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The article explores the cultural history of the banjo in American mass media, focusing on its portrayal in postwar films and its associations with race, class, and gender. It discusses how the banjo was linked to Black stereotypes through minstrel shows and how it evolved to symbolize poverty and criminality in white characters in movies and television. The banjo's decline in popularity compared to guitars is highlighted, along with its resurgence in the twenty-first century, led by women banjoists rewriting its cultural history. [Extracted from the article]

Renowned Black banjoist Rhiannon Giddens declared a "Black Banjo Renaissance" on February 12, 2024, recognizing the historical significance and precariousness of the Black string band music tradition. The banjo, descended from African spike lutes, was invented by Africans or African Americans enslaved on sugarcane plantations in the Caribbean. The Black banjo tradition faced near extinction at the turn of the twenty-first century but was revitalized by groups like the Carolina Chocolate Drops, leading to a resurgence of Black banjo music and scholarship. The relationship between Black banjoists and archival sound recordings, predominantly collected and controlled by white individuals and institutions, raises complex issues of power, control, and cultural appropriation. [Extracted from the article]

Typically understood only within the cultural history of the post–World War II folk music revival, documentarian Alan Lomax's "Cantometrics" research and artist Harry Smith's Folkways Anthology of American Music also deserve to be positioned within the broader Cold War–era rise of the digital computer and tactics of computation in American society. Linking what Ross Cole describes as the "folkloric imagination" to what we might call the Cold War "computational imagination," Lomax and Smith each examined folk music not through conventional ethnographic or musicological modes, but rather through computational lenses of data analysis, systems theory, informatics, and cybernetics. Both sought to expand cultural democracy by doing so, carrying Popular Front ideals into the postwar milieu while also presaging dilemmas found in today's fraught context of data analytics, artificial intelligence, and the application of digital technologies to almost all aspects of human culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explored the experiences of infant teachers (ECD A-Grade 2) in the teaching of the four selected areas of the New Curriculum namely: Mass Displays, Visual and Performing Arts, Physical Education and Information Communication and Technology. The New Curriculum, which is competence-based, was introduced in January 2017. The study was guided by the selfefficacy theory. A qualitative approach was used in this case study. Twenty participants were purposively selected from 3 primary schools and one teachers' college in Shamva District of Mashonaland Central Province in Zimbabwe. Data generation was done through face-to-face interviews, semi-structured questionnaires which yielded open answers, focus group discussions and classroom observations. The data gathered were analysed using the constant comparative method for thematic coding in line with the research questions. The major findings were that teachers felt that they were not competent enough to teach the selected areas of the curriculum and that there was high teacher-pupil ratio, lack of support from parents, inadequate resources and failure to use the mother language. This study recommends that the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education (MoPSE) should address the needs of teachers through professional development so as to ensure effective implementation of the selected areas of the curriculum at infant level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though the performance-based academic materials are useful for visual and performing arts studies, their availability is comparatively low in virtual space which makes difficult to find appropriate online resources to enrich their theoretical and practical knowledge. This study investigated the online resource utilisation and its barriers among visual and performing arts students of Swami Vipulananda Institute of Aesthetic Studies, Eastern University, Sri Lanka. A questionnaire survey was conducted among 246 randomly selected undergraduates and focus group discussion was conducted among sixteen students. The results revealed that the students mainly use social media, google applications, mobile applications and websites for their academic purposes. These online resources are significantly associated with students' academic disciplines. Instagram, Google slide share, Google art and culture, Google photo, Google drive, Art Gallery and Museum collection are significantly associated with Visual Technological Art students (p<0.05). Viber and YouTube are significantly associated with the discipline of dance (p<0.05), while Carnatic Music Apps and YouTube are significantly associated with the discipline of music (p<0.05). However, the drama and theatre students mainly use general google search, university and library websites significantly, and YouTube (p<0.05). The major barrier to accessing media content was poor internet connectivity. The loss of traditional teacher-student relationships and creativity were identified as consequences of online resource usage in performance-based studies. The study recommends that the library should play a role in making aware of the appropriate online performance-based resources among students to support the present curricula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deloria is a trustee of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian, an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University. Keywords: American Indian and Indigenous; Ideas and Intellectual Life; Visual and Performing Arts EN American Indian and Indigenous Ideas and Intellectual Life Visual and Performing Arts 305 313 9 12/21/21 20211101 NES 211101 Langston Hughes learned the art of storytelling from his grandmother. Richard is a historian's historian and some large part of that stems from his narrative gifts and his ability to process vast amounts of information into legible pieces. He is the recipient of numerous prizes and the author of many publications, including I Playing Indian i (1998) and I Indians in Unexpected Places i (2004), as well as the preface to I The World We Used to Live In: Remembering the Powers of the Medicine Men i (2006), the final book written by his father, the Sioux scholar and activist Vine Deloria, Jr. Philip Deloria's most recent book is I Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract i (University of Washington Press, 2019). [Extracted from the article]

