Search

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]