Learning Activities and Lesson Plans

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.

This guide to the Civil Rights History Project of the Library of Congress is written for teachers to introduce the collection and to offer a few points of entry for educators and their students.

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.)

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?

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

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.)

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!

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.

Museums offer multiple paths for learning. From decoding the museum itself to the artifacts in the exhibitions, this Local Learning Resource Guide provides educators practical tools and useful frameworks for engaging learning in museum spaces.

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.

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.)

Gain a deeper understanding of how Seneca social dances and songs reflect the values, beliefs, and traditions of the Seneca community with these lessons written by Rachael Wolfe, Salamanca City Central School District.

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.

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

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?