ACE works closely with leading academics, cultural specialists, and organizations to discover and develop new approaches to cross cultural and interdisciplinary pedagogy and research. Through these partnerships, ACE is dedicated to the creation of innovative educational resources, and expanding the valorization of cultural, historical, and humanist knowledge.
Kentucky educational program at Berea College
In an extension of the community outreach element of our Kentucky repatriation program, arts educator and scholar Judy Sizemore used a Berea College Appalachian Sound Archive fellowship to generate lesson plans based on the donated Lomax materials. These five lessons range from grades 3 to 12 and investigate the regional repertoire—ballads; children’s games; protest songs. Available nationally through PBS’ Learning Media site, with additional material included in our learning resources,they were also shared with educators through the Department of Education’s Promise Neighborhood of schools in the East Kentucky counties of Jackson, Clay, and Owsley. Distributed through educator listservs for music teachers, social studies teachers, ELA teachers, and library media specialists, the plans reached approximately 500 teachers. Sizemore also presented a workshop on the materials at the Berea Festival of Learnshops in July 2016.
TeachRock Project
We are currently working with Steven Van Zandt's not-for-profit The Rock and Roll Forever Foundation (RRFF), to create a series of lesson plans under the TeachRock Project. Our collaboration is producing a teaching curriculum of American History classes, designed around music’s capacity to impact and reflect social conditions. Our aim is to empower teachers by providing compelling content that reflects perspectives as diverse as the students in their classrooms. These lesson plans will be accompanied by film material from the ACE Alan Lomax Archive/American Folklife Center-LOC collections. This partnership will:
● Introduce educators and students to the work of Alan Lomax, as well as the resources available at culturalequity.org and the Global Jukebox;
● Encourage students to explore early 20th-century U.S. history from the perspective of minority, immigrant, and rural communities;
● Align to existing U.S. curriculum and education standards for K-12 classrooms; increase classroom engagement by using music to explore historical events; and
● Provide free, high-quality resources to educators nationwide.
Delta Center for Culture and Learning
We are presently working with the Delta Center for Culture & Learning at Delta State University (Cleveland, Mississippi) on an NEA funded project entitled, "Back Home to the Delta: Preserving, Cataloging, and Repatriating the Historic Lomax Mississippi Recordings, 1933-1942". Working with indigenous and local scholars, we are developing ten lesson plans about the Lomax 1933-1942 Mississippi audio collections. The education component of the project also include a series of podcasts that will be disseminated through both ACE and DSU online and media outlets. The material is now online at https://lomaxdeltastate.com/.
Carnegie Hall Migrations Festival
We have initiated plans to create an children’s educational program about the Global Jukebox through our partnership with Carnegie Hall's Migrations Festival. Scheduled for the 2018/19 programming season, the festival is a celebration that highlights the many contributions—cultural, social, and political—of people from diverse backgrounds, whose migrations helped to build the United States of America. Through this partnership with one of America’s most venerable cultural institutions we hope to share the Global Jukebox with a vast network of educators, artists, and audiences.
Repatriation and Education
One of ACE's core initiatives, Repatriation, is closely tied to our educational imperatives. We work with local educators, institutions and scholars to create lesson plans and other educational resources that are tied directly to the communities where the repatriations are taking place.
All of the lesson plans created through our partnerships can be found here.