Through the Schoolhouse Door: Folklore, Community, Currriculum

1. "I Didn't Know What I Didn't Know": Reciprocal Pedagogy

19 1 “I Didn’t Know What I Didn’t Know” Reciprocal Pedagogy Paddy Bowman1 Ask someone to tell you the most important thing he or she has learned, and you will be told a story. Deep learning takes the form of a story. The most important stories in education often aren’t the ones we are told—they are the ones we live. To be deeply changed requires a quest with our emotions and desires engaged, so a powerful education is necessarily an adventure that can be narrated. —Michael Umphrey, The Power of Community-Centered Education, 15 This chapter chronicles the arc of my development as a teacher educator . Documenting my teaching comes from the natural habit of a folklorist . I take notes and photographs and hang onto teachers’ assignments, evaluations, and artwork. My original chapter concept took me to thick files in my informal archive. I planned to appraise teachers’ assignments accumulating since 1994 to illustrate the powerful promise of folklore and fieldwork for K–12 educators’ understanding the deep connection between traditional culture and formal pedagogy. My research revealed more than I had anticipated —one of the gifts of writing, of course. Reviewing teachers’ work and my field notes exposed how much I had needed to learn about teaching teachers. This personal account describes how and why I came to love working in education and believe so strongly that folklorists in academic and Paddy Bowman is the director of Local Learning: The National Network for Folk Arts in Education and an adjunct faculty member of the Lesley University master’s program, Integrated Teaching through the Arts. Through the Schoolhouse Door 20 public programs gain from such engagement. I have learned firsthand the transformational impact of teachers and students learning from and with each other—“emotions and desires engaged”—an event that is powerful enough to be narrated. I call this reciprocal pedagogy to highlight the deep collaborative relationship that good teaching involves, whether within the traditional or the academic sphere. In her 1994 presidential address to the American Folklore Society, Sylvia Grider chose folklore and teaching as her theme, urging folklorists to take teaching seriously because “teaching is so fundamental to the function and process of folklore that tradition cannot exist without it” (1995, 179). Both folklorists and educators are intimately concerned with the transmission of knowledge, but we are engaged with different realms of knowledge and methods of transmission. Finding ways to meld these ways of knowing profits folklorists as well as teachers. I hope that my journey inspires other folklorists to engage in education and with educators and students as teacher, collaborator, and fieldworker. Perhaps my evolution as an educator who began by modeling her graduate-school pedagogy for K–12 teachers may serve as a cautionary tale, allowing others to avoid mistakes that I made. I also hope that educators will learn more about the perspectives of folklorists and the potential educational gifts of our discipline, for example, culturally authentic resources and ethnographic fieldwork methods. Such research can shift perspective and suspend judgment, which in turn can positively influence the teacher-pupil connection for the dozens of new students whom teachers face each year. “Through modeling and encouraging the development of fieldworker skills and attitudes, teachers foster an environment in which children are enabled to be both the resource and the analyst for the study of expressive human behavior. The student and teacher are placed in a cooperative relationship” (Haut 1994, 56). Finally, as Grider said, “The act of teaching is the connection between the formulaic classroom exercise and the age-old process of tradition. In both instances, the precious materials that provide essential cultural continuity are transmitted from the masters to the neophytes, from one generation to the next, in what we hope will be an unbroken chain but which, in reality, is only a frayed and tangled thread” (1995, 179). Again folklorists and educators are bound by their love of knowledge and its transmission. Since 1993 I have had the satisfaction of coordinating a network funded by the National Endowment for the Arts Folk and Traditional Arts Program “I Didn’t Know What I Didn’t Know” 21 to advocate for the inclusion of folk arts and artists in the nation’s education . Now called Local Learning, we began as the National Task Force on Folk Arts in Education after a roundtable that the Folk and Traditional Arts Program convened...