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)

Local Learning is committed to fair use and open access of educational materials. We, as Publisher, also look to protect the work that we publish from unauthorized, commercial use. Our Local Learning resources housed on the Local Learning website and at  www.JFEpublications.org are freely available to individuals and institutions. We license all work with the exception of only alternatively copyrighted photos or media that are expressly labeled under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, CC-BY-NC-SA. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0. This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you the Author and us the Publisher, and license their new creations under the identical terms.

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.

Filter by Class Subject

Filter by Themes

Filter by Research Topic

Resources by Type

Learning Activity and Lesson Plans

Documentation as Remembrance

This activity uses a primary set source from the Library of Congress to model how documentation of the Covid-19 pandemic can amplify students’ voices. (A Journal of Folklore and Education resource.)

Questing with Alan Lomax

An historic folksong collection with local relevance to students gives them creative voice and connects them to place through an immersive, cooperative project. (A Journal of Folklore and Education resource.)

Expressing and Reading Identity through Photographs

Photographs, like identity, hold multiple truths and illusions. Teaching visual literacy creates nuanced readings of meaning for, and about, the photographer, the subject, and the consumer. (A Journal of Folklore and Education resource.)

Vermont Folklife in the Seasonal Round

This unit asks: What can students learn about themselves, their families, their region, and the world by examining the seasonal round in their own lives and through primary sources?

Folk Sources and New Narratives in Oklahoma

This Curriculum Guide represents one part of a three-year study engaging the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre through primary sources. Included in these lesson plans and units of study are discoveries, tools for teaching, activity prompts, and deep pedagogical engagement from oral historians, cultural geographers, artists, historians, veteran teachers, and folklorists.

Art and Narrative

This curriculum guide explores the relationship arts education and teaching with primary sources that come out of ethnographic documentation and often feature folk and traditional arts.

Oral History in Interpretation and Museum Education

This curriculum packet was designed for a Teaching with Primary Sources workshop titled “Oral History and Interpretation” offered by Local Learning in partnership with Vermont Folklife and Washington State Parks.

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.

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!

Exploring Portraits, Dress, and Identity in Asian Art

What can art objects from distant times and places express about the identity of the people and the cultures depicted in them?

Exploring Dress, Culture, and Identity in American Indian Objects and Dress

How would you feel if someone (outside your identity group) used your identity design references in a clothing line? What might change how you feel about this use?

Tradition, Innovation, and Hawai'ian Cultural Identity in Lau Hala Papale

How is the weaving and wearing of lau hala papale (hats) connected to Hawai’ian history, identity, natural resources, and culture?