The ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes (The ARTS Council) is pleased to announce the publication of “Collaborative Ethnography: The Community Documentation Workshop Model” by The ARTS Council’s Folk Arts Manager, T.C. Owens and Elmira College Professor of Anthropology, Doc Billingsley. Learn about this cornerstone project of The ARTS Council’s Folk Arts Program, as well as the teams of community members, students, and facilitators preserving their traditions through documentary ethnography and short-form video production.
This article appears in the latest Journal of Folklore and Education (JFE), a publication of Local Learning: The National Network of Folk Arts in Education. JFE is a peer-reviewed, multimedia, open-access journal that publishes work representing ethnographic approaches that tap the knowledge and life experience of students, their families, community members, and educators in K-16, higher education, museum, and community education. Its readership is made up of educators and students at all levels and in all settings, folk culture specialists, and those working in community-based organizations. As a digital publication, JFE provides a forum for interdisciplinary, multimedia approaches to community-based teaching, learning, and cultural stewardship.
This special issue, entitled Cultural Frameworks for Transformative Documenting and Learning covers a wide range of topics. From teaching with AI to museum curation animated with augmented reality, and from the analog zine to the digital documentation student project, this latest issue of the Journal of Folklore and Education offers educators case studies, activities, and creative entry points to engage the art of documentation in our learning spaces.
“Storytelling is pedagogy,” write guest editors Naomi Sturm-Wijesinghe and Mauricio Bayona of Los Herederos. “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.”
We’re honored to be able to share this project with a national audience along with so many incredible cultural workers.
