Bringing folk tales back to life

MYTHS AND LEGENDS:Students are learning that folklore can be exciting and interesting, thanks to a new initiative by two TY teachers

SAY THE WORD “folklore” to a teenager and they’ll most likely think of leprechauns and old storytellers. But two Transition Year teachers have devised innovative ways of bringing this very contemporary subject to a younger audience.

Two years ago, Elizabeth Barbour, a teacher at Kings Hospital in Palmerstown, Co Dublin, incorporated a folklore module into her Irish class. “I wanted to show the students that this subject is very relevant to their everyday lives,” she says. “It touches on everything from folk tales to urban legends and folk medicine, and I show them examples of folklore in contemporary contexts.”

To this end, Barbour played episodes of Púca's Péist, a recent TG4 series narrated by Gabriel Rosenstock, to her class. She also explored modern interpretations of folk tales, such as Disney's Chicken Little, based on the Chicken Licken story, and showed how children's author Roald Dahl used motifs from Goldilocksand Little Red Riding Hoodin his stories.

The students complete a project using PowerPoint, a comic strip, a painting, or a film or short play. Some have carried out folklore research in their locality, collecting information from their own families, friends and neighbours, on topics as diverse as legend and myth; folk music, song and dance; calendar customs such as Halloween and Christmas, local history; customs and beliefs relating to birth, marriage and death; vernacular architecture; and folk medicine.

The students also draw on sources around them, such as the Children of Lir sculpture in the Garden of Remembrance, the Dublin Ghost Bus Tour, and popular literary fiction works such as The Lord of the Rings.

BARBOUR ALSO encourages the many international students in the class to share aspects of their own folklore – and finds surprising similarities.

“Several students from different African countries shared stories from their part of the world, and they were remarkably close to the versions we know in Ireland,” says Barbour.

Later this year, she hopes to take her class to the National Folklore Collection (NFC) at University College Dublin’s Delargy Centre for Irish Folklore. She won’t be the first teacher to visit. A few weeks ago, Emma O’Gorman, an Irish teacher at Coláiste Bríd in Clondalkin, Co Dublin, took four TY pupils – Eimear Kavanagh, Grainne Buckley, Kim Heary, and Amy Browne, all aged 15 – to visit the National Folklore Collection. This world-class archive contains over 2,000 volumes of traditional Irish folklore, over 1,000 volumes of material collected by schoolchildren in the 1930s, and a large selection of books, audio recordings, videos, photographs, drawings and paintings dealing with Irish life, culture, and folk history.

The students intend to use sound recordings of Peig Sayers’s folklore. They will start by giving an account of her life from beginning to end, and they will narrate the documentary. “We’ll be focusing on the colour, the character, and the positive contribution Peig made to Irish culture,” says Eimear Kavanagh. “So many people have a negative view of Peig. We want to tell the story of her life and show how she was interesting.”

The group will submit their project by January 2010.

For more information on the UCD Delargy Centre, visit ucd.ie/folklore

For more information on Gael Linn, visit gael-linn.ie