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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Learning Activity and Lesson Plans
Learning with Cemetery Secrets
Cemeteries may seem unlikely fieldtrip destinations, yet they offer intriguing clues about history and local culture and opportunities to conduct primary research and practice documentation skills such as note taking, sketching, and photography.
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?
Teaching with Folk Sources
Local Learning Teaching with Primary Sources project team offers teaching tools and materials that engage the digitally available archival holdings of the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress alongside local and regional collections, bringing them into conversation with each other to create a fuller, more complex narrative of American communities, history, and people.
Cultural Stewardship Conversation Guide
When we identify and protect our important ways of life and cherished places that make up our cultural ecosystem, we strengthen vital relationships to each other and the wider world.
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.
Museum Observation Field Journal
Consider a museum an important text that deserves careful reading. Before visiting a museum, inventory your assumptions about what you expect, even if you are familiar with the institution. Think about where it is, how it sits on the landscape, its relationship to the natural and built environments.
Thanksgiving Foodways
Many people in the United States celebrate the national Thanksgiving holiday by sharing a special meal. Although there is a stereotype about turkey and dressing as the iconic meal, we all have different ideas about what foods we want on Thanksgiving Day. Turkey or tamales? Mashed potatoes or sweet potato casserole? Collard greens or green bean casserole? Pecan pie or apple pie? What would your favorite Thanksgiving meal include? Who would share the meal?
Folk Song Remix
This activity offers a creative way to interact with favorite folk songs. Follow these directions to tap into familiar folk songs and give them your own, unique spin by remixing them!
On the Job
There is mystery in every job, even those of students, whose jobs are to study and contribute to school, family, and community life. How do we learn the secrets of doing a good job at our work? Folklife! Occupational culture is one of the dynamic areas of Folklore Studies. By closely observing work spaces and interviewing people about their work culture, we make fascinating discoveries.
How We Celebrate
Face to face or distant, celebrations feature cultural elements that we find very meaningful, such as special foods, music, gifts, jokes, clothes. This activity invites you to relish the fun of celebrations by analyzing them and consider how celebrations during the pandemic are the same and different from how they usually occur.
Come Rain or Come Shine
From song lyrics to predictions, we use weather lore every day. Have you ever worn your pajamas inside out in hope of a snow day? What sayings do you use to predict the weather? Do you have stories about storms or rainbows or really hot days? This activity looks at a variety of ways we are all folk meteorologists.
Music Around the Year
So much music surrounds us, we may not always be aware of it. This activity invites you to find and celebrate the music that you hear all around you—all around the year.
Collecting!
Kids are natural collectors, piling up treasures like seashells and Pokémon cards. Likewise, museum curators deal with many types of collections, from paintings to train engines. Curators organize collections for public exhibits, showcasing what they have learned about objects. By thinking like a curator, how would you organize one of your collections for a home museum?
Seasonal Round Lesson Plan
Use the Seasonal Round lesson plan to introduce students to your classroom or school culture, as well as their own. Students can learn about themselves, their families, their region, and the world by examining the seasonal round.
Family Mapmaking
Mapmaking is a wonderful way to engage family members in looking closely at how each experiences where they live. Family members may discover that each sees their neighborhood differently, that one includes a place that the others never noticed, or that certain neighborhood spaces, such as a vacant lot, are valued by one and considered an eyesore by others.
Bread Journal
Paying attention to a cultural element like bread tells us about ourselves as well as others. Think about bread broadly—from matzo to pancakes, tortillas to crackers! Here are some activities to do on your own or with others to find art in your daily life.
Games and Play
Games are fun to play at any age and tell us a lot about our families, friends, and communities. There are many cool ways to think about and study games.
Song Circle
Everyone sings. This means everyone knows some songs. Singing alone or with others can make us feel playful, help us through tough times, and bring us together.
Good for What Ails You
Our beliefs about health and wellness are part of our personal and family folklore. Collecting cures, home remedies, and health sayings reveals how much a part of daily life our folklore about health is.
Dress to Express
Our clothes are important cultural elements. We use them for many reasons. They are practical, fun symbols of our identity. Let’s find some surprises while exploring how we Dress to Express.
Research and Readings
Teaching with Foodways
The study of foodways offers compelling ways to explore local and world customs and cultures through an accessible, universal, everyday practice. The foods we eat provide a firsthand, sensory experience that can build an appetite for learning in any subject and offer opportunities for active, experiential education. Read the 28-page issue of the popular 2010 […]
The Art of Work/The Work of Art: Interview with Brad Bonaparte by 4th Grade Students at PS 78, Long Island City, New York
Occupations are a perfect topic for student interviews. People like to talk about their jobs and how they learned them, what their skills are, what they contribute.
Discovering Community
A 4th-grade teacher in Vermont introduced her students to the concept of community teachers, people who the children learn from in everyday life. Their resulting interviews and art projects helped students see how they are part of history and a community.
Cemetery Secrets
Cemeteries may seem unlikely fieldtrip destinations, yet they offer rich possibilities for engaging students in primary research.
Cajun Weddings
Weddings are very familiar rites of passage, yet each differs. Cajun wedding traditions provide a window for researching this life passage.
Rangoli: Traditions of the Threshold
Threshold traditions offer a concrete form for exploring how rites of passage help practitioners make a transition between two states, such as secular to sacred, outside to inside, child to adult, and so on.
The Life Cycle: Folk Customs of Passage
“In an age when it is easy to live vicariously through t.v. shows and other popular media, attention to the life cycle returns the focus to ourselves and our families, the arenas in which the real work of life takes place,” writes the Director of City Lore.
A teen and his mother consider the milestone of a first motorbike.
A teen and his mother consider the milestone of a first motorbike.
Welcoming a New Life: Yoruba Naming Traditions
By exploring what names mean and how different cultural groups have special naming traditions, students have a lot to learn about themselves, their families, their community, and the world.
From Imagine! Introducing Your Child to the Arts
Find a chapter dedicated to folk arts education in this publication, including tips for parents on the best ways to interest children in art–helping them explore connections between their own life experiences and the artistic processes of others.
Sense of Place
“What is a ‘place?’ Is that strip of grass between the lanes on the Interstate highway a place? Is a Web site a place?” Michael Umphrey, a poet and former principal, who currently directs the Montana Heritage Project explores the many notions of place. Umphrey also provides examples for how students can learn the skills […]
La Trace du Boudin
An engaging profile of Acadiana and Lafayette High School students who prepared the “Guide to Acadian Stores and Meat Markets That Sell Boudin.” The guide, a French and English tourism brochure, explores the boudin, a Cajun sausage made and sold in small family-owned markets all over South Louisiana.”
How Deer Came to the Kodiak Archipelago
Josh Wood, a student from rural Alaska, writes about an unusual relationship between people, animals, and place.
Family Maps
Luanne McLaughlin, a parent at PS 29 in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, shares a family mapping activity that works in any locale.
Holidays and Schools: Folklore Theory and Educational Practice, or, Where Do We Put the Christmas Tree?
How an Ohio parent and folklorist successfully engaged the issue of holiday celebrations in schools by integrating community study, family folklore and social studies curricula.
Mining Values in the Montana Heritage Project
Through asking her junior English class to investigate an old building that was once a gym, Rasmussen “discovered the joy of using cultural heritage in the classroom.”
American Folklife: A Commonwealth of Cultures
Folklife is community life and values, artfully expressed in myriad interactions. It is universal, diverse, and enduring. It enriches the nation and makes us a commonwealth of cultures. The traditional knowledge and skills required to make a pie crust, plant a garden, arrange a birthday party, or turn a lathe are exchanged in the course […]