The Importance and Necessity of Folklore Gender Studies. Introduction to the First Stages of Education and the Appropriate Teaching Models

Through contact with folk creation, young male and female kindergarten students and first grades of elementary school can learn about morals, traditions, beliefs, practices and attitudes of traditional community’s inhabitants and other grassroots groups. Through this they are able to understand human relationships (and in particular the social gender roles pattern) in the community and/or group, and to engage in comparisons through their own reality. They are able to broaden their knowledge and information about the treasures of folk tradition and its creators, who are folk people, women and men, and to connect, albeit unintentionally, with the social and topical history of their country. In the Gender Studies field, deployed successfully in undergraduate and postgraduate levels of the University of the Aegean, our study focused on the contribution of the analytical category of “gender” on various parameters. It especially focused on the renewal, modernization, and democratization of folklore studies, but also on the dissemination of its instructional intervention for teaching popular culture in kindergarten and first grades of elementary school. For the success of this diffusion, relevant teaching models were created, two of which we presented during the Conference.