Putting Folklore To Use

Michael Owen Jones

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780813108186, 9780813118253
• eBook ISBN: 9780813183893
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Folklore y mitología

The first book of its kind, Putting Folklore to Use provides guidance to folklorists but also informs practitioners in other fields about how to use folklore studies to augment their own studies. How can acting like a folklore fieldworker help a teacher reduce inter-group stereotyping and increase student's self-esteem? How can adopting a folklore fieldworker's point of view when interviewing patients help practitioners render health care more effectively? How can using folklore research help rural communities survive and thrive?

Thirteen folklorists provide answers to these and other questions and demonstrate the many ways folklore can be put to use. Their essays, commissioned for this volume and edited by Michael Owen Jones, apply the methods and insights of modern folklore research to thirteen different professions and areas of practical concern. The authors, all of whom have themselves put folklore to use in the fields they describe, consider applications in detail and explain how folkloristic concepts and techniques can enhance the work of various professions. They explore applications in such areas as museums, aiding the homeless, environmental planning, art therapy, designing public spaces, organization development, tourism, the public sector, aging, and creating an occupation's image.

In an extensive introduction to the volume, Jones provides an overview of applied folkloristics that defines the field, surveys its history in the United States, and scrutinizes its basic issues and premises. Part I of the book shows how to promote learning, problem solving, and cultural conservation through folklore and its study. Part II deals with folklorists helping to improve the quality of life. Part III reveals folklore's role in enhancing identity and community.

PART I

Promoting Learning, Problem Solving, and Cultural Conservation

1

How Can Acting Like A Fieldworker Enrich Pluralistic Education?

JUDITH E. HAUT

While living on the island of Saipan in 1975 I began to investigate how children perceived their own ethnic identities,¹ interviewing the members of a sixth grade class at a local elementary school. Most of the children in the class were Chamorro, Saipan’s indigeneous inhabitants. A few were Carolinian, their families originally from the Caroline Islands in Micronesia.

I found that the children evaluated themselves negatively in contrast with Americans but positively in relation to all other groups we discussed—Koreans, Japanese, and other Micronesians. The most upsetting comparison to American children was from one eleven-year-old boy who said, as he pinched the brown skin on his forearm, “I’m not smart, look at my skin.” Feeling some consternation, I asked, “Who ever told you that your skin had anything to do with how smart you are?” He said, “Nobody. I looked at my reader and it is for second-graders in America.”

I knew that English was the boy’s third language: he had already learned Chamorro and Carolinian. I also knew many Saipanese children assumed that all Americans are white. Though I reassured him that his book was for children who, unlike him, were reading in their first language, I felt his distress and realized that no educational experience should be this painful. By looking in his reader, this child had reached conclusions about others and about himself that no teacher should want or probably would expect. This child’s misperceptions dramatically illustrate the need for cross-cultural, multicultural, and home-cultural studies—i.e., for pluralistic education.

Goals in Pluralistic Education

Folklorists have a number of avenues through which their training might be applied to education. They can provide assistance in the development of curriculum for geography, culture studies, social studies, and/or comparative literature. They might also aid teachers in understanding the main forms of folklore the children themselves engage in outside the classroom.

Although it is normally the data from folklore fieldwork—e.g., legends, myths, or descriptions of folklife—that are applied in educational settings, I believe that folklorists also have much to offer as a result of their own experiences in doing face-to-face research with people. In this chapter I will explore why I believe the methods of folklore fieldwork are useful for expanding and meeting the goals of pluralistic education. Before describing folklore fieldwork, however, I want first to define what I mean by “pluralistic education,” at least for present purposes.

In my experience, pluralistic education is based on the notion that the United States has many ethnic groups. Pluralistic education not only accepts that observation but, tempered with a folkloristic orientation, also embraces the idea that each person belongs to multiple groups that may be identified on the basis of one or more of the following: religion, age, race, ancestors’ or the individual’s country of origin, economics, gender, special interests, and so forth. Pluralistic education uses these two basic ideas—the multiethnic make-up of our society and the multiple identities of each individual—as the basic premise for stimulating student excitement and interest about what human beings do.

Pluralistic education seeks to lessen dissonance in the classroom by incorporating a variety of learning and interactional styles. Two additional goals of pluralistic education are to increase self-esteem and to reduce intergroup stereotypes. It seeks to increase students’ self-esteem by promoting the students themselves as resources (i.e., using what the students themselves know as the subject matter), and by encouraging the students to analyze the information they bring to the classroom. In Teaching and Learning in a Diverse World (1987), Patricia G. Ramsey links these goals by hypothesizing that “higher self-esteem mitigates the need to prove one’s ascendancy over others” (p. 113). She speaks to the need for children to “express and explore their own ideas and perceptions of the world” (p. 118).

