Partnership with VT Tech Centers
Vermont Folklife Center Partners With Local CTE Centers To Promote Cross-Cultural Understanding and Develop Storytelling Skills Among Students
Beginning fall, 2021 the Vermont Folklife Center (VFC) has partnered with Burlington Technical Center and Windham Regional Career Center to create opportunities for students to produce and present media projects on issues and topics that matter to them and their communities. This program, to be carried out over two academic years, will pilot how to integrate humanities-centered training and skills practice at career and technical education (CTE) centers and will focus on Burlington and Brattleboro, areas that serve proportionally significant BIPOC student populations.
The program focuses on three major objectives:
Design a skills-based learning program centered on community inquiry and storytelling media for career and technical education centers.
Develop a media collection, Vermont Voices, that creates a legacy for and by young people that will be accessible online for future learning.
Train emerging generations of community-based, civically engaged leaders skilled in collaborative, participatory research.
In collaboration with Jason Raymond (Digital Media Lab program) at Burlington Technical Center, and Brandon Conrad (Professional English/Communication) and Jesse Kreitzer (Filmmaking & Digital Editing) at Windham Regional Career Center, VFC education staff will prepare students to conduct ethnographic interviews and create digital projects that will contribute to intergenerational conversations. To support the creation and preservation of these projects, the VFC will launch Vermont Voices, a digital platform dedicated to featuring work and projects by Vermont youth, reflecting their interests about the world they live in and issues that matter to them.
Students will work with VFC staff to arrange interviews, create additional media, and identify and incorporate archival materials to inspire multigenerational conversations about Vermont. Vermont Voices will help students develop key interpretive and technical skills while building individual and shared knowledge about cultural identity and social histories of Vermont.
Representing a rare opportunity to build shared connections to our personal histories, the program gives students the chance to engage and record individuals’ stories as a gateway for developing lifelong approaches of collaboration and reciprocity, crucial for building a more just, peaceful, and sustainable world.
This pilot program is generously supported by the Canaday Family Charitable Trust.
For over 35 years, the Vermont Folklife Center has produced exhibits, publications and audio and video documentaries from our Archive that share the lives and cultural heritage of Vermonters. A central mission has been to systematically document contemporary perspectives on cultural, racial and class diversity as expressed and reflected upon by individuals and communities. The VFC’s collections are an invaluable resource not only for Vermonters, but also for the advancement of humanities-based inquiry, creative practice and community building.
The Vermont Folklife Center seeks to broaden, strengthen and deepen our understanding of Vermont and the surrounding region; to assure a repository for our collective cultural memory; and to strengthen our communities by building connections among the diverse peoples of our state.