












































Children’s Folklore Review, Vol. 42, No. 1 · /doi.org/10.14434/cfr.2024.vol42.39019/ 
 

The Texas Children’s Folklore Project 
A Retrospective 

 
Richard Bauman 

Indiana University, Emeritus 

 
In this introductory essay, I present an overview of the historical and institutional context, the 
motivating ideology, the methodological framework, and the research foci of the Texas 
Children’s Folklore Project, conducted from 1973-1976 by a team of faculty and graduate 
students from the University of Texas under the auspices of the Southwest Educational 
Laboratory. 
 

 

From 1973-1976, I directed a research project on children’s folklore under the 

auspices of the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory (SEDL) in Austin, 

Texas. The project yielded a number of publications that suggest the principal frames of 

reference that guided our work1 but not necessarily the motivating factors that led me 

to undertake it in the first place or the elements of time, place, and organization that 

gave it shape and direction. This essay, then, is intended to fill some of those gaps, 

though at a remove of more than 50 years and in the absence of concrete records that 

would allow for more detail and precision. Those files, alas, fell by the wayside in the 

course of several moves and office clear-outs, but memory, conversations with 

surviving participants, and the published record bring back at least the basic contours 

of the enterprise. 

 

The politics of education in Texas in the early 1970s 

Texas, like other southern states with a long history of segregation, was 

conspicuously resistant to the kinds of efforts at integration mandated by Brown v. 

Board of Education in 1954 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Nevertheless, 

notwithstanding the foot-dragging of top-level administrative officials, there were a few 

https://doi.org/10.14434/cfr.2024.vol42.39019


 
6                                                                                          CHILDREN’S FOLKLORE REVIEW 
 

Children’s Folklore Review, Vol. 42, No. 1 · /doi.org/10.14434/cfr.2024.vol42.39019/ 
 

staunch staff members at the Texas Education Agency (TEA) who made efforts, 

beginning in the late 1960s, to respond constructively to the need for redressive and 

compensatory measures to overcome the deeply detrimental effects of a century of 

segregated schooling. 

 One such effort, organized by Mary Galvan of TEA in partnership with Rudolph 

Troike, a linguist in the University of Texas English department, was the East Texas 

Dialect Project, launched in 1967 with funding from the Elementary and Secondary 

Education Act (ESEA), signed into law in 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson. Among its 

wide-ranging provisions, the law provided federal grants to state educational agencies 

to improve the quality of elementary and secondary education. The substantive focus of 

the project in East Texas was “To study the language patterns which exist in Texas, 

particularly the phonology and syntax which have most bearing on learning” (Galvan 

and Troike 1972[1969]:298). A critical turning point in the project’s development was the 

discovery by fieldworkers of “extralinguistic” factors (i.e., factors beyond the initial 

focal elements of phonology and syntax) that seemed to have significant implications 

for understanding language use on the part of African American children. 

Specifically—perhaps unexpectedly—the fieldworkers began to amass a corpus of 

children’s folklore forms—“rope-skipping rhymes, game songs, and narrative 

accounts” as well as “verbal contests”—the dynamics of which could not be grasped 

satisfactorily in formal linguistic terms. As recounted by the principal investigators, 

“About this point, the project was fortunate in acquiring the consultative services of 

another University of Texas staff member, a folklorist with a specialty in Negro culture, 

whose role was to explain many cultural patterns of behavior to staff members. His 

contribution became larger as time passed and is at present [i.e., in 1969] equally 

important as the linguists’” (Galvan and Troike 1972:299). That folklorist was Roger 

Abrahams, Troike’s colleague in UT’s English department. African American children’s 

https://doi.org/10.14434/cfr.2024.vol42.39019


 
Vol. 42, No. 1 (2024)                                                                                                                     7 
 

Children’s Folklore Review, Vol. 42, No. 1 · /doi.org/10.14434/cfr.2024.vol42.39019/ 
 

folklore was a significant component of Roger’s dissertation research in South 

Philadelphia (Abrahams 1962) and at the time he joined the East Texas Dialect Project 

team he was at work on Jump-rope Rhymes: A Dictionary (1969). Roger’s contribution, 

and that of Américo Paredes who joined up in the next phase of the project as it 

expanded into Mexican American South Texas, cemented the place of folklorists in 

subsequent compensatory efforts on the part of TEA. All this is to say that just as the UT 

Folklore Program was getting fully under way with the establishment of the Center for 

Intercultural Studies in Folklore and Oral History (“the Folklore Center”) in the Spring 

of 1968 (see Bauman 2020), children’s folklore was becoming a significant component of 

the intellectual environment for UT folklorists. 

