What does a Folklore class, freshmen students and Flip cameras have in common?
Quite a bit.
Last summer, a group of students in Folklore 100: Introduction to Folklore were able to put together ethnographic skills and digital cameras at UW-Madison.
The students were all part of the 2010 Summer Collegiate Experience (SCE) -- a high-impact summer experience for incoming freshmen who taken courses together.
The students explored and documented the cultural diversity in Madison, including the South Park Street neighborhood and the historic Greenbush neighborhood.
Folklore 100 introduces students to the study of everyday life and community, fieldwork methods, and responsible ethnography.
The Summer Collegiate Experience provided the perfect opportunity for these incoming freshmen to explore the community surrounding UW-Madison, to meet neighborhood residents, visit grocery stores and community gardens, and interview and document business owners along South Park Street.
The Flip cameras, small easy-to-use digital camcorders, allowed students to create small documentary features as part of a final project in the course.
For the class, students interviewed Tamaki Wu, owner of the Oriental Shop; George Fabian of Park Street Shoe Repair; Steven Fraboni of Fraboni’s Italian Specialties & Delicatessen and Dr. Megan Caldwell of the Whole Pet Veterinary Clinic to name a few.
Folklore as a discipline seeks to empower individuals and communities to realize and embrace their cultural institutions.
The Flip cameras will be used in future Folklore 100 courses as students continue to collaborate in documenting local culture. This fieldwork assignment—which involves background research, interviewing and documenting, analyzing the information gathered and then presenting it creatively and effectively—will help bring future Folklore students into service learning relations with local neighborhood organizations.
The 2010 SCE students’ work will be acknowledged during a “Celebrate South Madison” gathering in late November.
A grant from the L&S Office of Service Learning and Community Based Research provided the cameras.