A drawn-out Midwestern goodbye. Bringing a dish to a potluck. Playing a game of euchre.
These may seem like ordinary practices that disappear into the background of the average Midwesterner’s everyday life, but they’re really folk traditions hiding in plain sight. Anna Rue (MA’09, PhD’14), director of the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures (CSUMC), calls them “performances.”
“These performances tell us who we are when we’re in each other’s company,” says Rue. “They reveal our identities, and they help us connect with our past, and also foreground our hopes for the future.”
This connection between identity, community and tradition is what Rue and her colleagues are now working to pass on to the next generation.
In collaboration with B. Marcus Cederström (MA’12, PhD’16), a teaching faculty member with the
Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic+, Rue works on the Sustaining Scandinavian Folk Arts in the Upper Midwest project, also called the Nordic Folklife Project. One of the project’s primary goals is to bring traditional artists and educators together to find new ways to incorporate folk arts and local culture into Wisconsin schools.
Their work is part of Culture, Community, and the Classroom (CCC), a professional development program developed by Local Learning: The National Network for Folk Arts in Education and offered throughout New York State for years. Local Learning contracted with CSUMC and the Nordic Folklife Project to bring CCC to Wisconsin for the first time, pairing traditional folk artists with K-12 art teachers.
The Local Learning team leads workshops across Wisconsin, giving each pair of folk artists and teachers a year to design a lesson plan that integrates a folk art form with standard learning goals, like a science concept or reading benchmark.
The project was structured around the idea that artists and educators contribute different expertise to the learning process. While teachers understand their students and curriculum, folk artists carry the knowledge and history of the practices passed down to them.
“The most important thing we can do is provide opportunities that bring people of different sectors together,” says Rue. “When those conversations ensue, they’re really powerful.”
Long before kids begin school, they are exposed to traditions taught to them by their families and communities. Rue believes that when these art forms and traditions are woven into the learning process, kids can recognize the cultural knowledge they already possess. While the Nordic Folklife Project has a Nordic emphasis, CSUMC’s roots represent the diverse cultures of the Upper Midwest, and the project’s goals extend beyond one singular culture. It’s not about teaching one tradition over another; it’s about valuing every student’s heritage at school, Nordic or otherwise.
“Kids have cultural competence walking into the classroom,” says Rue. “They know how they might celebrate a birthday differently from another classmate, or they know why they know a set of songs and dances that might be different from one of their classmates.”
The project’s focus wasn’t limited to just K-12 classrooms. Rue and Cederström partnered with 4-H to reach youth across the state, including those who may not encounter these opportunities through their schools. One of the special features of their partnership with 4-H was the ability to deliver some of the programming online. Each youth enrolled in the program received a kit of supplies, so they could easily follow along at home.
Derek Brabender, a woodworker from Stoughton, Wisconsin, was a key figure in this effort. Brabender works with wood in traditional ways, such as spoon carving and bowl turning. He collaborated with 4-H to develop a virtual workshop teaching knife carving to participants. Through the workshop, young people learned woodcarving techniques and gained an introduction to the history and culture behind the traditional art form.
Rue and Cederström are still gathering feedback from the artists and teachers who took part, listening for what worked and what the next phase of the project should look like. But their objective remains to treat culture and tradition as something worth bringing into the classroom, not something students leave behind when they walk through the door.
“We want to be a resource for people,” says Rue. “We want to highlight the knowledge, expertise and creativity that exists in these communities.”
This story originally included a photo of Ho-Chunk baskets, inaccurately creating the impression that they are an example of Nordic folk art. We're sorry for this oversight. While funding for this project comes from the Nordic Folk Arts project, artists from many cultural backgrounds participate in the program, delivering lessons in multiple folk art traditions of the Upper Midwest.