It is my task to first describe Rachelâs life and work as they led up to her own revolution. It is her assemblage of herself, growing up Quaker, and the events that led to her creation of three school and community programsâthe Assembly, Group Conversation and the Neighborhood-Home Festival, and the Parranda . These events/activities melded her understanding of how the school worked and how folklore as a peopleâs tangible and intangible expression served student, family, and community. These programs were created between 1924 and 1950.
My second task is to account for the use of folklore in education environments. Between 1950 and today, programs have been executed by folklorists to provide people, student, and adult alike, with opportunities to explore the power of folklife in their lives and in the lives of their neighbors.
And last (but certainly not least) my charge is to explore how Rachelâs programs meet with folklife education programs today. I suggest that intercultural education would not have existed without folklore. I contend as well that folklife education would not exist if intercultural education had not been on the landscape.
This is a chronicle of one womanâs campaign for education, pride, and harmony among culture groups in the United States. The subject of this campaign is Rachel Davis DuBois (1892â1993), who, through her Quaker belief in pacificism, education, and work toward the common good, guided her to the creation of education programs, the Assembly (1924â1929), Group Conversation, the Neighborhood-Home Festival (1937), and the Parranda (1945â1950) under the name of âIntercultural Educationâ through the Service Bureau for Intercultural Education (1934â1940) and the Workshop for Cultural Democracy (1945â1953).
Rachelâs work began in 1915 when she taught at Glassboro (New Jersey) High School. It was there that in teaching social studies that she employed a dramaturgic approach to presenting lessons, having students act out the parts and people of historyâs great events, such as the creation and signing of the Declaration of Independence. This meshed well with her sense of dramatic flair, which she capitalized on when she was a student at Bucknell College. Throughout her work she employed a dramaturgic model using the elements of rehearsal, performance, and review, which I explore throughout this book. She wasnât interested in the quality of performance. Rather, she saw the dramaturgic as a mode for immersion into the curriculum.
In 1920, Rachel felt a need to become more involved in Quaker activities and resigned from Glassboro to work with the newly formed American Friends Service Committee, in Philadelphia, founded in 1917 initially out of a concern for pacifist participation in war-time efforts (Austin 2009). One of her first activities was to attend a conference of Quakers in London to hear reports of works across the country and world. It was at this conference that she realized a diversity in Quaker faith and practice, unlike what she experienced in the sheltered arms of her hometown Quaker life, and she returned from the meeting with an even stronger desire to serve.
It was in 1921 that Rachel realized her Concern, something Quakers felt they could involve themselves with in work and pleasant duty. The American Friends Service Committee, through its satellite organization on Abolition, sent Rachel to South Carolina to inspect the work of a school organized by fellow Quaker Martha Schofield (1839â1916). It was that trip through Deep South Jim Crow that Rachel got her first taste of institutionalized racism, and it was that experience that gave rise to Rachelâs Concern, the eradication of racism. A rather tall order, she whittled her work to include public schools, colleges, and community groups from Boston to New Jersey.
Returning to teaching in 1924 at Woodbury High School (New Jersey), an opportunity to work on her Concern settled at her feet. Each week, students were herded into the auditorium for an assembly on a topic that Rachel perceived as boring. The teacher was saddled with the task of maintaining order, and it seemed that the students werenât getting much out of the experience. It was the lackluster experience of the Assembly that Rachel did what she called âDreaming Ahead.â She envisioned an Assembly program that would highlight and involve peoples of different cultures in and around the Woodbury community who could share some of the history and traditions in their lives. The Assembly would have three basic components: (1) the emotional, where the students would actually be in the presence of a tradition bearer; (2) the intellectual, which would involve student study of the contributions of the culture groups to America; and (3) the opportunity to meet with the tradition bearer in a social, more intimate situation. With this combination, the Assembly was a success.
Emotion, intellect, and social construction formed the basic spine of Intercultural Education. The disks of the spine fortified an architecture of social tolerance consisting of (1) gathering historical and cultural information on the culture groups under study to be shared with other teachers and students; (2) involving others in planning and preparing for the Assembly experience, including parents, teachers, students, and the tradition bearers themselves; (3) inviting assembly attendees to experience some of the culture being present, like sharing foods and participating in a dance; and (4) influencing some kind of change in attitude among participants, including a change from a negative attitude to a positive attitude (to be visited in Chaps. 5 and 6).
Rachelâs work took place in the heyday of the Progressive Education movement, which was child centered, but somehow didnât focus on the specifics of culture groups as they were practiced in the home and community. Except for John Dewey (1899, 1916), who promoted the experiential and democratic nature of Rachelâs work, the key players in the Progressive Education Movement, including Lucy Sprague Mitchell (1953), Agnes deLima (1926), and Caroline Pratt (1970), thought differently from Rachel, given the fact that they were working in private settings with younger children. Rachel held little interest in childrenâs physical development. She was far more interested in social and emotional growth. She lived for discovery through cultural, not developmental, interaction. Given her Concern, she tended to focus on certain specifics such as the traditional practices of Jews and African Americans. In fact, it was her view of Judaism as a culture ran counter to Jewish agencies like the American Jewish Committee, which viewed Judaism as a religion, not as a culture. This was only the first of her problems as her work expanded into a national phenomenon.
Rachel left Woodbury in 1929 to further her education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She refined and tested the Assembly Program with great success, and it attracted enough academic and philanthropic support that in 1934 her work formed the base for the Service Bureau for Intercultural Education (SBIE ). The Bureau served as an information clearinghouse on immigrant groups and allowed Rachel to train teachers in the Assembly and teach graduate students at New York University, where they formed a new method, Group Conversation, which supported the Neighborhood-Home Festival, an opportunity for adults of differing immigrant groups to informally gather to talk about traditions in their lives and explore commonalities and differences (Crispin 1987).
In 1935, Rachel, through the Service Bureau, worked with the Progressive Education Association (PEA) to heighten its efforts at becoming âethnic friendly.â At the time, the PEA had been focusing on the child, acknowledging his or her connections to home and community in education. The organization made a concerted effort to include ethnicity in its programs, but Rachelâs approach, highlighting ethnicity, first did not mesh with the PEA and so it dissolved the relationship in 1938.
While most of these offerings were successful, there were members of the Service Bureau Board who were disenchanted with Rachelâs work. They did not like how she gathered...