Through the Schoolhouse Door: Folklore, Community, Currriculum

6. Every Student Rich in Culture Nebraska Folklife Trunks

139 6 Every Student Rich in Culture Nebraska Folklife Trunks Gwendolyn K. Meister with Patricia C. Kurtenbach1 This chapter describes the authors’ work collaborating as folklorist and teacher—along with other teachers and a state historian—to bring Nebraska history to classrooms across the state authentically, yet economically , and, most importantly, use folkloristic material to meet state education standards. Marrying the expertise of folklorists and educators produced the successful design of traveling trunks filled with culturally accurate resources relevant to current teaching demands and allowed students to learn state history firsthand through the experiences of a variety of the state’s cultural groups. Social-studies educators today often emphasize point of view and primary source materials as well as artifacts. The involvement of Gwen as a folklorist who has been documenting Nebraska folklife for many years meant that trunks would include real-life primary sources and objects. Students would learn from interviews with tradition bearers from around the state, traditional music, images of authentic cultural expressions, an array of artifacts, and children’s books that do not reinforce stereotypes. A veteran classroom teacher, Pat Kurtenbach outlines a variety of practical ways that teachers can easily use these trunks with their students. Teachers’ input Gwendolyn K. Meister is the executive director and folklorist for the Nebraska Folklife Network, a Lincoln-based nonprofit organization that documents, presents, and assists traditional artists and conducts the state folklife program. Patricia C. Kurtenbach teaches fourth grade at Elliott Elementary School in Lincoln, Nebraska, with the goal of continuing to learn and grow, even after forty years in the classroom. Through the Schoolhouse Door 140 matched folklife content to essential education standards in social studies and English language arts and current education policy and practices. Why Cultural Trunks The Cultural Encounter Kit project began in 2004 when the Nebraska Humanities Council (NHC) and Meister’s organization, the Nebraska Folklife Network (NFN), committed to a partnership to produce a series of history and folklife trunks to help address a problem identified by the Nebraska State Historical Society and other state educational organizations. Schoolchildren statewide were receiving very little instruction about Nebraska because few educational materials existed. The last comprehensive textbook about the state had been produced decades before. Most information about Nebraska in general social-studies and American history books was either inaccurate or focused only on the overland trails, homesteads, and Indian tribes of the pioneer era. Indeed, Nebraska was portrayed as a place people traveled through on their way to somewhere else, where nothing important had happened since pioneer days. Conceptualization of the Nebraska history curriculum was influenced by another NHC program emphasis, New Nebraskans, focusing on newer immigrant groups in the state. NHC Executive Director Jane Hood was intrigued with the potential of profiling both newer and earlier immigrants to Nebraska through their folk arts, customs, and other cultural traditions and began a conversation about collaborating with NFN, resulting in the traveling-trunk concept. Both the NHC and NFN realized that to create trunks that would make sense in existing classroom curricula and practices, they needed to work closely with teachers enthusiastic about using them, and so collaboration with Kurtenbach ensued. She is a fourth-grade teacher with thirty-eight years of experience teaching in the Lincoln Public Schools (LPS), all at Elliott Elementary, a school in a low- to moderate-income, older neighborhood just south and a little east of downtown Lincoln. The NFN offered staff time, volunteers, and travel costs to conduct fieldwork interviews and undertake research needed to create traveling cultural kits. The NHC agreed to fund the costs of producing the kits, housing the trunks, and checking out and distributing them to schools and other educational organizations across the state. As of 2010 the partnership had Every Student Rich in Culture 141 produced kits on the cultures of Mexican Americans, Germans from Russia, Vietnamese Americans, Swedish Americans, Iraqi Americans, and Irish Americans in Nebraska with additional kits in planning stages or process of development. Subject to the availability of funding, the partners want to profile the largest and most significant cultural groups in the state, which entails approximately twenty kits. Outside and Inside the Kits Cultural Encounter Kits travel in a heavy-duty plastic, wheeled box meant for storing and hauling tools. The toolbox has a pull-out handle on the front, a four-inch-deep plastic tray that nests just inside the top cover, and two seven...