Introduction
Reading Zora Neale Hurston's novel entitled Their Eyes Were Watching God,
one becomes aware of her folkloric approach to her topic. As the novel's characters
trade stories and sayings from the folklore of their collective past, one sees the
importance of such material in their everyday lives.
Many people, however, living in the hustle-bustle of 21st Century suburbia, do not see
the relevancy of folklore. The objective of this WebQuest, then, is to explore the effect
of folklore and oral history on each student's own life.
We will, of course, use a broad, inclusive definition of the term folklore. For
our purposes, anything passed down informally through the family's history and
heritage will serve as an example. Formal means, such as education and religion, do not
really qualify as folklore, however.
So, the essential question is as follows:
What is my family's connection to the past through folklore, and what is its
effect on my family and me?
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The Task
The product a given student chooses to create may take many different forms based on the
interests and abilities of the students involved.
--Some students will put together a notebook/scrapbook kind
of arrangement, which will include evidence of their search for information and
the kinds of facts (and artifacts) they were able to discover.
--Some students will produce a website with links to the
various kinds of information and insights they were able to find.
--Some students have access to the equipment necessary to produce a
CD-ROM with a multimedia presentation of their findings.
--Some students may want to create a Powerpoint presentation
of their project. Again, this could involve a multimedia approach.
--Some students may want to produce a videotape recording
segments of family gatherings and interviews with family members. Ideally, this
would include some sort of narration to help the viewer make sense of it all.
These and other forms are completely acceptable as long as they show evidence of the
results of the quest and some evidence that the student has learned what is involved
in research in the area of folklore.
NOTE: With all the above in mind, we all realize that the modern American
family can take many forms. Some students may find it difficult to do this project in the
way others students do. That's perfectly OK!
An alternative project would be to create a product that focusses less specifically
on one's own family and more on a given ethnic, cultural or regional group. You
will find plenty of information for doing a project in this form and are perfectly
welcome to do so.
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The Process
You will need to accomplish most of the steps below to produce a good project result.
Realize, though, that different situations cause different problems which have to be
solved in different ways.
The first step will be to familiarize yourself with some of the basic principles of
research in the area of folklore. Some basic questions are as follows:
--What is folklore?
--What kinds of things do folklorists study?
--How do folklorists discover new information?
--What do folklorists do with the information they obtain?
The first part of the Resources section below should help with
that topic.
Then, you will need to begin the data collection phase of the project. This will
involve interviewing family members or family friends and finding out the kind of facts
you may not have known before. These interviews may also help you to see the significance
of facts you knew but had not understood before.
Again, the Resources section should prove helpful.
The next step will be to analyze the data you have collected and see what special
significance they have for your own situation. Here you may find fact linking on to
fact and discovery linking on to discovery in a very compelling way. What you should
look for, though, is some indication of what part of your own identity as a unique
21st Century human being can be traced back to the past and the folk traditions of
that time.
The final step is to create your particular product and make your findings available
in some easily understood form.
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Resources
Some General Folklore Sites
--
What is Folklore?
--
Folklore: an Introduction
Some Help with Interviewing and Data Collection
--My History is America's History
(from the National Endowment for the Humanities)
--
How to Collect Your Own Family Folklore
--
Family Folklife Interview
--
ORAL HISTORY METHOD AND GUIDES
--
A link page of interviewing resources
--
The National Genealogy Society
Some Useful Genealogy Sites
--A complete listing of
resources available from Genealogy.com
--Surname Navigator
--RootsWeb.com
Some link pages to many other genealogy and folklore resources
--
Yahoo!'s Genealogy Page
--About Genealogy
--
Folklore Resources on the Web
Some Folklore-related Organizations
--American Folklore Society Homepage
--American Folklife Center Home
Page, Library of Congress
--
Ethnographic Studies Internet Resource Page
--
UCLA Folklore & Mythology Archives: Folklore
--
Links to Oral History Organizations
--
Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage
Some University Folklore Departments
--
The UNC-CH Curriculum in Folklore
--
UCLA Folklore Homepage
--Department of Folklore &
Ethnomusicology at Indiana University, Bloomington
--
FOLKLORE & MYTHOLOGY at Harvard University
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Evaluation
Because this project could become quite extensive and take considerable time to complete,
I may be able to count it as two major grades. If your final product
shows a good application of skills and a significant degree of growth in your knowledge
in this area, you won't have to worry about your grade(s). They'll be fine! A
rubric,however, would be practically impossible to create and still allow you the
flexibility to explore the topic in terms of your own unique situation.
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Conclusion
This project can have some surprising outcomes! I hope it was interesting and
beneficial.
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Designed by Michael Byers
Orange High School
Hillsborough, NC
Last updated June, 2008.
Based on a template from
The WebQuestPage