TEACHING FOLKLORE IN A NIGERIAN UNIVERSITY: A TENTATIVE MODEL
Authors: Afam N. Ebeogu
Publication Details
Published: June 14, 2024
Reference: Volume 8, Issue 2
Abstract
One challenge confronting the Folklore scholar teaching in the Nigerian University is teaching the subject to students who may not have been acquainted with the subject before university education. Many of these students – of African Oral Literature course – had thought Folklore “unliterary”, and needed to know what it is all about; it has been the responsibility of the Folklore teacher to explain to them the rudiments of the subject. This has been the researcher’s experience. His knowledge of Folklore as a subject and scholarship came in the course of his one-session post-doctoral research in a British university, and on return to Nigeria he found it imperative to develop a syllabus on “Theories of Folklore” as a prerequisite for “African Oral Literature” for the Master of Arts degree in Literature-in-English. This paper is inspired by that syllabus and it includes the following: Definitions, Etymology, Growth, Scope and Methodology of, and Approaches to, Folklore scholarship; Functions of Folklore, the Interface between the Oral and the Written; Myth scholarship and the Heroic Ethos in Africa. It also includes seminar presentations by the students on African Achievement-oriented Names, African Cultural Bi-Sexual Names, Types and Functions of Stickers, Meaning and Purpose of Inscriptions on Motor Vehicles in Nigeria, Ghostlore in Nigeria, Types and Functions of African Legends, Cultural Jokes and Ethnic Slurs in Nigeria, Nigerian Culture-based Sloganeering, etc. Seminars delivered, discussed and revised constitute the Continuous Assessment for the course during the first semester, while an adjunct course, African Oral Literature, is taught in the second semester
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How to Cite
Afam N. Ebeogu. (2024). TEACHING FOLKLORE IN A NIGERIAN UNIVERSITY: A TENTATIVE MODEL. ABIA JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES , Volume 8 (2) .