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CONNECT WITH K12 EDUCATION

K12 Remote Learning

Statue of Liberty #1 About K12 Curricula

 Follow @K12PlayGround

► ► FIND MORE STUDENT PROJECTS THAT CONNECT YOUR POINT OF VIEW

► ► CONNECT CLASSROOMS ONLINE AND DO PROJECTS WITH CLASSROOMS IN OTHER STATES.

► ► FIND CLASSROOMS IN OTHER STATES USING HASH TAGS  #climatechange

 

What do we learn here

 

HOW CAN BLENDING FOLKLORE INTO INSTRUCTION BE USEFUL FOR MY TEACHING?

 

> STEAM PROJECTS
-- IT'S ABOUT OUR STORIES  

Curriculum is simple:

Kids need a well-rounded liberal arts and technology orientation to all things in this world.

  • The public builds the schools they want them to be - by tapping into and documenting their experiences and telling their own stories.

  • We learn best from the diverse range of views by the wider public.

DIVERSITY

Diversity

WHAT IS A CULTURE KEEPER?

WHO ARE COMMUNITY SCHOLARS?

FOLKLORE GIVES INSIGHT INTO OUR HUMANITY

 

 

Use Folklife and Techology FIND FOLKLIFE EDUCATION RESOURCES!

 WHAT DO WE LEARN HERE? Disposition / Soft Skills:   

"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." ~ Jan Brunvand "The Study of American Folklore" -- Covid-19 Resources for Folklore Educators

▼ FOLKLORE GIVES INSIGHT INTO OUR HUMANITY

    Folklife projects emphasizes Project Based Learning, documentation, service learning, and community.
    GAMES -- Children's Work is Play.
    MAKE A VIDEO ABOUT YOUR GAME  /  PROJECT
    SHARE A LINK TO YOUR GAME / STUDENT PROJECT
    EVIDENCE STUDENT SKILLS / KNOWLEDGE BEFORE GRADUATION

 

What is Folklife
WHAT IS FOLKLIFE
That's Simple! It Is The Story Of Us!

WHAT IS FOLKLIFE IN AMERICA?

FOLKLIFE PROJECTS

► Independent Folklore Profiles State Agencies
► About #STEAM #STEM
► Find Your School then Pick a Project
► Public Folklife Science Project
► Literature - Film

    Select  #Hashtags help define cultural indicators and measure K12 "cultural vitality".
    Core Arts Standards - The Arts turns data into actual information

 

What is Folklore
WHAT IS FOLKLORE IN EDUCATION?

WHAT ARE FOLK ARTS?

In The 1930s, Works Program Spelled HOPE For Millions Of Jobless Americans

The projects you build will contain the “folk wisdom” from ordinary people who will show, tell and document their own stories. Collectively there is a lot more than 10,000 hours of learning here. There is wisdom in crowds, and the bigger the crowd and more diverse the crowd, the greater that wisdom. This is the location to experience story, our story! 

  • Do an interview with an elder about lessons learned from previous moments of crisis in our lives; or a series of object biographies on 5 objects in their lives or their worlds whose significance and affective meaning has radically changed in response to the coronavirus crisis; or a mock exhibit on cultural responses in their own lives to the pandemic: jokes, meals, self isolation techniques; dress rituals; etc.

  • "Friend of a Friend" rumors that keep coming over email and texts telling us what is right and wrong to do, what calamities are just around the corner.

  • How does Fear work as a driving force that will affect the shape of tradition?
    1932 FDR said that the one thing we have to fear is fear itself, but he also said that anyone who isn’t paying to the current situation of the Depression is a fool. So, we are in an exacerbated situation of FDR’s claim. And perhaps exploring the essence of tradition will help us think about ways of staying alert but not frantic.

