A new global awareness and the increasing importance of bridging diversity in civic life make cultural education a national, even international priority. The Center develops cultural education programs and materials in schools and school systems. The Center also produces books, documentaries for television, recordings, and multimedia materials, and establishes training programs with and for educators in an effort to integrate cultural education into the music, art, social studies, math, and even science curriculum in grades K-12.
The Center works with a range of educators to develop materials for school-age children. The Center, with the U.S. Virgin Islands Department of Education and Humanities Council, produced a multimedia curriculum kit for the public schools. With the Music Educators National Conference the Center produced a kit on American folk music. The Center worked with El Colegio de la Frontera Norte to produce classroom material on U.S.-Mexico borderlands culture and consulted with the National Museum of the American Indian to produce educational materials on Native American cultures. In these efforts, and others, such as with local area schools, the Center's products and programs stress the direct involvement of tradition bearers in the educational process and the importance of training students themselves to become cultural researchers in order to understand their own communities and world around them.
The Center's cultural education efforts also reach university and specialized audiences. The Smithsonian Folklife Studies series pairs documentary films and scholarly monographs that examine cultural traditions in the U.S. and other parts of the world. The series expands on research originally conducted for the Folklife Festival. Films are often shown on public and cable television stations and are distributed to college campuses through Penn State Audio-Visual Services. Monographs are distributed by the Center. The series includes studies of American Indian drumming and technology, occupational culture, Korean pottery, Indian puppetry and other topics. A current project in the series examines the transformations and continuities of Muharram, a Muslim holiday, in Iran, India, Trinidad, and New York City.
The Center also established a Community Scholars Program as a Summer Folklore Institute in 1989. Community scholars are generally local documentors, presenters, and conservators of culture repositories of knowledge and insight who are not formally trained in cultural studies. This program brings together community or lay scholars with academic and public-sector colleagues to share ideas about their work. An institute on a chosen topic is held for several weeks during the time of the Festival. Community scholars come to Washington as institute fellows to discuss their work, meet with public officials, increase skills, examine and critique institutional activities, and become familiar with larger networks of people and organizations. Fellows return home more knowledgeable of the support potentially available to them and their work.
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