1 Engaging Students through Folklore Documentation
Arkansas Folk and Traditional Arts (AFTA) is a statewide public folklore program of the University of Arkansas Libraries and is dedicated to building cross-cultural understanding by documenting, presenting, and sustaining Arkansas’ living traditional arts and cultural heritage. AFTA worked with humanities scholars and public educators to facilitate this program. The program provides Arkansas educators with tools for local community engagement projects. This training also assists teachers with implementing community-centered historical and cultural documentation projects with their students.
AFTA’s Community Scholars Program is modeled after the long-standing Kentucky Arts Council’s program of the same name. Recognizing that individuals are already experts of their communities, Community Scholars training seeks to equip & empower them to document, present, and sustain their community arts. This professional development for public school instructors is a tailored version of Community Scholars that seeks to equip educators to take the curriculum and use it in the classroom. The immediate products of the program will include research projects that each teacher tackles with students in their communities—what they focus on and how/whether the project is archived/presented afterwards is entrusted to each participant. Long-term impacts include a network of teachers and students across Arkansas who can support each other with projects, programming, and research. AFTA staff will continue to be available after the training to offer support as needed to teachers, and our materials and additional resources are available online at https://folklife.uark.edu/scholar/.
At AFTA we are passionate about harnessing the power of folklore and community preservation to create networks of people willing to share knowledge in dynamic ways. We hope to inspire you as educators to go back into your communities to lead students through projects to better document your communities’ folklore, history, places, people, and stories. In turn, we hope a new generation of compassionate, community-driven young people come forward as stewards of Arkansas folk arts, traditions, and more.
Our lesson plans and conference theme draw on Arkansas legends such as the Fouke Monster, the Snawfus, or the reportedly haunted Keller Cemetery as the backdrop to dig into the broad subject of folklore and folklore documentation, but our over-all goal for participants in this training is to instill a base of knowledge for collecting community folklore and conducting community preservation projects with students in multiple areas of interest. This professional development workshop includes lesson plans for use in upper-level classrooms to teach the subjects of folklore to students with the goal of students completing oral history and folklore interviews or other similar community research and fieldwork in their own communities. In these lesson plans, the theme of Arkansas Legends and Lore is carried forward, and participants will find more information for their own research and to share with students on our course webpage. However, teachers who would rather work with students on other areas of folklore will find that our lesson plans are easy to adapt to other folklore topics; on our course webpage, there are additional lesson plans developed by other state folk arts or similar programs that will help take the following materials in other directors while remaining engaged with the subject of folklore in general.
