Sometimes, a simple question can be an entry into profound learning. In this residency, students not only learned about the craftsmanship required to create a kite that is visually pleasing and capable of flying, but they also learned about the kite’s cultural significance in Afghanistan. By inviting artist Ahmad Shah Wali into the classroom, students learned firsthand how art and design contribute to quality of life within a culture, including their own.
Culture, Community, and the Classroom: Analyzing Identity and Culture in Lullabies
“My students had been under the impression that culture was something that other people had but was not applicable to them. I was excited to see students analyze their own lives and consider (some of them for the first time) how their culture shapes their beliefs and values.” - Cathryn Lally, 9th grade English Language Arts teacher, New York
Culture, Community, and the Classroom: Cultural Inquiry Through Interviewing
Folk artists are often invited into a classroom to demonstrate their art form and sometimes have the opportunity to teach students artistic skills. Less often they are given an opportunity to speak with students about the value of the art form in their personal life and community context. This lesson plan, created for three short artist residencies over the course of a semester, provided the space for student inquiry that allowed them to connect with the artist on a personal level and learn more about their cultural traditions.
Culture, Community, and the Classroom: Hand Mudra Ceramic Sculpture Interpreting Classical Indian Dance
An art teacher pondered how a classical Indian dancer would fit into her high school sculpture curriculum. As she and the artist talked, the idea of gestures, mudras, as sculptural expressions took hold. Folk arts are inherently interdisciplinary, making traditional art forms, ways of teaching and learning, and artists’ passions easy to integrate into most content areas and engaging for all ages. No matter the genre, learners can answer, Where is something like this in my life?
Culture, Community, and the Classroom: Introduction to Mosaic
By studying mosaics across time, students could put a local artist into the context of art history. The lesson also heightened awareness of mosaic art in their community. After a two-part residency (demonstration, interview), the artist and teacher devised an extension to create a large class mosaic. Students made individual leaves for The Collaboration Tree to reflect their own sense of cultural identity. They focused intently and worked hard together and with the artist. Creating a beautiful work as a team allowed them to realize that each of their contributions is important artistically and created a beautiful, meaningful outcome in the mosaic Collaboration Tree.
Culture, Community, and the Classroom: Step Dance
Stepping is a dynamic, vital dance tradition that is widespread among African American fraternities and sororities. Many high schools have step teams. Other students may be unfamiliar with step dance, so learning about it—how to do basic steps—enriches all students.
Culture, Community, and the Classroom: Ritual, Dance, Theatre - An Introduction to Sattriya
By asking students to dig deeper than they usually might to consider their personal traditions and identities and sharing their responses with the artist, this teacher created a pathway to a deep connection between students and the artist. During their planning conversations, the teacher and the artist found similarities in their passions, drama and dance, and developed a close rapport. The teacher introduced the artist by asking students to read her Artist Statement and closely observe her Artist Portrait, which the artist developed during the summer workshop. This allowed them to inventory their assumptions and prepare questions.
Research and Readings
Local Learning: A Folk Arts Integration Handbook
This 24-page handbook outlines how to incorporate folk arts and folk artists into arts integration programs.
How to Teach Folk Arts to Young People: The Need for Context
In a a speech at New York University, Chalmers challenges the practice of “aesthetic scanning” by providing art teachers with ways to teach students the social context in which art is created.
An Accessible Aesthetic
The folk artist is very much like a curator and the community is a living museum. In unpacking this metaphor, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett explores how the folk artist learns various traditions and then teaches adults and children to develop strong ties to their communities and cultural history.
Teaching Artist Resources in the Journal of Folklore and Education
Over the years, the Journal of Folklore and Education has published resources useful for Teaching Artists, from case studies to pedagogical tools.
Folk Arts in the Classroom: Changing the Relationship Between Schools and Communities
The publication of this article launched Local Learning in 1993.