Cultural Frameworks for Transformative Documenting and Learning
Journal of Folklore and Education
2025: Volume 12
Naomi Sturm-Wijesinghe and Mauricio Bayona, Guest Editors
About This Volume
From teaching with AI to museum curation animated with augmented reality, and from the analog zine to a digital documentation student project, this issue offers educators case studies, activities, and creative entry points to engage the art of documentation in our learning spaces.
“Storytelling is pedagogy. To inherit culture in the digital age is to honor tradition while embracing innovation, to archive the past while imagining futures, and to make learning a process of shared transformation.” — Los Herederos, Guest Editors
Articles
Introduction: Cultural Frameworks for Transformative Documenting and Learning
For Los Herederos, documentation is inheritance. Storytelling is pedagogy. To inherit culture in the digital age is to honor tradition while embracing innovation, to archive the past while imagining futures, and to make learning a process of shared transformation.
Archiving at a Crossroads: Cultural Contact and Rapid Change in Los Herederos’ Documenting as Resistance Collection
Through documentation created in collaboration with and in service to their community, alongside more traditional institutional archiving through the Library of Congress, this author finds the archival collection Documenting as Resistance produced by Los Herederos in Jackson Heights, Queens, seeks to symbolically represent cultural life and also actively sustain it. Analyzing the collection's oral histories, soundscapes, and visual media, dynamics of intercultural interaction and coexistence and neighborhood transformation under gentrification are explored.
The Power of Place-Based Stories: A Case Study of the MKE Roots Digital Ecosystem
Using anonymized, composite vignettes from ongoing case study research, the authors tell the story of MKE Roots: The Democratizing Local History Project. MKE Roots offers a pedagogical ecosystem—a digital space of transformative, multimodal documentation of community stories—for teaching a critical, place-based history of Milwaukee’s marginalized communities. Through the documentation and sharing of community stories in Social Studies teaching, MKE Roots demonstrates the transformative potential of folklife activated for cultural and community education.
Using Folklife Magazine in the Classroom: A Guide for Educators
An 8th-grade Social Studies teacher gives insight on what it was like to create learning modules using preexisting Smithsonian Folklife Magazine content and activities.
An Intergenerational Indigenous Language Education Case Study: Developing Ichishkíin Teaching Resources Sustains Community Cultural Life
Indigenous languages are necessary for sustaining community cultural life. This collaborative project of Indigenous teacher education students with Elders creates classroom-ready teaching resources to support Ichishkíin language education and revitalization. Indigenous education students successfully learned Ichishkíin alphabet, vocabulary, and grammar; collaborated with Elders to understand the cultural significance of their work; and gained confidence in centering Indigenous knowledges they can apply within their own communities and workplace settings.
Storytelling in Augmented Reality to Discover Community in the Borderlands
Arizona State Museum embarked on a collaborative community-curated ethnohistory project presented via augmented reality (AR). Transcending traditional boundaries—curatorial, geographical, and technological—the AR mini exhibit experiences animate community spaces with stories of our diverse community. The AR experiences ask users to consider the people of this place over time, their history, relation to the land, creativity, traditions, and ongoing work that has and continues to shape this community.
Helping Students Find Their Natural Voices in an Artificial Age
Asking the question, "Can Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT offer students an opportunity to develop voice?" this high school teacher considers the important role of culturally responsive teachers against a backdrop of rapidly evolving technologies, techniques, and unknowns, including AI.
The Crystal Book: A Comic-Based Method for Cross-Cultural Learning
While teaching in New York City, the author explored how comic books could serve as a classroom resource to connect diverse students through storytelling, history, and cultural exploration. The resulting comic-based approach uses visual storytelling to spark curiosity, support student inquiry, and connect culture with creative expression.
Going Analog in the Digital Age: Zines as Multimodal Storytelling
This zine project offers a model to bring embodied learning into the classroom. Students create zines as a form of multimodal storytelling that incorporates various forms of traditional knowledge to educate diverse audiences. Zines in the folklore classroom allow students to engage with and create a specific cultural artifact, while also examining, through ethnographic fieldwork or primary- and secondary-source research, specific issues relevant to their lives and the course content.