  • A free “Story-a-Day”  drawn from the extensive American Family Stories Project archive.
    Since the stories are short, two to six minutes on average.The tellers come from all over the United States and several villages in Ireland. Some of the tellers are well-known individuals, such as Pete Seeger, Jim Hightower, Lee Smith, Utah Phillips, Laurie Lewis, Alan Jabber, and Jane Yolen, while most are ordinary people with extraordinary tales to tell, like most of us.

| PROJECTS

FIND YOUR SCHOOL THEN PICK A PROJECT

Share Your Project FIND YOUR SCHOOL ON THIS SITE

LINK TO YOUR PROJECT VIDEO FROM YOUR SCHOOL INFORMATION PAGE

USE HASHTAGS SO WE CAN FIND YOUR PROJECT

Your Project Video

This site links to “Proof of Work” PROJECTS

 

GAMES GAMES GAMES GAMES GAMES


Make Cootie Catchers, Games, Music Games, Memory Certificates, Saying Goodbye to Teacher, Memory Video Project, Collect Childcren's songs games chants, Pre school graduation Party, produce a chatterbox, fortune teller, You May Also Connect Autograph Books to the National Standards:

FINE ARTS: Visual Arts GRADES K - 12 Understanding the Visual Arts In Relation to History and Cultures

LEARN THE FOLLOWING: STATE SONG | PRESIDENTS SONG | STAR SPANGLED BANNER

CHILDRENS LITERATURE: THE ORAL TRADITION - Nursery Rhymes Origins and History

 

Share Your Project #NCFR SHARE YOUR PLAYGROUND SONGS AND CHANTS PROJECT

Collect what is happening at your school, your playground, or your community!

LINK TO YOUR PROJECT VIDEO FROM YOUR SCHOOL INFORMATION PAGE

USE THE #HASHTAGS SO WE CAN FIND YOUR PROJECT

Save the Folksongs

SAVE THE 84 FOLKSONGS - PASS THEM FORWARD
2016 THE EXTENT TO WHICH AMERICAN CHILDREN’S FOLK SONGS ARE TAUGHT BY GENERAL MUSIC TEACHERS THROUGHOUT THE UNITED STATES By MARILYN J. WARD

Prepare

  • Use the Song Catching Worksheet if you are collecting playground chants and songs or stories.
  • Capture photos or video of kids playing using your phone or whatever else you want to use
  •  

VIDEO PROJECT SHARE YOUR PLAYGROUND RECESS GAMES BRING BACK RECESS WE NEED TO PLAY GAMES

SHARE YOUR PLAYGROUND RECESS GAMES

LINK TO YOUR VIDEO PROJECT FROM YOUR SCHOOL INFO PAGE

The opposite of play is depression: We are living in a culture of play deprivations.

IMPORTANCE OF RECESS: Anna Beresin was one of 2 guests who was interviewed on Radio Times about her ongoing research with importance of children's play and recess. Was an excellent show with a very articulate.

PLAY IS SERIOUS WORK for the young and old from the novice to the experienced. RESEARCH PDF It's about all the different ways we play to learn. Larger brains are linked to greater levels of play. In other words, playing makes you intelligent. Rich or poor, young or old, male or female, play has evolved to shape the overall architecture and to build big brains, explaining why children need the playground just as much as the classroom.

IMITATION IS THE FIRST IMPULSE SO WE CAN GET IN SYNCH.  
Children Learn by Monkey See, Monkey Do. Chimps Don't. 

EMOTIONS LOCK IN MEMORY
A specific area of the brain's temporal lobe called the amygdala is the center of emotion in the brain and, it is becoming clear, a very strong tool for solidly hammering in a memory. When the amygdala detects emotion, it essentially boosts activity in areas of the brain that form memories" And that's how it makes a stronger memory and a more vivid memory."

NCFR#NCFR Folklore Project
CLASSROOM ACTIVITY COLLECT EXAMPLES OF PLAYGROUND GAMES

NATIONAL CHILDRENS FOLKSONG REPOSITORY #NCFR

INTEGRATE: #GAMES #TECHNOLOGY #PLAY #HEALTH #MUSIC #LITERACY #READING #POETRY AND #ORAL CULTURE

LANGUAGE IS MUSIC MUSIC IS LANGUAGE ~ Karen Ellis

Promote Children's Playground GAMES -  Poetry, jump rope chants, clap pattern chants and songs.

