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Return to Natalie
Kononenko's Home Page
TEACHING GOALS
My discipline, folklore, shapes much of what I do
When I was a child, I noticed that, although my family looked like everyone else's, they behaved differently. There were many disparities between what I encountered at home and what I saw in society at large, but I was probably most painfully aware of the differences between the body type expected of me by my parents and the one dictated by American popular culture. Perhaps even then I wanted to discover the reasons for the differences. I also wanted to understand why my parents' behavior patterns were so tenacious, why, after so many years in the United States, they insisted on being so "foreign."
My answers came to me through folklore. It was through my beloved discipline that I learned about information acquisition on the unconscious level, what folklorists call transmission by custom and practice. And, through the study of folklore, I learned about making the unconscious conscious. Through analyzing the products of folklore, looking at oral rather than written texts, I learned a great deal about cognition. I understood that, while most of the thinking we do is logical and linear, folklore is non-linear. Folklore connections are not haphazard. By the same token, there are multiple sets of possible relations; there is no single thread running through a folklore text precisely because there is no one text, but multiple variants. An image or a symbol does not belong to one genre; it appears in many and acts to tie the genres together. An action is not peculiar to one ritual; a mock sacrifice occurs as part of the rite welcoming spring and a variant of the sacrifice characterizes the carnival that follows a wedding. It is these multiple variants that constitute what folklorists call tradition. To me, having students study the multifaceted relationships of folklore exponentially increases their ability to see and to make complex connections. In a word, such study increases their capacity to reason. And improving my students' ability to think in more than one way is the greatest gift I can give them.
Tradition: Becoming aware of our assumptions and habits of mind
One of the most important things I do is make students aware of their own "folklore." I try to show them that there are multiple venues for informal information transmission. I want them to be aware that, in addition to the formal instruction they receive in school, they are taught by everything from the commercials they watch on television, to the arrangement of objects in their homes, to the behavior they observe in their parents, neighbors, and classmates. I want them to understand that a great deal of the thinking they themselves do occurs beyond their conscious awareness. To do this, I present material from another culture (I use Russian and Ukrainian data) and examine as many facets of the tradition as course time will allow me. I then try to show American parallels, either in terms of material type, or thinking styles, or unconscious assumptions. For example, I show Russian story structures and then find similar story structures in American popular culture, such as movies or cartoons, only peopled with characters appropriate to current American issues. I explore gender relations in Russian ritual and then examine gender in American weddings, showing how American norms are the inverse of Russian ones. I then have my students discuss why this is culturally appropriate.
Folklore as non-linear thought: Learning about cognition
Folklore is a complex and interconnected web. In Ukrainian folklore, for example, we see that larks appear as symbols in lyric songs and that they are also pictured on embroidered sacred towels which protect icons. The same birds, now made of dough, decorate wedding breads, indicating that the couple is flying off to a new home and protecting them in this dangerous time of transition. Seeing an embroidered lark, then, stimulates in a Ukrainian a complex set of associations only some of which are conscious. Complex associations of this type characterize all cultures and I want to make students aware of the fact that they exist. To do so, I have used many techniques. Early in my teaching I began to supplement the texts that students read with photographs, trying precisely to show connections between the verbal and the visual. I would play tapes so that students could hear a text as well as read it. As video became more accessible, I added this component to my courses. A great breakthrough for me came with digital technology. I began using digital media such as Power Point in my classes. With the help of a Teaching and Technology Initiative grant from the University of Virginia, I have been working on making a set of images web-accessible through a searchable database. This will soon permit students to work with my data on their own, outside the classroom, doing projects that approximate the work that scholars do. Most important of all, digital technology permits me to link materials in a non-linear fashion. Hyperlinks approximate folklore relationships best and using digital media helps me teach students about the sorts of interconnections that characterize folklore. Ultimately, it is a wonderful tool that helps me expand student thinking styles.
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