This case study examines the perceptions of primary school teachers about the teaching and learning of Visual and Performing Arts (VPA) following a seminal curricula review undertaken by the Government of Zimbabwe (GoZ) and its subsequent implementation in 2017 in Zimbabwean schools. Data collection included interviews with teachers, observing them teaching VPA lessons, and analysis of curricula documents. The findings indicate that teachers manifested a relative lack of disciplinary and pedagogical knowledge of the discrete components of VPA and that schools were ill-equipped to transition into this new curriculum area. These observations have implications for the programming of VPA pre-service teacher education curricula and the facilitation of capacity development programmes underpinned by effective pedagogical approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to explore how parents perceive the benefits of the East Street and Greater Portmore Junior Centre Visual and Performing Arts After School Program (JSVPASP). This research employs a qualitative research design which, according to Creswell (2014), is "a means for exploring and understanding the meaning individuals or groups ascribe to a social or human problem" (p. 246). This research is therefore aimed at exploring recent and relevant research articles relating to visual and performing arts and its benefits to children. The objective of this study was also achieved by using data collecting techniques such as telephone interviews, face to face interviews, and field notes with 18 parents of students who were attending the centre for over 1 year. The interview results indicated that parents have seen improvement in their children's academic performances, social skills, behaviours, and self-confidence while attending the Centre. The results of this study will be used to encourage stakeholders to invest in the Junior Centre programmes, to highlight its benefits, and to increase parental participation in the activities and development of the Junior Centre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from the 2012 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, I investigate whether education's influence on the likelihood of visual and performing arts attendance in the USA varies by race-ethnicity. The results reveal that education increases the odds of attendance for both Whites and non-Whites, but it has a stronger impact upon the former than the latter. Unlike Whites, education's effect on attending visual and performing arts activities for non-Whites is insignificant for high school diploma recipients when compared to their counterparts with some college education. These findings suggest a racial-ethnic bias in visual and performing arts attendance net of education that connects to the European roots of "legitimate" art in modern western society and the history of US racial discrimination. European Americans have dominated the USA's social institutions for centuries and have held prejudices against minorities' artistic capabilities since the colonial era. Consequentially, they could determine which arts genres provide valuable cultural capital. Conversely, minority art communities have only recently acquired the resources for self-sustainability. This likely limited their ability to develop formal institutions within their own communities to support the arts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

School counselors play a vital role in meeting the needs of gifted students in their buildings. However, because there is a lack of structured, standardized, and empirically tested best practices for counseling gifted students, school counselors may not know how best to serve this unique population. The purpose of this study was to investigate gifted and talented adolescents' experiences with the counseling techniques, strategies, and approaches most frequently cited in the gifted education literature in order to determine if any of these best practices were actually occurring. Few of these best practices were experienced by gifted and talented adolescents surveyed. School counselor preparation programs should consider providing training curriculum that addresses issues unique to the learning and development of gifted students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature indicates that the demand for program evaluations is likely to increase and that those evaluations will be conducted across diverse disciplines. Preparation of discipline-specific evaluators may present challenges. This study reviews the experiences of a group of arts educators who participated in a discipline-specific evaluation course that combined a summer residence experience with Saturday meetings. The primary aim of the course is for participants to develop an evaluation plan for implementation in their settings. Through use of a reflective survey and a focus group, the authors investigate the extent to which the course addressed participants' needs as arts educators in program evaluation. In their feedback, the arts educators indicate that the development of an evaluation plan was one of the strongest aspects of the course; however, they also indicate that future offerings of the course should provide models of evaluation plans and reports specific to the arts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]