The place of folklore in education has always been an important concern within the discipline. Folklore often is explicitly contrasted to knowledge that we have learned through formal education, and movements such as Folklife in Education (FIE) are built on the key principle that certain forms of knowledge are either specifically excluded from or marginalized within the educational process. There are numerous volumes that provide instructional resources for integrating folklore and folklife into school curricula, and there is an increasing literature on the methods and theories of FIE. Speaking Out and Inside the Classroom (And Out) are two new contributions furthering the scholarship on folklore and education.
Zipes’ important scholarship on folktales provides him with a rich basis for this new publication. Speaking Out complements and expands upon his earlier volume Creative Storytelling: Building Community, Changing Lives. His new book integrates his research interests in storytelling with a programmatic case study of the Neighborhood Bridges Project that he helped to coordinate in inner-city schools in Minneapolis and St. Paul. In this project, elementary students both recorded their own stories and studied stories within compilations and media presentations to craft their own creative writing and theatrical projects. Zipes describes his own involvement with the program, and he offers important insights into ways to move such in-school storytelling programs away from the highly-stylized presentations of professional storytellers, suggesting practical ideas for creating rich educational experiences that allow students to transform their own creations into more meaningful artistic presentations.
His approach is inspiring. While Zipes sees merit in having schools host programs by professional storytellers, he asserts that there is limited value in approaches that turn children into spectators of a performance. Instead, he offers a program that focuses on ways to teach students to create their own literary and theatrical artistic expressions by affirming the value of the stories told within their own families and communities. Zipes’ masterful blending of theory, methods, and practical experience provides an excellent resource for coordinating this kind of program in other schools. He also suggests ways that teachers can adapt various activities to all age levels, including college teaching and adult continuing education.
Zipes deals with challenging issues. The majority of educators who read this book will appreciate his trenchant critique of standardized testing and its fetishization in programs such as No Child Left Behind. He provides practical ways to challenge the sad state of educational reform in which administrators and elected officials value performance on bubble sheets over inspired teaching and culturally-responsive pedagogy. The problem is that while his idealism may encourage resource teachers and educational coordinators who work outside of schools, the classroom teacher who increasingly must teach for the test will find his excellent ideas difficult to put into practice. This critique does not indict Zipes’ work. It merely supports his accurate contention that transforming education in the ways he suggests involves a significant challenge to the political economy of education and the disconnect between educational research and conservative, even reactionary, educational policy.
Inside the Classroom (And Out) is provocatively subtitled “How We Learn through Folklore.” This edited volume consists of twenty-five entries compiled from previous publications and conference presentations of the Texas Folklore Society. Kenneth Untiedt offers an interesting preface that cogently sets forth the book’s goal as a demonstration of ways that folklore plays important roles within various learning processes. He organizes the volume to show how folklore is embedded within educational experience both in the classroom and within various communities. Articles on folklore within primary, secondary, and college educational environments document an array of traditional expressions ranging from children’s rhymes to cheerleading and to legends on college campuses. The book also includes four articles that provide a tribute to the master teacher Paul Patterson, and five articles on folklore and the use of language. As Untiedt makes clear, the book is written for non-specialists. Many of the articles read as collectanea, personal reminiscences, or introductions to folklore study for laypeople.
Two of the most successful articles are a reprint of Mody Boatright’s “Folklore in a Literate Society,” which opens the book, and James Bratcher’s “Some Past Directions of Narrative-Folklore Study.” Both essays will appeal to the general reader who desires some background on the nature of folklore and the history of folklore study. Their scholarship is solid, and these entries could serve as important resources for college instruction. The connection between folklore and learning is a tacit theme in both articles, and these entries could provide useful ways to read and discuss the other articles.
If these entries can be regarded as bookends, they are supporting a collection that is of uneven quality. While the essays on Paul Patterson offer ideas about what makes a good teacher, they will appeal mainly to the few Texans who knew Patterson. Many of the articles in the remaining sections include few—or even no—reference citations. While the more anecdotal readings may interest the casual reader, the professional folklorist will discover huge lapses in the writers’ knowledge of folklore scholarship. An article on cheerleading, for example, makes the dubious claim to be the first documentation of cheerleading as a form of folklore. The author’s condescending, and at times even salacious, tone further undermines his credibility. Another article on popular language usage in Texas is a bit more solid, but it consists mainly of a listing of putative Texan expressions, the majority of which are also part of the lexicon of people from throughout America’s southern states.
Although these types of reflective essays and compilations of curiosities may be useful for further scholarship, the book does contain some important and interesting pieces of more serious scholarship. Barbara Morgan-Fleming’s “Folklore in Schools: Connections Between Folklore and Education” is a good discussion of ways in which folklore scholarship is connected to various educational theories. This essay will be useful to educators and folklorists, and it also provides an important base for more comprehensive research into folklore and education. James Ward Lee’s witty essay “Talking Fancy” is an eloquent and clever discussion of folk speech, both in and out of academe. He offers an insightful and highly readable discussion of ways in which academic-speak can rightly be considered a folk dialect, and he articulates his own affection for certain registers of “fancy talk” or the propensity to show off the fifty-cent words in appropriate conversational registers. Lee’s ability to integrate insights from academic inquiry into essays designed for a general audience is an impressive model for this type of volume. When other writers approach this type of presentation, Inside the Classroom (And Out) provides good resources for examining how we learn through folklore.
It may be useful to consider how these volumes complement each other. The various activities that Zipes provides could use some of the material of Untiedt’s edited volume. Certainly, the discussion of children’s rhymes and the descriptions of various cheers present the types of folkloric expressions that are resonant within many students’ folk culture. Articles in Inside the Classroom (And Out) could provide a solid introduction to Zipes’ more comprehensive and compelling discussion of educational theory as it relates to folklore. There are also resources in both books that may be useful for folklorists who coordinate public presentations of folklore in non-academic settings. Both volumes open new ground for continuing to develop a discussion of relationships between folklore theory and education, although both volumes take different approaches to discussing how we learn through folklore.
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[Review length: 1238 words • Review posted on August 29, 2006]