Berea Sound Archives Fellowship Topics

Carla Gover / Richmond, Kentucky / 2007-2008 / Topic: Teaching

Project: Carla is a native of Letcher County, Kentucky where she was part of a large extended family in which music of many kinds was a constant. She is a multi-instrumentalist and singer and has a B.A. in Appalachian Studies from the University of Kentucky with a concentration in music and folklore. For the past fifteen years she has been heavily involved in performing, composing, and school-based artist-in-residence programs in Kentucky, other parts of the United States, and internationally.

Her Music Fellowship work focused on learning 12-15 new songs around which she developed teaching materials that highlight the diversity of Appalachian music. The result is a one hour show for school presentations and a series of teacher lesson plans disseminated through a website that will include audio links to the songs.   As of November 2008, work on the proposed lesson plan website is under way in collaboration with Flying High Designs of Berea with launch projected February 2009. The school show is coming together in collaboration with banjo and fiddle player, Sarah Woods. They will audition the show for Kentucky teachers live and on KET-ED in March as part of the 2009 Arts Education Showcase program presented by the Kentucky Center for the Arts.  Fellowship derived material from such performers as the Couch Family, Pleaz Mobley, Snake Chapman, and Maude Kilbourne has been well received by adult audiences on recent tours in Ohio and Tennessee. Also, "Lady Isabelle", and likely one other tune from the archives, will be included in a commercial CD being recorded in November 2008.

Cassie Patterson / Columbus, Ohio / 2010-2011 / Topic: Teaching; Folklore

Project: Cassie Patterson is a PhD student in the English department at Ohio State University. Her areas of study are Folklore, Ethnography, Appalachian Studies and Literary Studies. Her Fellowship project was in furtherance of her doctoral research which addresses the complexity of Appalachian educational practices, both historical and contemporary. She is especially interested in how interventions by outsiders collide with local community traditions, both as critique and romanticization of culture.

The primary focus of her Fellowship work was the audio recordings in Berea's Leonard Roberts Collection that documented Roberts' use of folktales as a teaching resource. A secondary focus was the early records that documented educational philosophy and methodology of Pine Mountain Settlement School in Harlan County, Kentucky where in later years, Leonard Roberts was a teacher. A near term outcome of her Fellowship study is a conference paper at the American Folklore Society annual meeting in Nashville, October 2010.

Judy Sizemore / McKee, Kentucky / 2015-2016 / Topic: Teaching

Project: Judy’s Fellowship work will be directed toward developing educational resources that enhance awareness of the musical and storytelling heritage of eastern Kentucky as documented in the Alan Lomax Kentucky recordings.

These resources will initially be provided for use by teachers, teaching artists, and students at the elementary, middle, and high school levels in the target counties of the Berea College Promise Neighborhood Initiative (Clay, Jackson, and Owsley) and other Eastern Kentucky counties. They will eventually be included in the Kentucky Educational Television collection on PBS Learning Media which will make them available to a national audience of educators.

Judy is a freelance writer, arts and cultural consultant. Her areas of expertise include arts education planning and assessment, arts integration in the classroom, and folk & traditional art. She most recently served as cultural researcher and arts education consultant for the Berea College Promise Neighborhood Initiative.

Susan Mills / Boone, North Carolina / 2006-2007 / Topic: Folklore

Project: Susan is the Coordinator of Music Education at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. Her traditional music involvement started with high school folk dance activities in Pulaski County, Kentucky and eventually included playing bass and piano for folk dance groups and at commercial country and bluegrass venues in Florida. She has taught music at the elementary and middle school level and is presently involved in training other music educators. Beginning in June, her Fellowship work at Berea will focus on the development of Appalachian music teaching resources for elementary and middle school music classes that meet state and national music education standards. These resources will be derived mainly from audio and manuscript materials in Berea’s Leonard Roberts Folklore Collection and be made available through a teaching resources website, journal publications, classroom lecture/demonstrations, and music education in-service workshops.