Use technology to save and promote their own games, their own oral culture. Academics state the important role listening to nursery rhymes, and in many cases watching the accompanying actions, help in language acquisition.The ability to listen and discriminate between sounds in the language is an important predictor of children's later success in learning to read, and of course rhymes can play an important part in that. All cultures are hard-wired for the language of music.

Help Build Your School To Be The School You Want It To Be.

YOU CAN

  • COLLECT and VIDEO OF CHILDREN'S PLAYGROUND GAMES, CHANTS, PLAY PARTIES, AND CLAP PATTERN SONGS from the school yard, back yard, neighborhood playground, shopping mall, anywhere you see it.

  • COLLECT OUR AMERICAN VERNACULAR GAME SONGS

  • HELP PROTECT AND PRESERVE CHILDREN'S INDIGENOUS PLAYGROUND GAMES AND ORAL CULTURE

  • Tell your family's story and let Grandmom sing Miss Mary Mack for you the way she used to do it !

  • BE A PATRIOT SAVE OUR HISTORY
    THE EXTENT TO WHICH AMERICAN CHILDREN’S FOLK SONGS ARE TAUGHT BY GENERAL MUSIC TEACHERS THROUGHOUT THE UNITED STATES By MARILYN J. WARD

#NCFR GAMES / PROJECT RESOURCES

Nursery Rhymes are the foundation for reading readiness.
Understand the connections between speech, music and reading.

FOUR WHITE HORSES ON A RAINBOW
Greetings All: My name is Karen Ellis. I published a book and cassette titled Domino in 1991 of live sound field recordings; children's songs and chants from the United States Virgin Islands which were collected in 1976 - 1979. It is no longer in print, but plan to publish in the future.  This is where teachers have gotten Four White Horses from. Contact me if you want more info. The original words are much sexier :-)

Interdisciplinary connections between Language, Music, Evolution, Reading.

Rhythmic patterns underlie the human language.  As language develops some cultures pay attention to the pitch of the word and the rhythm of the word. In all cultures, If it doesn't have the right rhythm nobody will understand.

Nursery Rhymes promote Play for Healthy Development and Reading Readiness.

Why Use Playground Game Chants to Teach Reading

CONNECTIONS BETWEEN EVOLUTION, MUSIC, LANGUAGE, READING.

ORIGINS OF GAMES / FOLKSONGS, NURSERY RHYMES, PLAY PARTIES, AND INDIGENOUS PLAYGROUND POETRY 

Online Nursery Rhymes and the Oral Tradition

COLLECT CHANTS / ORAL CULTURE USE NURSERY RHYMES USE PLAY

LORE AND LANGUAGE OF SCHOOL CHILDREN #Linguistics #child-originated culture skip rope songs, counting out rhymes, parodies, singing verses, superstitions

Learn about Language Evolution and Memetics   ORAL CULTURE  NURSERY RHYMES USE PLAY

USA Jump Rope Games

Hot Topics in Health and PE

 

"Domino" ©1990 by Karen Ellis
60 Traditional Children's Songs, Games, Proverbs, and Culture From the United States Virgin Islands  45 minute Live Sound Field Recording ©1979 Registration Number TXu 822-111 Cross Curricular, Interdisciplinary, Multicultural Resource. Currently out of print.

Domino plus  60 live sound field recordings. If interested please let me know.

Domino by Karen Ellis

 

Micky

 

West Indian Proverb:

 

 

Projects for the Commnity and the Common Good

The SE is about bBuilding an economy for people and planet.

Common Good Communities

US Solidarity Economy Map and Directory:

Are you interested in being able to find worker coops, community land trusts, community gardens, social currencies, credit unions, community banks, and other solidarity economy businesses or practices? You can find them here.

The Common Good system is all about community-centered economic democracy.

11/2021 Nicholas Seppy, a 19-year-old sophomore political science major at Stockton University, easily won a seat on the Egg Harbor school board, promising to bring a fresh voice. His plans for the board are to make vocational training, and civics a priority for the High School Classrooms.

