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Common Ground: Folklore and Place-Based Education  By Paddy B. Bowman How do we sense a place? We use our five senses, often unconsciously, to read the unique patterns that various cultural groups lay upon the landscape and soundscape -- in other words, the folklore of a place. From vernacular architecture to local legends, foodways to language and dialect, folklore defines place. We employ the customs, narratives, music, material culture, beliefs, and body communications of everyday life both to create and to sense a place. Folklorists define folklore in numerous ways. I like to keep it simple: Folklore involves a tradition that passes over time and through space informally by word of mouth, observation, and imitation within folk groups who share customs, special language, and beliefs. All of us belong to many different, sometimes overlapping, folk groups that change throughout our lives and include, for example, nationality, age, gender, ethnicity, religion, region, neighborhood, social class, hobbies, family, occupation, school, and classroom. Finally, folklore exists in a dynamic relationship with both popular culture, which comes at us through mass media, and academic culture, those things we learn formally in schools, museums, and academies. The Work of Folklorists Folklorists are scholars of place as well as of people, identifying, documenting, analyzing, and preserving hundreds of folklore genres. Like cultural anthropologists, we study the varied, complex cultural expressions of varied, complex cultural groups. Unlike many anthropologists, we document local cultures and do not travel to faraway places. The local mall or a soybean farm will do just fine, thanks. We teach in universities, but we also work in arts councils, museums, and other public agencies. Like folklore itself, our work is often overlooked. We produce recordings, exhibits, videos,Web sites, festivals, publications, and curriculum guides that would enrich all teaching, yet few of our resources make their way into classrooms or libraries. We work collaboratively with people whom we are documenting, seeking the insiders' point of view. What is it like to be a white, female, middle-aged, middle-class social studies teacher from the Upland South teaching in a prairie state? Ask her! As coordinator of the National Network for Folk Arts in Education, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, I strive to build a bridge between K-12 classrooms and folklorists' rich content and engaging fieldwork methodologies. I usually work with teachers and always begin by evoking the often overlooked folklore of my audience. What are their memories of childhood games and play? What is the seasonal round of individuals, schools, and communities? What have they learned outside school? What constitutes their sense of place? As I journey with teachers through their self-discovery and sharing, I joyfully witness their surprise at finding what has been in plain view all along -- the ultimate tool for studying local culture, history, ecology, geography, and sense of place. I marvel at the unique classroom applications and community connections that teachers conceive. I continue to learn as I teach. For example, as a folklorist I thought I'd analyzed my sense of place thoroughly, yet an art teacher's suggestion that I change a writing assignment to drawing a "sense of place postcard" improved not only my teaching but my understanding. Sense of place -- easy for me to write about, but to draw? I've written and spoken often of the small East Tennessee town where I grew up, just below the Cumberland Plateau. My memories of time and place are keen and visceral, but I cannot draw. My houses look the same as they did in third grade. Yet through drawing a crude evocation of my home town and sharing with a group of educators the context of my sketch, layers of meaning that had never shown up in my tale-telling or writing emerged. For instance, I realized that the older I got, the wider my wanderings and knowledge of the town ranged -- playing in front of my house at three, roaming downtown by age eight, driving across the river with boys to park and neck at 16. I could see neighborhoods divided by hills, tracks, class, and race; recall main street celebrations like the Christmas parade or Fourth of July fireworks; smell the paper mill; hear the flat East Tennessee "i" in "night" and "right"; smile at the teen tradition of cruising the drive-in hamburger joint; taste the greasy but ideal chili ladled into customers' jars at the chili wagon; mark secret hideaways and haunted houses; and place superstitions, pranks, and outlandish tales on many spots. Why Folklore? By studying first their own and then others' folklore, students become cultural experts who collect primary resource data, which they can categorize by genre, compare and contrast, analyze, and use to create innovative interdisciplinary projects. The teaching tools and activities in an extensive online guide, Louisiana Voices, are in public domain and provide a framework for studying the folklore of any region. Find rationales, definitions, fieldwork basics, technology tips, and dozens of lessons and rubrics at
Inherently authentic and interdisciplinary, folklore and fieldwork teach listening, observing, mapping, retelling, sequencing, finding patterns, analyzing, summarizing, editing, planning, ethics, and making meaning. Students don't need anything but a notepad and pencil for field notes, and they can work without leaving the school, interviewing other students and school personnel and observing and documenting school culture. However, going into the community and using audio and video recorders and cameras during fieldwork engages students and provides media that they can use to create high-tech or low-tech presentations (see the resource guide for teaching resources). Looking for distinct genres makes fieldwork doable for any age group and can say more about a place than a dozen oral histories. What are the local folk beliefs about weather or health? Hunting practices and lore? Music and dance traditions? Markets and foodways? How do local traditions express the ethos of a place? When students study folklore and conduct fieldwork, they discover that they themselves, family members and friends are cultural experts. They learn to decode many kinds of "texts," from landscapes to images, public celebrations to oral interviews. They hear why people take pride in their work, their homes, their communities and they connect across generations. They view their community from an outsider's point of view by stepping out to observe and document local folklore. They explore the folk roots of popular culture and the concept of culture as a dynamic process. They find how they and their families and communities fit within history and culture, yesterday and today. They find infinite layers of traditional culture, learning, and teaching that contribute to a sense of place and undergird their developing worldviews. Drawing upon what is local shows us, ultimately, what is universal: folklore and traditional ways of knowing and learning.
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