As the foundation of the discipline, ethnographic methods are crucial to the work folklorists do.  Field school provides students with immersive training in field documentation techniques (interviewing, audio and visualrecording, etc.) and collaborative work practice documenting the folklife ofa specific community. The Department of Folklore conducted an immersive, month-long, Folklore Field School between 2012 and 2024,  It was required for all first-year graduate students.  Operating for more than a decade, the field school is now changing.  Field school will no longer be a required course for first-year students and is undergoing a revised format.  Faculty is working to create a community field school that could expand the program to related disciplines in addition to offering training and deeper engagement with local community members.  The forthcoming new field school model will maintain its priority in community-based research methods and will continue to provide students with the invaluable experiences of immersive fieldwork opportunities within communities.

History of the Folklore Field School at Memorial University 

By Kellley Totten

The Folklore Field School was established at Memorial University in 2012 by Dr. Jerry Pocius.  Modelled after the American Folklife Center's Field Schools, Dr. Pocius took the 2012 cohort of incoming graduate students to Keels on the Bonavista Peninsula to teach folklore fieldwork methods immersed in community.   The program continued, always taught as a required course, Folk 6020, for all first-year graduate students.  Dr. Pocius also led programs in the following years in Quidi Vidi and Witless Bay.  Dr. Cory Thorne led the 2015 Field School in Change Islands.  In 2016, Dr. Diane Tye and Dr. Jillian Gould took over leading the field schools together for four years, taking students to Cupids, Bay Roberts, and then within St. John's in the Georgestown neighborhood and at the Community Farmer's Market.  In 2020, Dr. Gould continued to lead the program alongside Dr. Kelley Totten; their 2020 program in collaboration with New Perlican was forced to shift to a remote Field School due to the Covid pandemic.  They resumed the in-person program in 2021, holding Field School at the Rabbittown Community Centre for two consecutive years.  In 2023, Dr. Totten took the school back to the Bonavistia peninsula to Port Union, where it has been held for the past two years in collaboration with the Coaker Foundation, Union House Arts, and the Women's Institute.  Over the years, the Field School has hosted an impressive array of visiting lecturers who have helped train our cohorts of folklorists and expanded their opportunities to meet esteemed researchers and practitioners in the field, including Guha Shankar, Tom Carter, Ed Shappell, Kent Ryden, Bonnie Sunstein, David Taylor, Hanna Griff-Sleven, Pravina Shukla, and Gabrielle Berlinger.  The Field School has always been grateful for its annual support from MUNFLA, as well as Heritage NL, led by Dale Jarvis and a stellar team of Memorial Folklore graduates  - Andrea O'Brien, Lara Maynard, and Terra Barrett (graduate of the Witless Bay Field School).  2024 marked the last year of Field School in this format, as part of the required Research Methods class.