CO OP PROJECT -  K-12 teachers throughout the United States have embraced oral history as a way of making classes more interesting, but they have largely approached this through two somewhat divergent means. By far the most dominant has been the effort to develop curricula that teach students how to conduct interviews.

While there are some programs and organizations that have tried instead to incorporate existing oral histories into lessons, the latter is a much less utilized technique. In the first instance, relevant lesson plans are usually developed by individual teachers based on the intent of a class project, but in the second category, it has been more likely that curricula have been created by various oral history programs and archives and then provided to educators as a finished product that they can work into their current plans.

Economic democracy shifts power from big business and big government back to communities, where we know and care more. As a Common Good member, you buy things with your Common Good Card (from participating businesses), get an every-growing zero-interest line of credit, and occasionally move some money into or out of your account. 

 

Community #COMMUNITY #STORYTELLING PROJECT

Albert Einstein ~ "If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales."

Websites for Storytellers and Their Teachers Incorporating Oral History into K-12 Curricula by Mary Larson

K-12 teachers throughout the United States have embraced oral history as a way of making classes more interesting, but they have largely approached this through two somewhat divergent means. By far the most dominant has been the effort to develop curricula that teach students how to conduct interviews. While there are some programs and organizations that have tried instead to incorporate existing oral histories into lessons, the latter is a much less utilized technique. In the first instance, relevant lesson plans are usually developed by individual teachers based on the intent of a class project, but in the second category, it has been more likely that curricula have been created by various oral history programs and archives and then provided to educators as a finished product that they can work into their current plans.

  • Learn about Story Telling Find Websites for Storytellers.
     The Oral Tradition, Bards, Ballads, Folk music, Folk Tales, Gossip and Myth used in the classroom.
  • Folklore and folklife are not about the long-ago and faraway but about the power of place and time and the dynamic creativity of traditional culture.

  • Can Your School Tell Us About Their Community?
    Help Build Your School To Be The School You Want It To Be.
    Use our partner STORYMAP  designed for K-12 teachers to help their students experience history through stories. 

  • USE THE STORYMAP to upload your video, tell us your story and show us how this is working for the common good.

Professional Story Tellers Who Work for a Living are Freelance Editors.

JOB SKILLS YOU WILL ACQUIRE

  • - prepare a Story Telling Timeline and Tools.
  • - Background research, proposed questions, and biographical data form
  • - Unedited digital audio recording 
  • - You should have your own equipment capable of producing such documentation [minimum 48/16 or 96/24 wav files ] 
  • - Abstract of main topics of interview [submitted as electronic file] 
  • - Field notes [submitted as electronic file] 
  • - Index of main topics and location [time stamp or time code] within interview [submitted as electronic file]

Science of Story Telling

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How To Combat Hate Sites HOW TO COMBAT HATE WEBSITES, #FAKENEWS AND THEIR RECRUITING TOOLS

“Stealing Ideas”: Folklore and Education by Betty Belanus

Folklorists working in education often joke that we are great at stealing each other’s ideas, and we don’t mind a bit. “If you have a good idea, share it” is our guiding motto, and the AFS meetings are a great place to gather purloined ideas for one’s own use.

K12 Classroom / School Activity -- Betty Belarus  "Pop Up Exhibition"

Choose a theme and find the ways you can become involved as a formal or informal participant: Read more about Pop Ups 

The idea is simple:  bring an object (or a few) which follows a theme and be prepared to tell the story of that object to your audience and start a conversation around the story. 

Opening Doors, Opening Dialogues:  Sharing Cultural Knowledge and Memories from Homelands

What happens when one must leave a "homeland" and establish a new one?
Whether moving to a new town or a new country, or making a life move (such as changing career paths), how do the artifacts that we take with us, whether tangible or intangible, help us hold on to important cultural knowledge and memories, in order to share them with new friends and neighbors while creating a new identity in a new (literal or figurative) place?  
This Pop Up Exhibit invites participants and visitors to *open doors* (inviting visitors into the shared space of the small exhibit displays of objects, images and text) and *open dialogues* (using the displays as a means to explore together how cultural knowledge and memories can define and recreate homelands).