The RIT Iceberg: A Case Study Documenting Collegiate Student Folklore and Traditions
This article includes Classroom Connections
This case study examines the author's research project into the folklore of Rochester Institute of Technology students and argues for the importance of increased research into the field of collegiate folklore.
Collaborative Ethnography: The Community Documentation Workshop Model
This article includes Classroom Connections
The Community Documentation Workshop in New York's Southern Finger Lakes region brings together teams of community members, students, and facilitators to preserve their traditions through documentary ethnography and short-form video production to share with a wider public.
The Herbarium of Coquí: A Platform for Knowledge Sharing, Cultural Documentation, and Community Education
This article is bilingual
This bilingual article reflects on the processes of creating inclusive learning environments for children and elders to promote the circulation of ancestral knowledge and to document the ethnobotanical use of plants of Coquí, Chocó, Colombia.
El Herbario de Coquí: Una platforma para el compartir de saberes, la documentación cultural, y la educación comunitaria
This article is bilingual
Este artículo es una reflexión sobre la creación de espacios inclusivos de aprendizaje para jóvenes y sabedores que promuevan la circulación de saberes ancestrales y documenten el uso etnobotánico de plantas en Coquí, Chocó, Colombia.
Common Threads: Weaving Community in Gatlinburg, Tennessee
This article details the interweaving of education and craft practice in Gatlinburg and the surrounding area through the lens of an exhibition, Common Threads, which brought together historical textiles and contemporary weavers at the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts to invite them to reestablish it as a community space where their knowledge and skills are valued.
Unwritten Presence: On Listening, Learning, and the Living Archive
PUSAKA is a UNESCO-accredited cultural organization dedicated to researching and documenting Malaysia’s traditional and ritual arts. Resisting the act of documentation as “preservation,” a word too often bound to nostalgia and the industry of “cultural heritage,” PUSAKA approaches documentation as a living archive—a way into the texture of traditions still pulsing, still becoming.
Tending the Archives: A Philadelphia Hmong Family’s Multimodal Living History
Reflecting on the innovative multi-year collaboration where seven young Hmong documented their community through interviews, photographs, sound, and video recordings, supported by non-Hmong cultural professionals in the 1980s, the authors reflect on the power of a living cultural archive in sustaining culture and community.
"All the Good in Life": An Interview with Amanda Dargan and Steve Zeitlin of City Lore
As City Lore celebrates 40 years, Local Learning Board member Sahar Muradi sat down with City Lore founder and Co-Director Steve Zeitlin and former Director of Education Programs Amanda Dargan for a conversation on how it all began, where we are now, and why it matters.
Documentary Arts: Innovative, Interdisciplinary Methodologies Since 1985
For more than four decades, Documentary Arts has introduced and employed innovative interdisciplinary methodologies to broaden public knowledge and appreciation of the arts of different cultures in all media, from photographs, films, and videos to studio and field recordings, interactive installations, and musical theatre productions.
Note from the Field
Told through the lens of a personal and professional journey, the folklorist Jon Lohman describes the needs that informed development of "World Culture in Context," a virtual school-based arts program that features a roster of artists from across the U.S. and the world. It has become a powerful model to deepen understanding and connect communities that might never otherwise cross paths.
2025 Journal of Folklore and Education Reviews
Smithsonian Folkways Music Pathways, https://folkways.si.edu/learn | Whispers in the Echo Chamber: Folklore and the Role of Conspiracy Theory in Contemporary Society, Jesse A. Fivecoate and Andrea Kitta, eds.
A Note
We document our year to recognize, with urgency, the importance of this publication that has no paywall and advances the work of folk arts education.
Key Themes in This Issue
AI and Technology, Media, Documentation, Narrative and Voice, Identity, Place
The Journal of Folklore and Education (ISSN 2573-2072) is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal published annually by Local Learning: The National Network for Folk Arts in Education. JFE publishes work that uses ethnographic approaches to tap the knowledge and life skills of students, their families, community members, and educators in K-12, college, museum, and community education.
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