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About Us
Mission
History
Presenter Bios
Louisiana Voices Milestones
Mission
The Louisiana Voices Folklife in Education Project provides teachers and other K-12 educational programmers 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. Louisiana Voices supports educators with instruction and assistance on the use of these tools and provides forums of communication through which individuals may share information and offer feedback.
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, initiatied Louisiana Voices with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Louisiana Division of the Arts. Through its various activities, Louisiana Voices serves two segments of the population: 1) K-12 educators and after-school programmers and 2) K-12 students.
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.
Louisiana Voices offers professional development to teachers. Presenters demonstrate how to combine the theory and content of Louisiana cultural studies with state-mandated education parameters. Through workshops, Louisiana Voices provides teachers with instruction on how to develop and implement folklife lessons that engage students' natural curiosity. Louisiana Voices also keeps abreast of current educational issues, aligning its training with high-priority educational goals to maximize the effectiveness and usability of our resources and training. To date, Louisiana Voices has provided over 100 professional development sessions to teachers in approximately 22 school districts, and we maintain a growing mailing list of over 2,000 individuals. To reach our audience, we leverage the networking capabilities of established organizations and institutions.
Our partners include:
- Tulane University's Deep South Regional Humanities Center
- Teachers Learning Technology Centers (TLTCs)
- University colleges of education throughout the state
- T.H.E. | QUEST
- Louisiana Learn and Serve
- Louisiana Department of Education Office of Quality Educators
- Louisiana Center for Educational Technology (LCET)
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- State and federal parks
- State and local museums
- Louisiana Public Broadcasting
- LINCS
- American Folklore Society
- American Folklife Center's Veteran's History Project
- Louisiana Alliance for Arts Education
- Arts councils
- Regional Folklife Program
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Louisiana Voices also communicates with our community of educators through our email group, and our newsletter, Giving Voice.
The Louisiana Voices project is the first of its kind and has become a national model; several states are modeling their own folklife-in-education initiatives after Louisiana Voices, including Virginia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Tennessee.
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. In 2002, Louisiana Voices received funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities to produce a special year-long humanities seminar for teachers from three South Louisiana parishes.
Presenter Bios
| Louisiana Voices Presenters |
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Eileen Engel, Education Coordinator, Workshop Presenter
Eileen Engel is an education program coordinator and public history specialist. Her area of specialization in public history is the Louisiana Slave Narratives. She has 20 years of teaching experience, including teaching every K-12 grade except 3rd. She has managed over $20 million of education programs and received awards both for her teaching and program direction as director of Education at the new Chabot Space and Science Center and a space laboratory. |
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Jane Vidrine, Workshop Presenter
Jane Vidrine is a middle school vocal music teacher in Lafayette Parish. Vidrine received her M.Ed. at University of Louisiana at Lafayette. As an educator, she has worked extensively with French Immersion classes and arts in education residencies. Vidrine has worked in public folklife and cultural tourism since the 1970s. |
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Lana Henry, Workshop Presenter
Lana Henry is currently a Ph.D. student in English and Folklore at the University of Louisiana at
Lafayette. She has taught middle school, high school, and college folklore, composition and literature, English as a Second Language, and adult education. Her research interests are ritual and folk belief, folklore and medicine, women's folklore, and folklore in literature. |
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Dr. Susan Roach, Workshop Presenter, Regional Folklorist
Susan Roach is the Regional Folklorist at Louisiana Tech University in Ruston which serves north central and northeast Louisiana. She has more than 20 years of experience teaching English and has taught folklore at Louisiana Tech since 1989. She has Ph.D. in Anthropology (Folklore) from University of Texas at Austin and a Ph.A. and M.A. in English from University of Arkansas. She has been involved with Louisiana Voices since its inception. She serves as the Louisiana Voices liaison at Louisiana Tech and taught a Louisiana Voices course at Louisiana Tech in June 2003 for 17 teachers. |
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Dr. Jocelyn Donlon, Workshop Presenter, NEH Seminar Coordinator
Jocelyn Donlon has taught literature, folklore, and writing in high school and universities. She earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois in 1993, where she researched oral storytelling in Southern culture and literature. She wrote Swinging in Place: Porch Life in Southern Culture. |
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Dr. John Laudun, Institute Presenter
John Laudun teaches folklore at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and serves as the Louisiana Voices liaison there. He received a Ph.D in folklore from Indiana University and served as a faculty member for the Louisiana Voices Institute in New Orleans in 2003. |
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Cherice Harrison-Nelson, Site Coordinator for LV Institute and Workshops
Cherice Harrison-Nelson teaches gifted students in the New Orleans schools and has received the
Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Teacher of the Year award for using traditional culture resources in the classroom including her family traditions. She received her M.A. in Curriculum and Instruction from Xavier University in 1996. She participated in a Fulbright Study Abroad Seminar at the University of Saint-Louis in Senegal and the University of Ghana at Accra in 1994.
She is a queen with the Guardians of the Flame Mardi Gras Indian tribe. |
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Dr. Delma McLeod-Porter, Workshop Presenter
Delma McLeod-Porter received a fellowship from Tulane University to attend the 2003 Louisiana Voices Institute in New Orleans. She teaches English at McNeese University and serves as the Louisiana Voices liaison there. She received her Ph.D. in English from Texas A&M University, where she focused on ethnography and narrative. She taught high school English for seven years. She has been actively involved in teacher certification redesign for English Language Arts. |
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