Ago/Ame

As the field of education offers more inclusive learning environments for students from different backgrounds—for example, cultural, socioeconomic, and neurological, to name a few—providing  alternative education models challenges the “one-size-fits-all” approach in...

Folk Culture

Folklore and folklife1 are ways that everyday people, in the present, maintain relationships to their past. So much community “DNA” resides in folklife—in community embedded stories, dress, dance, foodways, song, and other cultural expressions. The lessons and...

Sound Ideas

In 2015 in this journal, I presented a short article called “Pen Tapping: Forbidden Folklore” with a short collaborative film made by my undergraduate students titled, “Making Beats.” A taboo practice in elementary school, making beats with a pen was outlawed both in...

Old Songs New Opportunities

Erie, Pennsylvania, is a Rust Belt city of about 100,000 in the Great Lakes region. Although we have a relatively small resettled  refugee  community, refugees  represent about 11 percent of our population, one of the highest percentages in the nation. The refugee...