What does it mean to be an educated person? PROJECT: WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE AN EDUCATED PERSON?

TEACH HISTORY THROUGH SONG 

SONGS THAT TEACH RESPECT AND TOLERANCE 

Folk and work songs always have been windows into culture and history. But many of the Hate songs being sung by "folk groups" at "folk music events" show the Intersection between Cultural Identity and Racist Ideology.

TEACH CHARACTER EDUCATION  

THERE WERE MANY WARS ON TERROR INSIDE THE UNITED STATES  AND THEY STILL EXIST

THE CULTURE OF HONOR AND THE ONLY MUMMERS YOU NEVER HEARD OF

  • ROUGH MUSIC  AND THE KKK
  • ROUGH MUSIC - WHO IS A REBEL VS WHO IS A PATRIOT
  • INTERSECTION BETWEEN CULTURAL IDENTITY AND RACIST IDEOLOGY

DO YOU KNOW YOUR STATE SONG? 

Get Help to Teach Your Songs in Context.

You have to make connections between "disciplines". Do you find the use of the word "darkeys" offensive in Florida's current State Song? The OFFICIAL words are the original words for The Swanee River (Old Folks at Home) authored by Stephen Foster, America's Troubadour and written in imitation of dialect.

2018 'We Shall Overcome' Ruled Public Domain In Copyright Settlement! 

The music publishers, who collected well over a million dollars in royalties from the copyright, owe attorney's fees and court costs.

union members

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PETE SEEGER: "It was known among the food and tobacco workers, mainly Negro union members. And I heard them singing it in 1947."

Labor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's not how pretty a song is but what good a song does ~ Woody Guthrie

Woody

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WHAT IS SO BAD ABOUT SINGING KUMBAYA?

Language Arts / Literacy / Linguistics / Dialect Speakers / Reading

More about: Creole speakers Definitions - Dialect Speakers 
African American Vernacular, AAVE, Dialect, Creole, Patois, Pidgin, ESL, American Virgin Islands Creole, American Indian words in Louisiana, Dialect Speakers, Irish American Vernacular

"Pete Seeger sings "Kumbaya" and talks about the song's history in 1963.

"Kumbaya"? Why are these politicos invoking a sincere, melodic popular American folk song in a disparaging manner? And it's not just the Republicans. If this nation is not about everyone getting along, what is it about? And read about when singing "Kumbaya" become such a bad thing. 

Come by ya A Long Road from 'Come by Here to Kumbaya and About That Song You’ve Heard, Kumbaya. A Simple, Sincere Song  Like many political phrases these days, says Richard E. Vatz, a professor of political rhetoric at Towson State University, "Kumbaya" is used "irrespective of its derivation.

CITIZEN SCIENCE / LANGUAGE

| PUBLIC PROJECTS

PUBLIC CITIZEN PROJECTS

DONATE YOUR VOICE #Linguistics #Health #Science 'Embracing Our Differences’  Coexistence Clubs value diversity and inclusion.

[LESSON PLANS] [RESOURCES]

They are the high school component of the Embracing Our Differences Education While working within their respective schools and the local community, these dynamic high school students promote creating a world that embraces diversity, respects differences and actively rejects hatred and prejudice, by helping to make their schools a safer and more inclusive environment for everyone.  If you would like more information about how to start a club at your school, please EMAIL us.
#diversity #Arts #ByThePeople #folklife #HateGroups #CommonGood #democracy  #STEAM  #Tolerance #TeachDemocracy

DONATE YOUR VOICE #Linguistics #Health #Science #LANGUAGE #SCIENCE PROJECTS

Human Voicebank Initiative DONATE YOUR VOICE #Linguistics #Health #Science

HELP SOMEONE LIKE STEPHEN HAWKING WHO NEEDS A PERSONALIZED VOICE!

You can also find out more about how to donate your own voice. Their goal is to collect one million voice samples by 2020 to create the world’s largest repository of voices. This corpus would allow us to generate unique vocal identities for hundreds of recipients for whom we do not yet have matching donors.

