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About Us Mission Mission The Louisiana Voices Folklife in Education Project provides educators with tools for teaching Louisiana folklife -- including extensive teaching materials, training, research strategies, student activities, concepts, and content -- via the Louisiana Voices Educator's Guide. History of the Louisiana Voices Folklife in Education Project Before the creation of Louisiana Voices in 1997, information and materials on Louisiana's folk cultures were used by only a few teachers who had the time or motivation to research a folklife topic and create a lesson based on that topic. Interested in seeing greater use of existing resources in K-12 classrooms and also in seeing that new scholarship was available, Maida Owens, the director of the Louisiana Folklife Program, initiated Louisiana Voices with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Louisiana Division of the Arts. The heart of the project is this Educator's Guide with nine study units that include dozens of lesson plans and student activities. They are theoretically and methodologically informed by the disciple of folklore and draw upon folklorists' research of Louisiana's traditional cultures. The Educator's Guide is flexible and easily adaptable to any curriculum, aligned with educational mandates, and accessible to teachers with no previous exposure to folklife studies. The lessons align with the Louisiana Content Standards, accentuating and augmenting existing curricula rather than creating extra work for teachers. Our partners have included:
The Louisiana Voices project is the first of its kind and has become a national model. In honor of this achievement, Louisiana Voices was awarded the prestigious Dorothy Howard Prize from the American Folklore Society in 2000. Louisiana Voices also received pointed recognition from the National Endowment for the Arts as an outstanding project, able to serve as a model for other arts-in-education efforts.
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