Folklore, Learning and Literacies conference
- 21-23/05/2021
- Friday 21 to Sunday 23 May. from 09:30 to 17:30 GMT
- Online conference
Marc Armitage
The rescheduled Folklore, Learning and Literacies conference will be online, Friday 21 to Sunday 23 May 2021
Keynote speaker: Prof. Michael Rosen: ‘”Don’t say that!” – how my parents negotiated Yiddish.’ (Friday 21st) In this talk, Michael Rosen explores how his parents who had both come from Yiddish-speaking households, retained many Yiddish phrases and words and passed them on orally. Michael explores why they didn’t speak it more, how aspects of their English were in fact ‘Yinglish’, and how that’s affected his own writing and performing. In the past, this sort of cultural and linguistic transition has been described as ‘assimilation’ but Michael suggests that other terms might be more useful such as ‘interculturalism’. He will refer to his memoir ‘So They Call You Pisher!’ (Verso), his book about his relatives in the Holocaust ‘The Missing’ (Walker Books) and will read several poems from e.g. ‘Mr Mensh’ (Smokestack Books).
Tickets: £30.00 (Folklore Society Members £20.00)
Lore is learning: folklore is a body of knowledge and a means of transmission.
Formal education and training are no more—or less—formative than the informal, everyday vernacular literacies that we absorb from our peer groups or families. A proverb is a condensed lesson; a ballad or a fairy-tale has a moral more often than not; a rite of passage may encapsulate a trade’s culture. And the landscape, whether rural or urban, is a theatre of memory and the backdrop of local legend.
So yes, lore is learning. But how do we learn folklore? How do we learn about folklore?
Download the Programme and Abstracts
Programme:
Friday 21 May
11:00-12.30 Panel 1: Modern Media and Folklore
Robert McDowall, Digital Literacy: its Application to Folklore
Laima Anglickiene & Jurgita Macijauskaitė-Bonda, Multilingualism and Multiculturalism in Lithuanian Children‘s Folklore
Sarmistha De Basu, The Use of Folklore in the Media world of the Indian Subcontinent
13:15-13:45 Keynote lunchtime talk
Michael Rosen, ‘Don’t say that!’ – How My Parents Negotiated Yiddish
14:00—15:30 Panel 2: Playing the Archive
Julia Bishop, Catherine Bannister, and Alison Somerset-Ward, Children’s Folklore, Learning and Literacies: The Making of the Iona and Peter Opie Archive
Alison Somerset-Ward and Helen Woolley, Affordances of Outdoor Environments for Play in the Opie Archive
John Potter and Kate Cowan, ‘This is me reporting live from the playground…’: Improvisation, Imagination and Lifeworlds in Children’s Playful Talk
16:00—17:30 Panel 3: Childlore Collections and Collectors
Janet Alton, Games, Rhymes, and Wordplay of London Children by Nigel Kelsey
Yinka Olusoga, The Iona and Peter Opie Archive: A British Academy Research Project
Julia Bishop and Steve Roud, Childlore Online: Accessing the Children’s Contributions @ Opiearchive.org
Saturday 22 May
9:30—11:00: Panel 4: Applied Folkloristics
Caitlin Rimmer, Accountability in Aesthetic Interpretation: The Role of Folklore in Deconstructing Homophobic Ontologies
Victoria Newton, Vernacular knowledge and Public Health: Reproductive Bodylore and contraceptive decision-making
Kate Smith, How Can Folklore and Folkloristics Make Climate Change Education Better?
11:30—13:00: Panel 5: Using Folktales in the Classroom
Patrick Ryan, ‘Every teacher should be an excellent storyteller’: a Wholesome Revival of the Ancient Art in Progressive Education.
Shuli Barzilai, Using Victorian Fairy Tales to Go ‘Beyond Magic’ in the Classroom
Diana Coles, Bruno Bettelheim and the Rule of Three
14:00—15:30: Panel 6: Folklore & the Historian
Margaret Bennett, ‘When was the Battle of Waterloo?’ Remembering History Through Folksongs and Oral Tradition
William Pooley, Who Believed in Witchcraft? France 1790-1940
Martha Vandrei, Lessons for Historians: Historical Imagining, Folkloric Knowing, and Aesthetic Learning in the Work of R.G. Collingwood
16:00—17:30: Panel 7: Formal and Informal Learning
David Hopkin, Songs For and From the Flemish Lace Schools
Rosemary Power, Traditional Learning in Northern Iceland
Paul Cowdell, Written in the Back
Sunday 23 May
10:00—11:30: Panel 8: Proverbs, Performance and Professionals
Fionnuala Carson Williams, From Mouth to Hand: the Use of Proverbs and Sayings in Contemporary Campaigns.
Leon Conrad, The Function of Cognitive Dissonance in Folklore: Content, Form, Story
Helen Frisby, Growing the Next Generation of Researchers: Law, Lore and the Role of the Researcher Developer
12:00—13:00: Panel 9: From the Oral to the Written
Richard Jenkins, What Happens When We Write it Down?
David Shankland, The Alevis: Scriptualization of an Oral Tradition
14:00—15:30: Panel 10: Folklore and Education in Central & Eastern Europe
Ioana Baskerville, ‘Why Should We Still Teach Folklore?’ A Romanian Contemporary Perspective on Folklore’s Place in K-12 Education
Gabriela Boangiu, Reality and Fairy Tale Elements in Children’s Films and Cartoons in the Communist Times in Romania
Svea Hundertmark, Once Upon an English Lesson: Using Fairy Tale Adaptations in the German EFL Classroom
16:00—17:30: Panel 11: Learning from Non-Humans
Tommy Kuusela, White Snakes and Cunning Folk in Swedish Folk Belief
Ethan Doyle White, ‘Krampus Came Not to Reward, But to Punish’: Or, How Krampus Teaches Us the True Meaning of Christmas
Jessica Bradley, Performing and Playing the Goat
17:30—18:00: Conference closing comments