Intercultural Education, Folklore, and the Pedagogical Thought of Rachel Davis DuBois makes an important contribution to the history of the interdisciplinary field of folklore and education—a history that largely is yet to be written. Jan Rosenberg brings her own experience in helping to establish the field of folklore and education to bear on elucidating DuBois’s practice of what was called “intercultural education,” but, Rosenberg argues, was essentially what became folklore and education (FIE, that is, Folklife in Education).
This book will be valued for its contribution to the history of intercultural education; however, its pedagogical and democratic contributions are most important. It is a “how to” guide for the pedagogy of intercultural education/FIE, particularly on the key pedagogical models DuBois developed: the Assembly, Group Conversation, the Neighborhood Home Festival, and the Parranda, and what Rosenberg recognizes as the contemporary practices of similar pedagogies in FIE. Importantly for the present moment, the book documents an early (perhaps the first) use of the term “cultural democracy,” a concept that makes FIE immediately relevant in a time when sustaining—or achieving—democracy is of key importance.
Intercultural education was established as an area of practice and research during the progressive era of U.S. schooling, 1890-1930. During this era, most progressive educators, including John Dewey and the Progressive Education Association (PEA) as a whole, were interested primarily in the Americanization of white ethnics via schooling; many scholars (see e.g. Johnson 2000) have hypothesized this was due to proponents’ unreflectively maintaining evolutionary thinking in which African Americans and Native Americans were relegated to stages of savagery and barbarism and were thus thought to be unassimilable. Rosenberg reveals how, unlike her fellow progressives, DuBois purposefully rejected evolutionary thinking and instead prioritized crossing the color line. Eradicating racism was DuBois’s lifelong interest—indeed, as framed by her Quaker faith, it was her Great Concern, which directed her professional work and her continuing self-education.
Rosenberg’s study of DuBois is a historical biography, a genre that “reveals the relative power of individuals to stabilize or transform the determinacies of cultural tradition, political arrangements … social circumstances and educational processes into new social possibilities” (Finkelstein, 1998, as cited on page 6). The individual’s work of transforming social life is Rosenberg’s theme throughout the book. Rosenberg reveals that her own work in FIE was deeply shaped by her encounter with DuBois early in her career. This reflexive turn drives the narrative: throughout, Rosenberg weaves DuBois’s story with her own story. Rosenberg’s and DuBois’s lives reflect each other’s as the reader sees each scholar-activist plying her craft through carefully constructed events and activities. This is conveyed in each of the later chapters in the book, which include close description of DuBois’s approach, followed by “a tale of the field” illustrating Rosenberg’s parallel approach.
In chapter 1, Rosenberg presents descriptions of the two subjects of her book: Rachel Davis DuBois and FIE. Here, Rosenberg foreshadows how she sees DuBois’s work in contemporary FIE research and practice some seventy years later. Chapter 2 is comprised of “snapshots” of DuBois’s cultural contexts and national education movements, which made DuBois who she was. Rosenberg gives a fast yet insightful tour of the histories of Quakerism, American education and especially the progressive education movement, folklore studies and especially FIE, and educational sociology—overviews that provide context for understanding DuBois’s life and work.
In chapter 3, Rosenberg draws on DuBois’s autobiography, All This and Something More, and many other writings to chronicle the early development of her lifelong interest in race relations and intercultural education. Rosenberg carefully depicts DuBois’s childhood, immersed in Quakerism, gardening, and encountering “others” in the form of hired help and boarders. Chapter 4 continues with accounts of college and early professional work. Rosenberg describes how DuBois strategized her way through Bucknell College, honing her joke repertoire in order to create a role for herself. This allows the reader to recognize DuBois’s self-education as to how cultural artifacts and performances could be used to build relationships and overcome isolation—which is exactly what she would do professionally. In college, DuBois also developed a “love of logic and method” through scientific studies in botany—a methodology she later uses to evaluate her programs. After marriage and a first teaching job, DuBois went with Quaker Friends to the South, where through experiencing Jim Crow segregation, she found her Concern. Together, chapters 3 and 4 exemplify historical biography in which we recognize how the human agent draws from cultural resources to create new social opportunities.