DONATE YOUR VOICE #Linguistics #Health #Science HELP RECORD  AMERICAN ENGLISH DIALECTS

North American English Dialects, Based on Pronunciation Patterns

 PLEASE DONATE AND RECORD YOUR OWN VOICE!

 

How can these activities be implemented in my classroom?

PUBLIC CITIZEN #SCIENCE PROJECTS

SUPERINTENDENT / ADMINISTRATOR / TEACHER / PARENT / CITIZEN SCIENTISTS

The world's #biodiversity is diminishing rapidly and undergoing an extinction crisis

Help discover biodiversity! Take part in scientific research anywhere and at anytime.

The underlying theme is to connect biological research and collections with education and outreach. The project has the specific goal of engaging a broader audience, especially students (K-12 and college) and citizen scientists to partner with our efforts in recording critical data sets from digitally rendered images.

Scientists and educators at The Field Museum (Chicago) partnered with Citizen Science and Zooniverse at the Adler Planetarium to coordinate a network of students and professionals at universities, city colleges, high schools, and middle schools to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery.

Study Micro Plants NASA -- Citizen Science App to Combat Mosquito-borne Disease

Citizen scientists can play a role in helping prevent Zika and other mosquito-transmitted diseases. The free GLOBE Observer smartphone app can be downloaded from Google Play or the App Store. With the app the public can report where they find mosquito breeding habitats and larvae, information that scientists and public health officials use to map the range and population density of mosquitoes in your neighborhood. Visual System

 

Study Micro Plants MicroPlants Project  #Science:

Scientists want YOU to help them study in the field 

 Scientists want YOU to help them study amphibious lil plants 

Scientists from the Field Museum, Duke University and international researchers need your help.

How can these activities be implemented into my curriculum?

K-12 programs: Educators from the Education Department at The Field Museum developed Virtual Visits from The Field – an NGSS aligned program that virtually brings our MicroPlants Scientists into the classroom.

This sixty minute live broadcast is accompanied by pre and post activities that easily integrates MicroPlants into your curriculum.

POPULAR SCIENCE explains: https://www.popsci.com/liverwort-plant-citizen-science
Toddlers, teens and retirees are helping researchers understand how tiny plants respond to climate change.

OPEN SOURCE JOURNALS / BOOK REVIEWS

| LITERATURE - FILM

Collect Traditional Folktales LITERATURE

COLLECT TRADITIONAL FOLKTALES

"It is only when our old songs and old tales are passing from one human being to another, by word-of-mouth, that they can attain their full fascination. No printed page can create this spell. It is the living word-the sung ballad and the told tale-that holds our attention and reaches our hearts." ~ Richard Chase

“Barracoon” by Zora Neale Hurston

An important book by an important folklorist. A Work by Zora Neale Hurston! In 1931, publishers were unimpressed with Zora Neale Hurston’s “Barracoon.” One offered to buy it if she rewrote it “in language rather than dialect.” Hurston refused, and the book was never published until now. ~ Carl Van Vechten, via Library of Congress

Folklife and Fieldwork: An Introduction to Cultural Documentation

Fourth Edition, 2016 By Stephen Winick and Peter Bartis - download PDF
For print copies contact  folklife@loc.gov

John Henry

Story Telling, The Oral Tradition, Ballads, Folkmusic, and Folktales used in the classroom.

Folktexts Compiled by Professor D. L. Ashliman is one of the best.

Folktexts is deeply underwhelming in the looks department, but the way that it's organized is pure genius. Instead of simply presenting the stories as so many other online resources do, Professor Ashliman has gone through the bother of categorizing hundreds, if not thousands of stories by their central themes and related tales.

Let's say that you've read "The Emperor's New Clothes" and want to find out if other cultures have their own version of the story. No problem: just look under 'E.' There, you'll find information on the different names that the story is known by and what culture the story comes from. If that's not enough for you, the page even links to the text of all of the versions of the story that the professor is aware of. It's as much a labor of love as it is a work of scholarship.

The Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend

Folktale Project @FolkTaleProject
A new folktale every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. From Ayerton to Grimm and from the US to Japan.

clap FILM

Folkstreams Films

Folkstreams portray diverse cultural groups and communities, and they offer unique American voices for the study of film, art, music, history, and media literacy for the classroom.
Unlike feature films, documentaries are not fictionalized accounts but are filmmakers' attempts to capture the reality of some situation or group of people. Like feature films, documentaries are framed in a point of view. Folkstreams films try to capture what it is like to be an insider in local cultural groups from cowboys to urban Go-Go musicians. Many Folkstreams documentaries are made by folklorists, who study the myriad forms of traditional culture that are often invisible in mass media and history books but are essential to how we live our lives and formulate our worldview.
Davenport developed Folkstreams.net in 1999 as "A National Preserve of Documentary Films about American Roots Cultures." A non-profit organization, Folkstreams aims "to build a national preserve of hard-to-find documentary films about American folk or roots cultures.... [and] to give them renewed life by streaming them on the internet." The site features the work of independent filmmakers from the 1960s and later—including Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, Les Blank, Davenport, and others—focusing on films that document and preserve the culture and folklife of various American regions and communities. Folkstreams also features explanatory material alongside the films, providing cultural, historical, and artistic context and significance as a means to educate the public.

OPEN SOURCE JOURNALS / BOOK REVIEWS   

-- ARTICLES

- This interview with Henry Giroux is in part about the state of academia.

- The Death of the Public Square: Today’s most powerful companies are enemies of free expression. by Franklin Foer

Excerpts:

Nobody designed the public sphere from a dorm room or a Silicon Valley garage. It just started to organically accrete, as printed volumes began to pile up, as liberal ideas gained currency and made space for even more liberal ideas. Institutions grew, and then over the centuries acquired prestige and authority. Newspapers and journals evolved into what we call media. Book publishing emerged from the printing guilds, and eventually became taste-making, discourse-shaping enterprises. What was born in Milton’s lifetime lasted until our own. . .
The old, enfeebled institutions of the public sphere have grown dependent on the big technology companies for financial survival. And with this dependence, the values of big tech have become the values of the public sphere. Big tech has made a fetish of efficiency, of data, of the wisdom of the market. These are the underlying principles that explain why Google returns such terrible responses to the God query. Google is merely giving us what’s popular, what’s most clicked upon, not what’s worthy. You can hurl every insult at the old public sphere, but it never exhibited such frank indifference to the content it disseminated.
This assault on the public sphere is an assault on free expression. In the West, free expression is a transcendent right only in theory— in practice its survival is contingent and tenuous. We’re witnessing the way in which public conversation is subverted by name-calling and harassment. We can convince ourselves that these are fringe characteristics of social media, but social media has implanted such tendencies at the core of the culture. They are in fact practiced by mainstream journalists, mobs of the well meaning, and the president of the United States. . . .

3/14/18 Say goodbye to the information age: it’s all about reputation now

We are experiencing a fundamental paradigm shift in our relationship to knowledge. From the ‘information age’, we are moving towards the ‘reputation age’, in which information will have value only if it is already filtered, evaluated and commented upon by others. Seen in this light, reputation has become a central pillar of collective intelligence today. It is the gatekeeper to knowledge, and the keys to the gate are held by others. The way in which the authority of knowledge is now constructed makes us reliant on what are the inevitably biased judgments of other people, most of whom we do not know. 

OPEN SOURCE JOURNALS

IUScholarWorks Journals is a service of the Indiana University Libraries to support open access journal publishing at Indiana University. The Libraries provide server space and support for Open Journal Systems (OJS), an open-source solution for managing editorial processes and online publication.

CLAP BOOK REVIEWS ON PLAY


“Group Motion in Practice: Collective Creation Through Dance Movement
Improvisation.”
co authored by Anna Beresin for McFarland Press.