In the aftermath of the East Texas Dialect Project, TEA established a consulting 

committee, including Roger and Américo, to assist in the development of intercultural 

education programs but the politics of culture in Texas and the continued foot-dragging 

on the part of top-level leadership at TEA precluded any real progress. Pressures 

increased significantly, though, in 1971 with the handing down of Civil Action 5281, a 

federal court order issued in response to a lawsuit challenging continued efforts to 

circumvent integration (The School Desegregation in Texas Policy Research Project 

1982). Sweeping in its scope, encompassing the entire state, the order contained 

multiple provisions addressing demographic and administrative problems and policies, 

but one section addressed “Curriculum and Compensatory Education” and placed TEA 

in charge of monitoring and enforcement. This responsibility provided an impetus to 

elevating the consulting committee, now under the rubric of the “Confluence of Texan 

Cultures,” with a charge that included “the provision of programs to compensate 

students for the ill effects of previously segregated schools” and “the development of a 

statewide design to educate the disadvantaged.”2 Membership on the committee, as it 

turned out, was not without its frustrations as efforts to slow-walk the process within 

https://doi.org/10.14434/cfr.2024.vol42.39019


 
8                                                                                          CHILDREN’S FOLKLORE REVIEW 
 

Children’s Folklore Review, Vol. 42, No. 1 · /doi.org/10.14434/cfr.2024.vol42.39019/ 
 

TEA and to circumvent its implementation out in the state at large persisted, but for the 

time being, into the mid-1970s, children’s folklore remained of at least professed interest 

to the agency as a resource that would serve the interest of compensatory program 

development and acknowledge the cultural heritage of “the disadvantaged.” 

It is important to recall that this period in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s was the 

heyday of deprivationist ideologies on the part of educationists and psychologist—even 

liberal ones—concerning the verbal and cognitive abilities of working class and 

minority kids and their low performance in the nation’s public schools. In the pithy 

critical summary offered by Joan Baratz, 
 

The educators were the first to contribute a statement about the language 

difficulties of these children, a statement that amounted to the fact that these 

children were virtually verbally destitute—i.e., they couldn’t talk and if they did, 

their speech was deviant and filled with “errors.” The next group to get into the 

fray—the psychologists—reconfirmed initially that the children didn’t talk, and 

then added the sophisticated wrinkle that if they did talk, their speech was such 

that it was a deterrent to cognitive growth. [Baratz 1969:87] 
 

 To folklorists even superficially familiar with the kinds of verbal, cognitive, and 

interactional skills—even virtuosity—that these very children were able to display out 

in the schoolyard, the neighborhood, and the home, these deprivationist portraits 

simply did not ring true. The interventionist efforts that those of us at UT and our 

colleagues elsewhere sought to bring to bear were based on our understanding that 

what kids knew and could do with regard to language and the associated skills 

demonstrated in their play activities would provide a critical corrective to notions of 

verbal and cognitive disability and a basis for enriching educational programs that 

would compensate for and redress the damaging effects of segregated schooling. 

https://doi.org/10.14434/cfr.2024.vol42.39019


 
Vol. 42, No. 1 (2024)                                                                                                                     9 
 

Children’s Folklore Review, Vol. 42, No. 1 · /doi.org/10.14434/cfr.2024.vol42.39019/ 
 

At the same time that Roger and Américo were engaged in these state-focused 

efforts, I became involved in similarly motivated project sponsored by the American 

Speech and Hearing Association (ASHA), the national professional organization of 

speech pathologists and audiologists in the U.S. Collegial connections with faculty and 

graduate students in Speech and Hearing at UT drew me into a consultative role with 

ASHA as it too attempted to come to terms with linguistic and cultural diversity and 

overcome a deeply entrenched bias toward monoglot standard English and the 

ideologies that sustained it. My efforts, in a 1970 workshop and subsequent article 

(Bauman 1970), were directed at suggesting the productiveness of a relativist, 

ethnographic perspective on language as a critical corrective to the ethnocentric biases 

that prevailed among the vast majority of speech pathologists and speech therapists 

engaged with school-aged children. In particular, I advocated for the value of children’s 

folklore as a vantage point on what minority children knew and could do with 

language. 

