Through the Schoolhouse Door: Folklore, Community, Currriculum

Introduction

1 Introduction Through the Schoolhouse Door Lynne Hamer and Paddy Bowman The knowledge, aesthetics, skills, and beliefs that young people, educators, and staff members bring through the schoolhouse door each day accompany them in almost invisible backpacks that too often go unopened. Likewise, the culture unique to each classroom and school may be as overlooked as water is to goldfish. While experts in educational research and leadership continue to call for improved home-school relations, the opportunities for developing such relationships remain severely constrained. Even before the strictures wrought by the education wars of the past decade, school-community connections were not as deep as folklorists working in K–12 education could envision. Today what folklorists regard as natural resources freely available in any school and in any community are unlikely to be tapped. In this volume, readers will see ways in which folklore connects home, community, and school. We address two audiences: first, folklorists seeking to go in through schoolhouse doors to work with students, teachers, and parents to bring family and community culture into schools; and second, teachers and teacher educators wanting to take their curriculum as well as students out through schoolhouse doors into the community to make their work culturally relevant and socially useful. The pressures of national and state standards, high-stakes testing, narrowed curricula, and scripted teaching should prompt us all—community members, teachers, administrators, parents, and guardians—to come together to find sustainable, grounded solutions. Instead they distract us further from local ways of knowing—the bedrock of folklore, and the bedrock Through the Schoolhouse Door 2 of family and community. Educational equity demands cultural equity. Educational reform cannot happen without taking both school and community culture into serious consideration. To this end, the chapters of this book demonstrate the usefulness of what folklorists call traditional knowledge and formal educators call intrinsic knowledge. They show by example the potential for rich learning when partnering among teachers, community members, and folklorists helps to reach all students, support students’ participation in their local communities, and deepen students’ agency and understanding of the wider world and the diversity of people and knowledge in it. But First, What Is Folklore? Folklore has been defined many ways for many purposes. In 1846 William Thoms suggested “a good Saxon compound, Folklore—the Lore of the People.” Folklore thus replaced the term popular antiquities, which had been used for the leisured gentlemanly collection of relics and oral materials and preservation of antiquarian architecture, which Thoms and other scholars feared were disappearing in industrializing England (Bronner 2002, 9). Today the term folklore can refer to items of verbal, material, or behavioral culture or to the process of collecting and documenting (the fieldwork process ), also sometimes called folkloristics. Jan Brunvand, in his classic book, The Study of American Folklore (1978), emphasizes three aspects of the definition of folklore that are particularly useful in considering the relationship between folklore and education. First, Brunvand states, “Folklore is the traditional, unofficial, non-institutional part of culture. It encompasses all knowledge, understandings, values, attitudes , assumptions, feelings, and beliefs transmitted in traditional forms by word of mouth or by customary examples” (1978, 8–9). “Unofficial” and ”non-institutional” tell us that folklore does not include official pacing guides, textbooks, or standardized tests in school, but it does encompass just about everything else—positive and negative—from jump-rope rhymes and cruel taunts on the playground, to Roy G. Biv (a children’s color-spectrum mnemonic), to the stories that teachers tell about childhood memories, favorite books, classroom disasters, and a grandfather’s recipe for meatloaf topped with peanut butter. Second, Brunvand describes the forms of folklore, providing a framework for what folklorists focus on as significant and worthy of attention: “Folklore manifests itself in many oral and verbal forms (‘mentifacts’), in Introduction 3 kinesiological forms (customary behavior, or ‘sociofacts’), and in material forms (‘artifacts’), but folklore itself is the whole traditional complex of thought, content and process—which ultimately can never be fixed or recorded in its entirety; it lives on in its performance or communication, as people interact with one another” (1978, 9). Thus, as folklorists we look at children’s jokes and riddles as art forms, and we delight in the turns of speech of parents and teachers (oral/verbal). We are intrigued by the ways that students greet each other and take leave and by the contents of their lunch boxes, the...