A folkloristic approach to understanding teachers as storytellers

This article presents a folkloristic analysis of two history teachers' performances of lectures in an eleventh-grade American history course. Folklore is defined as the situated performance of a traditionalized text (in this case, from the course textbook) in which the performer (the teacher) takes responsibility for communicating a version of the text to the audience (the students) that is meaningful to them in their current situation. Using performance analysis grounded in folkloristic theory, it is shown that the history lecture is a complex genre combining such simple genres as anecdote and personal experience story. In so doing, a folkloristic approach to the study of teachers as storytellers is explained.