Chapter 5 details both with DuBois’s first pedagogical contribution, the assembly, and with Rosenberg’s own pedagogical contribution to FIE. As a new teacher at Woodbury High School in New Jersey, DuBois convinced her principal to let her convene a committee of teachers and parents to redesign the school assemblies. Rosenberg shows how DuBois collaborated with parents and teachers to develop “the assembly,” which involved three distinct stages: (1) students’ emotional experience in attending assembly programs with performances by representatives of various culture groups; (2) students’ situational experience in attending smaller group conversations; and (3) students’ intellectual experience learning about the representatives’ cultural heritage and group contributions to American life. By including generous quotations, Rosenberg makes DuBois’s original work easily accessible, and also portrays DuBois’s radical approach, including collaboration with stakeholders, involving students in research and presentation of material, and recognizing African Americans as equal to white ethnics in planning and presentation.
In the second part of the chapter, in a tale of the field, Rosenberg compares DuBois’s assemblies to her own FIE programming, showing that the basic structure was very similar. The differences are interesting: while DuBois sought speakers recognized in the community as a sign of “prestige,” Rosenberg recruited people who were “special but not in terms of education or social standing” but rather as tradition bearers. While DuBois consistently tried to correct misconceptions about the inferiority of the groups she featured, Rosenberg addressed problems identified by the school (72). These discussions are useful to any folklorist doing FIE.
Chapter 6 chronicles DuBois’s work in founding, directing, and creating programming for the Service Bureau for Intercultural Education (SBIE), and shows how the SBIE came into conflict with the powerful Progressive Education Association (PEA), due in part to DuBois’s insistence on valuing and including poor people and people of color. Rosenberg begins with DuBois’s graduate career at Teacher’s College, Columbia University, where she wrote her master’s thesis describing the structure and successes of the assemblies, and at New York University, where she wrote a dissertation evaluating the efficacy of the assemblies in shifting attitudes of participants from negative to positive. The chapter includes excellent pedagogical descriptions of Dubois’s development of the group conversation method as “a way of getting from the skepticism inherent in intolerance to the embracing nature of tolerance” (86), and it provides clear and thorough instructions for the method. Similarly, Rosenberg describes the neighborhood home festival as “art form, … social interaction … and aid to the release of tension,” and describes how it was orchestrated. Finally, she analyzes DuBois’s pioneering curriculum development with the Americans All-Immigrants All radio series of 1938–1939, DuBois’s “swan song” before her involuntarily resignation (the board said they wanted male leadership) from the SBIE. In concluding the chapter, Rosenberg illustrates the relevance of these approaches to contemporary FIE work with two more tales of the field, one concerning use of the group conversation method in a hospital where nurses wanted to get along better with their administrators, and the other involving social workers in a mental health clinic.
Chapter 7 concerns DuBois’s “great segue” into the next stage of her career, via revitalization of her Great Concern through attending an intense, month-long workshop on spirituality and culture led by philosopher Gerald Heard. The combination of lecture, discussion, and contemplative meditation allowed DuBois to realize what had been lacking in the SBIE programming she had done. Rosenberg writes: “To get to the place where the goals of programs involved expressing misconceptions and biases in order to produce events with their own goals of consciousness raising, planners had to engage purgation. To reduce the ego, program planners worked at admitting their cultural biases and learning about the realities of immigrant life and its contributions to the United States. Through purgation, they were to become free of stereotypes and misgivings, which would lead to enlightenment and union, an ultimate consciousness” (101). Recognizing that her own ego, her desire for recognition, was hampering her efforts gave DuBois “a refreshed resolve for activism and a new strengthening of her Concern” (102). Significantly, this process of self-reflection is what antiracist education, as practiced in 2020, requires.