I believe folklore fieldwork methods and resultant data have an important role to play in education, especially as it moves away from an educational model predicated upon the deficiencies of children to one which acknowledges what the child brings to the classroom. Through the appropriate exposure to and utilization of folklore methods and materials, children can increase feelings of self-worth by exploring their perceptions of the world, delight in the diversity of their peers and the world at large, and develop critical thinking and independent learning skills. Following a brief characterization of folklore fieldwork, I will present and discuss some of my specific fieldwork and classroom experiences with students. Through an acauaintance with the processes of fieldwork, educators will be better able to assess the usefulness and the limitations of the outputs of fieldwork—such as published collections of folktales or children’s games—for their own classrooms.

What Is Folklore Fieldwork?

For the purposes of this chapter, fieldwork means a systematic approach to answering our questions about our own and others’ behavior, culminating in some sort of reported description and analysis. For the folklorist, the specific behaviors or activities under scrutiny are those that we consider to be “traditional”—i.e., those that we assume to exhibit historical and geographical continuities and consistencies. Research is carried out in the situations in which these behaviors naturally occur (in contrast to, say, library, archive, or laboratory research).

The most rudimentary requirements for folklore fieldwork are curiosity and the skills for appropriately and adequately serving that interest. By “appropriate” I mean utilizing acceptable and ethical means of obtaining information: this may include protecting interviewees’ identities, learning about informal hierarchical authorities (social channels), observing what may be very subtle rules of discourse (who can ask what of whom and in what specific circumstances), and finding common ground before exploring differences. By “adequate” I refer to the production of a full description and analysis, which are inseparable. The goal is to move beyond the assumptions and perspectives we carry into the fieldwork experience; to engage in fieldwork, we hypothesize, observe, question, and participate while trying to defer judgment. We make inferences and eventually reach generalizations. Finally, good fieldworkers also let themselves be the subject of inquiry.²

What benefit can the methods and materials of folklore fieldwork provide for pluralistic education? When students practice the basics of folklore fieldwork—observing, asking questions, analyzing, and reporting—they utilize concepts that enhance their ability to notice diversity with interest; they also learn appropriate ways in which to answer questions about that diversity. Learning to identify what the question is, as well as how to ask it, is an essential quality of good fieldwork as well as of the independant learner. Furthermore, the methods and materials of folklore fieldwork can help teachers discover and practice new communication strategies as well as internationalize the curriculum by using easily available folklore publications.

How Can Fieldwork Methods Help the Student?

Bringing data from fieldwork into the classroom can mean using published collections of, say, narratives or children’s games from around the world in order to internationalize the curriculum. Or it can entail utilizing the activities of the children so students see themselves reflected in the classroom, e.g., employing traditional games in the teaching of math, vocabulary, or spelling. A third, more subtle and perhaps far more powerful means is to encourage children to be the resources and the analysts through teaching them the techniques of a fieldworker and thus stimulating their interest, engagement, and analysis. Because narratives have such broad application in the classroom—for language arts, bilingual programs, geography, history, and even public speaking—I will use this genre as an example of application.

Storytelling is a ubiquitous activity. Everybody tells stories—from the child who describes how he managed to get to the top of the tree to pull down the kite or how he and his friends managed to toilet paper the scout leader’s house without getting caught, to the child who delights her friends at a slumber party with scary stories. Because of its broad and familiar use, children can relate to the data and study of storytelling while seeing both similarities and differences between themselves and others.

Narrative or folktale collections provide a readily available resource for internationalizing studies at the elementary or secondary school level. Because folkloristics has a long history of comparative studies, rich resources and indexing aids are available. For example, Alan Dundes’s anthology, Cinderella: A Casebook (New York: Wildman, 1983) covers the many forms of Cinderella or Cinderella-like stories as well as the different scholarly approaches used to study these tales. From Germany’s Aschenputtel to Java’s Kleting Kuning and on to America’s Disney-created Cinderella, the geographic breadth of these stories combined with the students’ probable familiarity makes this a good start for either a comparative study of oral narratives or a discussion of some of the traditional sources for written literature or film. Several sources for locating similar comparative materials are listed in the further readings section.

For many folklorists, finding versions and variants of what is conceived to be the same story (or ballad or game) is proof of tradition and oral transmission. In the classroom, using different versions of the same tale illustrates that storytellers narrate in specific situations and often for special purposes, oftentimes altering the account to emphasize a point. Having students tell stories and describe the different ways they have heard or told what seems to be the “same” story leads to a discussion of rhetoric. We tell stories to an audience—of one or many. Our purpose in relating a story, whether of a personal experience or a story we heard at home or on the street corner, may differ from one situational context to another. Ask the students: “Do you tell stories the same way to your friends as you do to a parent?” One may narrate the “same” personal experience story to illustrate one’s wit or the gullibility of another simply by shifting emphasis in the telling.

Furthermore, by being asked if certain stories are told in particular settings or circumstances (such as parties, on the way to school, or during part-time jobs) or only with specific groups of people, the individual student may begin to see that she or he belongs to several groups. With the realization that having multiple identities is a common human characteristic, students can also acknowledge their different ways of interacting based on the role or group of the moment. This may contribute to modifying the common concept that any one group of students can be labeled as belonging to a culturally homogenous body. Remember, any individual has multiple identities.³

Students as Fieldworkers

Students gain confidence in exploring diversity as they are encouraged to see that they can act as fieldworkers; it is appropriate to notice differences among people and it is possible to learn techniques for investigating and understanding those differences. Many of the basic skills folklorists use—participant observation, inference, and reporting—are already part of elementary-age students’ repertoire.