 

The Texas Children’s Folklore Project 

The foregoing overview is prologue, but it suggests why I should have been 

receptive when Bob Randall came to see me as director of the UT Folklore Center, 

sometime in the fall of 1972. Bob was the head of the Early Childhood Program at the 

Southwest Educational Development Laboratory (SEDL), one of a network of research 

and development centers and regional educational laboratories authorized in 1965 

under Title VI of the ESEA, the same agency that funded the East Texas Dialect Project, 

and subsequently transferred to the newly created National Institute of Education (NIE) 

in 1972. The Early Childhood Program was charged with research and program 

development for children in kindergarten through third grade, roughly, 5-9 years old. 

Bob’s own interests centered on informal learning, that is, learning that takes place 

https://doi.org/10.14434/cfr.2024.vol42.39019


 
10                                                                                          CHILDREN’S FOLKLORE REVIEW 
 

Children’s Folklore Review, Vol. 42, No. 1 · /doi.org/10.14434/cfr.2024.vol42.39019/ 
 

primarily outside or in the margins of formal educational institutions and without 

formal instruction. Children’s folklore was on Texas educators’ radar by this time and 

Bob wanted to explore with me the possibility that SEDL might sponsor a research 

project in the area with the potential to serve a basis for educational programs that built 

on the verbal, cognitive, and interactional energies and strengths of cultural forms that 

were child-initiated and directed and pleasurable to the participants. Moreover, given 

that the children’s folklore forms were rooted in their own communities, they might 

provide a mechanism for the kids to work out their own adaptations to 

multiculturalism in newly integrated schools. The outcome of our conversation was that 

I agreed to direct the project that Bob envisioned under the auspices of SEDL. For me, 

the venture was multiply appealing: it was an opportunity to put my money where my 

mouth was, doing primary research that was at the same time oriented to important 

applied ends and it was a way to support UT graduate students and get them involved 

in fieldwork that was socially engaged, motivated at least in part by real world social 

problems. 

During the spring of 1973, SEDL administrators and I worked out the 

arrangements and launched the project. I would teach a graduate course on children’s 

folklore that would serve as a venue for recruiting and training potential fieldworkers 

as well as exploring foci for research that would suit their interests and those of the 

overall project and include kids from the three predominant ethnic groups in Texas: 

African American, Anglo American, and Mexican American. During the academic year 

of 1973-74, I would take a leave of absence from UT to work full time on the project. 

Our responsibility was primary research, defined in scholarly terms. SEDL would 

handle all the bureaucratic work, mediate between us and NIE, provide leads to Austin-

area schools that would allow us to work with their kids, and do the work of adapting 

our findings to school-oriented programs when the time came. Altogether, seven UT 

https://doi.org/10.14434/cfr.2024.vol42.39019


 
Vol. 42, No. 1 (2024)                                                                                                                     11 
 

Children’s Folklore Review, Vol. 42, No. 1 · /doi.org/10.14434/cfr.2024.vol42.39019/ 
 

graduate students worked on the project: Meg Brady, Rosalind Eckhardt, John 

McDowell, Andrea Meditch, Danielle Roemer, Beverly Stoeltje, and Dorothy Stroman. 

Meg and Beverly were experienced teachers, returned to UT as doctoral students in 

folklore and Beverly had kids of her own, which enhanced her participation in the 

project. As the project developed, solicitational routines (riddles, knock-knock jokes, 

catches), ring games, line plays, and handclaps emerged as the principal substantive 

foci of our research. 

 

Project guidelines and research foci 

The guidelines for project research were shaped by the conceptual and 

methodological principles of the ethnography of speaking, then entering what 

amounted to the second major phase of its development. Following on the 

programmatic phase of the 1960s, a cadre of young researchers had carried the 

approach into the field as a framework for their own primary research and by the early 

1970s they were ready to report on the results of their efforts. At the time of my 

involvement in the TCFP, I was engaged, with Joel Sherzer, in the organization, 

conduct, and aftermath of the Conference on the Ethnography of Speaking, held at UT 

in April of 1972 to bring these researchers together and followed by the publication of 

Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking (Bauman and Sherzer 1974) and a review 

essay of the field (Bauman and Sherzer 1975). At the same time, in a related effort, I was 

engaged in formulating a concept of performance as a display of virtuosic skill and 

efficacy, presented initially in the American Anthropologist in 1975 and in expanded form 

in the book version of Verbal Art as Performance (Bauman 1975, 1977). 