In chapter 8, Rosenberg details how DuBois worked with colleagues from the Heard workshop to conceptualize and establish the Workshop for Cultural Democracy, with the objective “to develop means for positive approaches to race and culture conflicts and offer teacher training to its approaches.” An early brochure describes “eradicating prejudice and building friendship” using the methods that DuBois had developed through the SBIE, but with a critical, activist edge and the explicit goal of social justice. DuBois’s cultural democracy focuses on shared humanity, the need to hold onto “our unique social backgrounds,” and an insistence that “in a democracy of sharing there is no domination” (1941; quoted on page 108). In other words, DuBois puts cultural pluralism at the center of democratic life. Rosenberg describes how DuBois again brought together stakeholders to devise programming for their schools, and how “in the course of [group] conversation, one of the Puerto Rican mothers … described a kind of Puerto Rican party, the Parranda, where people would spend an evening going from home to home for visiting, and she suggested that the party could be translated into a school activity” (110). The concluding tale of the field for this chapter compares parranda to the contemporary school field trip to visit tradition-bearers on their own ground.
In chapter 9, Rosenberg concludes by positing that orchestrating transformative events is the heart of the work of FIE—as pioneered by DuBois and as practiced today. FIE work is valuable in the moment in which it is performed and in the relationships those moments facilitate. However, it is easy to overlook these, as most folklorists doing FIE move quickly from event to event, intent on creating the next social possibility rather than laboriously documenting the remnants of the moments. FIE’s fleeting social creations are essential in that they create new social connections that are the basis for new, culturally pluralistic and socially just structures. Therefore, DuBois’s work was—and much FIE work is—a “forgotten dream” (120), but a dream with lasting impact. With this insight, Rosenberg’s work gives legitimacy to the social creations of FIE as real academic work—similar to what Ernest Boyer (1998) argued for recognizing as engaged scholarship.
Rosenberg convincingly drives home her thesis that “if it weren’t for folklore, there would be no Intercultural Education as Rachel designed it,” meaning that the stuff of folklore—the artifacts and the performances—were the essential curriculum and pedagogy of intercultural education as DuBois developed it. Rosenberg continues: “On the other side of the same coin, without Intercultural Education’s forms and structures, folklore/folklife education, given its concern for customs, genres, expressions, and its mission as a social justice movement, would stumble, fall, and collect even more dust” (121). Rosenberg contends that by recognizing DuBois’s mindset and models as foundational, FIE can establish the history, methodology, and theoretical framework necessary for FIE to establish its place in educational research and reform practices.
DuBois’s approach and contemporary FIE work are both kindred to culturally responsive teaching (Gay, 2010), particularly Moll et al.’s (1992) “funds of knowledge” approach, and Emdin’s (2017) “reality pedagogy.” These contemporary approaches involve teachers working with stakeholders—parents, community members, and students—to build classroom curriculum and pedagogy that is rooted in cultural knowledge and roles in the community. Rosenberg’s book remembers the “forgotten dream” of DuBois’s contributions to intercultural education and subsequently multicultural education, and highlights the work of folklorists in helping to identify the performances of cultural knowledge that make for engaging, meaningful material, and thus, it will guide culturally responsive educators to useful pedagogical methods.
Rosenberg’s work is also timely and relevant beyond FIE and intercultural education. Since 2014, there has been a small explosion of work on cultural democracy, not only in cultural studies, history, and philosophy, but also in applied and professional fields including law, counseling, higher education, arts management, and museum studies. Rosenberg’s book makes a timely contribution to these efforts by providing foundational framing of the vital concept of cultural democracy and highlighting the place of folklore in it.
Works Cited
Boyer, E. “The Scholarship of Engagement.” Journal of Public Service and Outreach 1 (1996): 11-20.
Emdin, C. For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood…and the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2017.
Gay, G. Culturally Responsive Teaching (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Teachers College Press, 2010.
Johnson, D. “W.E.B. DuBois, Thomas Jesse Jones and the Struggle for Social Education, 1900-1930.” The Journal of Negro History 85 (2000): 71-95.
Moll, L. et al. “Funds of Knowledge for Teaching.” Theory Into Practice 31 (1992): 132-141.
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[Review length: 2192 words • Review posted on November 19, 2020]