The Library of Congress

FINDING THE INVISIBLE: Folklore in Sense of Place

1. Introduction: The Seasonal Round and Defining Folklore (50 minutes)

   Popular opinion often reinforces the idea that folklore is quaint, untrue, and quietly fading away. By looking at our own traditions and customs that fall across the year on a seasonal round calendar, we can identify many examples of folklore that undergird and enrich our lives and ways of knowing. This exercise introduces participants to the concept of the seasonal round and how it plays out individually and lays the groundwork for defining folklore as a dynamic cultural process common to all people. Participants begin to see that the discipline of folklore offers not only content that engages students but methodologies such as fieldwork research, documentation skills, analysis, categorization, preservation, and presentation of findings.

   1. Identifying, Recording, and Comparing Seasonal Round Traditions (35 minutes)
      1. Fill in a blank Seasonal Round Calendar, marking days and seasons of the year important to you, your family, and your community. You may decorate it with pictures if you wish.

      2. Compare your Seasonal Round Calendar with a partner. What surprises you about your own calendar? Your partner's calendar?

      3. Look at the Seasonal Round Activities on Coal River, West Virginia. Folklorist Mary Hufford of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress plotted current and past traditions related to the land and natural resources based on her long-term fieldwork there.

      4. Report your comparisons with your partner to the group. Do you see similarities? Differences? What traditions do you see emerging? (This activity may be extended by making seasonal round collages with cardboard cake rounds, paints, markers, fabric scraps, and other art supplies.)

   2. Defining Folklore (15 minutes)
      1. Using participants' Seasonal Round Calendars, we discuss how folklore falls across time as well as space and introduce the definition of folklore.

      2. By considering definitions of folk groups and types and functions of folklore, what ways would you see of using folklore in the classroom?

      3. We discuss how collecting and documenting folklife through fieldwork research gives students important skills and perspectives.

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2. Finding Folklore in Our Sense of Place (55 minutes)
   1. Exploring Personal Sense of Place (30 minutes)

      No matter where we live, folklife and place intertwine. From place names to local legends, traditional music and crafts to religious practices and foodways, every place may be experienced through all our senses. Although often invisible or overlooked, folklore opens windows into other times as well as today, making history come alive and connecting students to community and to the past.

      1. Using your five senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching, think back to your childhood or another time in your life when "place" was important to you. Draw a picture of this place on an index card to make your own Postcard of Place.

      2. Using your postcard, share your story with the class.

   2. Analyzing and Categorizing Images (25 minutes)
      1. Standing in a circle with other participants, examine the image you are given. Consider era, colors, shapes, themes.

      2. When you see an element that relates to your image among those being laid on the floor in a museum exhibit, lay your image next to it. Do the same for your Postcard of Place.

      3. As a group, reach consensus about the layout of the museum exhibit. Feel free to rearrange images into various "wings" or themes.

      4. Discuss how an outsider would view this exhibit. What context would a viewer need to understand this museum of place? How would students react to this exercise?

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3. Searching for Folklore in the American Memory Collections (15 minutes)
   1. Using the Online Folklife Scavenger Hunt, search for examples of folklore in various American Memory collections. Often folk culture influences popular and elite culture or is appropriated consciously or unconsciously by artists and scholars of popular and elite culture.

   2. Brainstorm a list of how you can envision using folklore in your teaching and American Memory lesson plans.

 

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Last updated 09/26/2002