For example, in a discussion with fifth- and sixth-graders about storytelling, the children began to describe the kinds of scary stories they tell each other and why they do so. In recapitulating their own responses about storytelling, I told them, “When you hear stories like these, you’re participating in folklore. When you think about why you tell these stories—‘it’s fun, it’s scary, it’s like a roller coaster’—you’re analyzing the functions. And when you talk about it here with your friends, you are reporting. In short, you are doing what any good folklorist does.” Significantly, using and analyzing folklore data builds upon skills the children already possess.

Encouraging students to further develop their fieldwork skills does not mean that they need to go out into the community to interview people. Bringing in data or visitors from the outside and then asking the children for their own observations and questions will contribute to their refining the fieldworker’s attitude: stimulating their curiousity as well as helping them learn the appropriate means for generating questions, puzzling over possible answers, analyzing, and inferring.

Like stories, published information about the wide geographic variation of games as well as their immediacy for children make them a highly useful topic for multicultural purposes and for eliciting from children their conceptions about fieldwork. During a recent folklore presentation for upper elementary school children in the Los Angeles area, I suggested that the children imagine not having available mass-produced toys. “What would you do? What would you play with?” The children talked excitedly about making their own playthings. Then I demonstrated a game played much like jacks, involving the use of a lime and eight small stones. I told them I had learned it on Pohnpei in the Central Caroline Islands. Having first established that we sometimes play with items readily found in the environment, the use of a lime as a ball did not seem to be a quaint or exotic culture trait. In fact, the students were intrigued with the game. They also wanted to know more about what these children do—their playthings and games, their way of life, and the physical description of their island.

While locating the respective geographic areas on a map, I described similar games with their differing names, rules, and playing pieces. The students described their own games of jacks in greater detail, debating over how many pieces were really needed for play. When they noted that both boys and girls play, the teacher and I reflected aloud that rarely in our childhood did boys play jacks—a matter that then led to remarks by all of us on possible changes in girl/boy domains in our society. Brian Sutton-Smith and B.G. Rosenberg describe some of these changes in “Sixty Years of Historical Change in the Game Preferences of American Children,” in Child’s Play, edited by R.E. Herron and Brian Sutton-Smith (1971: 18-50).

At one point I asked the children, “How would you study this game if you saw a child playing it?” They responded by posing a number of questions, such as “What is it called?” “How do you play it?” “What is its purpose?” “Why are you playing it?” These are some of the basic questions that a folklorist doing fieldwork would consider in an attempt to understand the activity from an insider’s perspective.

I also asked the children to tell me what they learned from playing jacks themselves, or from hearing about jacks-like games. They mentioned eye-hand coordination, excitement, playing with friends, and timing. Then one child said, “Other kids do the same things we do.”

The initial recognition that other people share remarkable similarities is an important step in developing an ability to delight in diversity. Over the course of the school year the sensitive teacher might try to expand the simple discovery that all people have ways of playing, demonstrating happiness or sorrow, providing for the survival of their children, and so forth but that all people do so in profoundly diverse ways. Through enacting the role of folkloristic fieldworker in and out of the classroom, teachers and students will acquire the skills and attitudes that are an essential part of pluralistic education.

It is apparent from this example of jacks that folklore in the curriculum can also pique interest in and provide novel ways of approaching such subjects as geography and history. Jacks even has relevancy to math instruction, as it involves principles of subtraction and division. Because of familiarity in form or content, folklore has an immediacy with which students can readily identify, tending to stimulate further inquiry. In classroom discussions involving children’s folklore, the children do not have to be told that their ideas count; it becomes self-evident.

The example of jacks suggests yet other ways to develop teaching strategies and to affect the educational process, namely generating skills in independent learning and critical thinking through a fieldwork model. The students became self-motivated, spontaneously asking essential questions about who played the jacks-like game I had described and demonstrated. Furthermore, they demonstrated how they would go about trying to study an unfamiliar game on their own. Through this activity and discussion, these children were learning to identify, document, and interpret certain forms of expressive behavior by asking questions, posing and testing hypotheses, and reassessing their assumptions about taken-for-granted aspects of everyday life. The skills required for this process are vital to critical thinking—a process whose essence is delayed judgment, i.e., weighing and assessing data rather than jumping to conclusions or functioning in terms of stereotypes and oversimplification. In short, the students had the opportunity to reaffirm that they have the ability to be both the resource and analyst of their own traditions as well as the interested observer and interpreter of other people’s expressive behavior.

How Can Fieldwork Methods Help the Teacher?

Thus far I have...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Applying Folklore Studies: An Introduction —Michael Owen Jones
• Part I. Promoting Learning, Problem Solving, and Cultural Conservation
• Part II. Improving the Quality of Life
• Part III. Enhancing Identity and Community
• About the Authors
• Index