New Dance Game Book - Group Motion—an improvisational dance performance practice—represents fifty years of co-creation by the authors, with the participation of thousands of dancers, musicians, videographers and others around the globe.
Informed by Mary Wigman’s expressionist dance and other contemporary dance and theater traditions, Group Motion has brought dance not only to stages worldwide, but also to public parks, prisons and airports.
Part memoir, part guidebook, part philosophy of art treatise, this book provides step-by-step guidance to dozens of improvisational structures or games for dance professionals, theater artists, musicians and other performers who use movement for creative expression.

More about the connection between Mary Wigman and Karen Ellis founder of K12PlayGround.com

The Art of Play: Recess and the Practice of Invention by Anna R. Beresin
Review Journal of American Folklore American Folklore Society Volume 128, Number 508, Spring 2015 pp. 239-241

Journal of Folklore Research Reviews

are reviewing scholarly products emanating from the world of folkloristic enterprise. Launched in January of 2006, JFRR now has over 1,000 subscribers all across the globe. Last year, 2013, we published 98 reviews; in our eight years in existence we have published 885 reviews. Journal of Folklore Research Reviews will continue to review publications of interest to folklorists, ethnomusicologists, and our colleagues in other fields.  We invite you to visit our website for information about our parent entity, the Journal of Folklore Research; you will find here as well the permanent collection of reviews published in JFRR: http://www.indiana.edu/~jofr

Folk Masters: A Portrait of America.
By Barry Bergey (text) and Tom Pick (photographs). 2018. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
ISBN: 978-0-253-03233-1 (hard cover). 
Reviewed by Steve Siporin, Utah State University

Folk Masters is a beautiful coffee-table book filled with large, rich, color photographs of outstanding American folk artists--one hundred of the National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellows. I intend "coffee-table book" in a descriptive, not a pejorative or superficial sense: an oversized book in which photographs, rather than text, dominate. This "Portrait of America" adds up to a positive vision of our country as ethnically, culturally, and artistically diverse, a land of harmony and beauty, of thriving traditional arts. Folk Masters displays an upbeat, alternative America, in contrast to the generally grim, usually homogeneous picture broadcast daily on the news and mass media. [snip]

Curatorial Conversations: Cultural Representation and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival.
Edited by Olivia Cadaval, Sojin Kim, and Diana Baird N'Diaye. 2016.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 352 pages. ISBN: 978-1-4968-0598-0 (hard cover).
2018 Reviewed by Maggie Holtzberg, Massachusetts Cultural Council 

In July 2017 the Smithsonian Folklife Festival celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. The book under review was conceived in anticipation of this anniversary. The ten-day annual Festival presents music, dance, craft, foodways, occupational skill, and ritual practice, always striving to recreate contexts in which these cultural traditions naturally occur. Visitors over the years have watched Kentucky tobacco being planted, timber framers at work, home cooks preparing ethnic food, Mariachi musicians performing alongside churros (cowboys), and railroad track-laborers singing work chants, with lining bars in hand. [snip]

Peggy Seeger: A Life of Music, Love, and Politics By Jean R. Freedman.
2017. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 368 pages. ISBN: 9780252040757 (hard cover).
Reviewed by Patrick Ryan

This comprehensive overview of Peggy Seeger's life also serves as an absorbing history of the folk music revival. Jean R. Freedman provides the usual pertinent as well as lesser-known details that make any successful biography, with information gleaned from her subject and Seeger's extended family, friends, and acquaintances. As a participant of the folk scene in her youth, Freedman began an acquaintanceship with Seeger that, renewed over years, grew into a close friendship (which Freedman acknowledges in her introduction). Given access to a wealth of resources through conversations, interviews, and countless private papers and public documents, the author successfully places the events and artistic oeuvre of a multifarious life in sociocultural and historical contexts. As a folklorist, Freedman manages enormous detail with a clarity and honesty that absorbs the reader. This is no hagiography, though the author clearly admires the artist and her work, nor is it an affectionate light-hearted laudatory summary of a life. It provides insight into folk music and the folk revival, which makes the publication of interest to any reader, whether a neophyte or veteran on the folk music scene, or a scholar of twentieth-century popular culture. [snip]