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Teacher Planbook: Integrating Folk Music, Folklore and Traditional Culture Instruction Into K-12 Education

"Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there." - Will Rogers

What is folklife?

“When Congress created the American Folklife Center in 1976, it had to define folklife in order to write the law. Here is what the law says:
American folklife is the traditional, expressive, shared culture of various groups in the United States: familial, ethnic, occupational, religious, and regional. Expressive culture includes a wide range of creative and symbolic forms, such as custom, belief, technical skill, language, drama, ritual, architecture, music, play, dance, drama, ritual, pageantry, and handicraft. Generally these expressions are learned orally, by imitation, or in performance, and are maintained or perpetuated without formal instruction or institutional direction.”
- from, Folklife and Fieldwork: A Layman’s Introduction to Field Techniques. by Peter Bartis; Revised 2002. Publications of the American Folklife Center, no. 3

English Departments used to have someone who taught Beowulf, or English and Scottish balladry. That's where the great ballad collecting movements, and the early 20th Century local, regional and state folklore societies had their origins, in English Departments of places like University of Virginia. C. when C. Alphonso Smith called for ballad collection in the very first issue of the Virginia Folklore Society Bulletin, in 1913, through the US Dept of Education. The same can be said of John Lomax (English Dept., Harvard), and sociologist folksong collector Howard Odum at UNC-CH.
Compare 1923 to 2010 and you"ll find out how difficult it is to find graduate level courses that include Hawthorne, Twain, Melville, Hemingway or Faulkner, much less Child. The field lost three truly titanic people in one year Archie Green, Bess Hawes, and Nancy Sweezy who there before this became a formally
organized field, and knew what it was like before we had public folklife programs, funding streams, endowments, apprenticeships, appreciation for immigrant traditions, and the like. These are fragile institutions are it is important for all of us to be advocates for things like hand-made objects, musical traditions, and other genres of artistic expression. If English Departments still taught the HISTORY of English literature, you would find . . .

STANDARDS FOR FOLKLIFE EDUCATION

Teaching: folklore; folk music; and culture, curriculum, teacher planners.

Classroom Teacher Educational Resources

We need to remember that folklore is created by "the folk," and not defined or delineated by the folklorists.

"The folk" do define their own folklore.  That's the way the idea of folklore began.  "The folk" were around before folklorists. The term "folklore" actually goes back over 1,000 years, and William Thoms basically re-coined the term in the mid-19th Century. 

"You can find an interesting citation of early uses of an Old English term that looks and sounds a lot like "folklore" in Jeffery Mazzo's 1996 article in "Folklore."  One of the interesting things that Mazzo discovered is that "folklore" was in contrast to "book-lore" or 'knowledge advanced within the early academic settings.'  Mazzo also shows that "folklore" meant something like "knowledge held in common" in contrast to "book-lore" or the knowledge held by the elite. "What's folk?" but stories and behavior that are rooted in tradition -- not corporate processes". ~ Gregory Henson P.h.D.

What is Folklore?

 

Folklore(in a broader sense, traditional and popular culture) is a group-orientated and tradition-based creation of groups or individuals reflecting the expectations of the community as an adequate expression of its cultural and social identity; its standards and values are transmitted orally, by imitation or by other means. Its forms include, among others, language, literature, music, dance, games, mythology, rituals, customs, handicrafts, architecture and other arts. - UNESCO, 1985

There is / was such a thing as "folkloric truth" -- this was "what should be true, whether it was documentable fact or not". From Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" you will find "story-truth" versus "happening-truth." So, maybe it *should* be true, but that don't mean folks should buy it! Don't believe everything you read in a gallery, museum, park, book or website.

"My name is Jeff Albertson, but everyone calls me the 'Comic Book Guy'" I have a Phd in Folklore. The Simpson's definition of Folk Art "When Juliet and Lisa are running through the folk art museum, the song played in the background is a version of the Beach Boys song "Wipeout." The real song starts out "Heheheheheheee wipe oooout!" In the museum scene the song starts with "Heheheheheheee, folk art!" and the Singing Folklorist from Saturday Night Live.

Did you hear the story about the cowboy poet who was constantly getting asked to come "perform" at schools and libraries and such, the refrain always being "We can't afford to pay you anything, but it'd be great exposure." To which the cowboy replied, "M'am, in Wyoming people DIE of exposure."

DEFINITION OF FOLK

O.E. from P.Gmc.
folc "common people, men, tribe, multitude,"
*folkom (cf. O.Fris. folk, M.Du. volc, Ger. Volk "people")
*fulka-, perhaps originally "host of warriors;" cf. O.N. folk "people," also "army, detachment;" and Lith. pulkas "crowd," O.C.S. pluku
"division of an army," both believed to have been borrowed from P.Gmc.
Some have attempted, without success, to link the word to Gk. plethos "multitude;" L. plebs "people, mob," populus "people" or vulgus. Superseded in most senses by people. Colloquial folks "people of one's  family" first recorded 1715. Folksy "sociable, unpretentious" is 1852, U.S. colloquial, from folks + -y.

FOLKLORE RESOURCES and RESOURCE PEOPLE

K-12 TEACHERS

 

FOLKLIFE PROGRAMS AND RESOURCES FOR EDUCATORS

STANDARDS

TECHNOLOGY

Mailing Lists / Listservs

Online Projects

NATIONAL CHILDREN'S FOLKSONG REPOSITORY

COLLECT SONGS - BE A JANE OR JONNY APPLE SONG SEED

UF study reports children don't know their folk songs anymore and schools aren't teaching them!

NCFR

The Historic Electronic Online Archive of Children's Folksongs A Public Folklore Project built by the children of the United States. Empower Children - Integrate Literacy, Music, and Technology into the classroom.

CALL TOLL FREE 1 - 877 - 220 - 0262

TELL US THE NAME OF YOUR SONG
+ YOUR TOWN + STATE + YOUR NAME + THE YEAR
 
--> NOW YOU CAN SING OR CHANT YOUR SONG <--
 

How do you turn children into American citizens?

FOLK MUSIC, SONG LYRICS, STORY TELLING, AND FOLK TALES

THE ORAL TRADITION: From Gossip to Story Telling.  Life Lessons Learned by hearing the stories.

The simplest definition of a folk song has it that a folk  song is one that singers feel free to change, to make their own; and that it has passed from one generation to the next.  ("Generation" is not the demographers' 33 years, but a flexible number.  A generation is high school students is four years; of miners about seven, etc.)   The word 'Folk' comes from the German 'Volk', meaning peasant, muzhik, serf, helot, sharecropper, and so forth.  You can use this definition to separate a "topical" song from a folksong.

FOLK MUSIC started before there was a music industry when the role of music was about your life - about the life and times that most of us don't experience anymore and originally folk music was sung because it helped the people get through life and folk music song lyrics told the stories about their life and work.

K-12 Curriculum Standards, Benchmark

Bind children together, give them something in common using our own fabric of Folktales or choose one of the 50 states to see the folktale from that state.

STORIES & STORY TELLING RESOURCES

FOLKTALES
"Folktales outnumber all other books about American Indians and people from Africa, Asia, & Latin America because folktales are 'safe' and since they belong to the public domain present no copyright or royalty problems. See Folktales like John Henry.

Scholarship

 

 

ETHNOMUSICOLOGY

 

RADIO

 

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