 There are abundant bodies of literature on the ethnography of speaking and 

performance so there is no need to recapitulate their founding principles and 

subsequent development here. A few key points may be useful, however. First, the 

https://doi.org/10.14434/cfr.2024.vol42.39019


 
12                                                                                          CHILDREN’S FOLKLORE REVIEW 
 

Children’s Folklore Review, Vol. 42, No. 1 · /doi.org/10.14434/cfr.2024.vol42.39019/ 
 

notion of performance was central to the TCFP in two fundamental senses, both rooted 

in the ethnography of speaking: (a) performance as practice, that is, the social use of 

communicative forms in the conduct of social life, with a focus on acts, events, 

participant roles and structures, emergent outcomes; (b) performance in the more 

marked sense of virtuosic display, especially important as a critical corrective to 

deprivationist models. Second, our focus was developmental, attentive to the 

acquisition of competence in the use of the folklore forms in the children’s repertoires. 

How did children acquire and manifest the knowledge and ability to use these forms in 

socially appropriate and intelligible ways? This concern required that we record and 

analyze what amounted to incompetent as well as fully competent attempts to engage 

in riddling or perform handclaps as novice performers tried them out on the way to 

being able to accomplish and evaluate fully competent performances and ultimately to 

attain reflexive awareness of how the various forms are made, used, evaluated, and 

even, perhaps, parodied or subverted in inversive counterplay. The standard of social 

appropriateness that guided our work was child-centered: if participants judged and 

responded to a performance as skillful, enjoyable, and engaging, it was socially 

appropriate, even if, by strict adult or school-centric terms it was obscene, scatological, 

or otherwise transgressive. Third, again consistent with the charter of the ethnography 

of speaking, our assumption was that engagement in children’s folklore was cross-

culturally variable and to be discovered ethnographically. Thus, as noted earlier, we 

built into our research protocol fieldwork with children from all three of the major 

ethnic groups in Texas, Anglo American, African American, Mexican American. Finally, 

in addition to variation by age and ethnicity, we were attentive to gender variation in 

repertoire, participation, and development. 

Outcomes 

https://doi.org/10.14434/cfr.2024.vol42.39019


 
Vol. 42, No. 1 (2024)                                                                                                                     13 
 

Children’s Folklore Review, Vol. 42, No. 1 · /doi.org/10.14434/cfr.2024.vol42.39019/ 
 

It’s difficult to know whether or to what extent the research findings produced 

by the TCFP made their way into early elementary education. By the terms of our 

arrangement with SEDL, we submitted our materials and reports to them and they were 

to take over from there in developing educational programs based on what we 

provided. I do recall a mockup of a booklet of riddles drawn from our corpus, but I’m 

unsure whether it ever found a publisher or made its way into schools. The lab did 

support the production of two brief books, one consisting of essays by Meg and 

Rosalind on African American girls’ participation in a variety of play forms, at times in 

interaction with their Anglo and Mexican American classmates (Brady and Eckhardt 

1975), and one by Beverly on handclaps (Stoeltje 1978). Both works combined scholarly 

documentation and analysis with teacher-oriented explication and feedback to the 

authors indicates that some teachers, at least, found the works interesting and useful. 

Just how they were used, who knows? I need hardly say that the lab people paid no 

attention to the transgressive materials that we collected. Some were even a tad 

suspicious of data that suggested that children manipulated forms like counting-out 

rhymes or engaged in inversive clowning against the grain of orderly performances 

considering that those materials somehow compromised the mainstream ideology of 

childhood innocence. 

 For the graduate-student researchers who worked on the project, there were a 

number of clear payoffs, even beyond the financial support they received for their 

work. Several went on to do further research on children’s folklore. Danielle and John 

produced Ph.D. dissertations based on the research they carried out under the auspices 

of the project (McDowell 1975; Roemer 1977). Meg extended her engagement with 

children’s folklore in her subsequent dissertation research and book on Navajo 

children’s Skinwalker stories (Brady 1984). Danielle, John, Meg, and Beverly all went on 

to teach courses devoted to children’s folklore or including a significant component of 

https://doi.org/10.14434/cfr.2024.vol42.39019


 
14                                                                                          CHILDREN’S FOLKLORE REVIEW 
 

Children’s Folklore Review, Vol. 42, No. 1 · /doi.org/10.14434/cfr.2024.vol42.39019/ 
 

children’s folklore in more general courses, such as American folklore. And for all 

participants, I believe, the project offered a focused initiation into the world of socially 

engaged scholarship. I know that for all those participants who went on to teach, 

bringing that engaged stance into the classroom had a multiplier effect. Over the 

decades since the early ‘70s, the work of the TCFP colored the educational experience of 

a lot of college students. We can hope that it made a difference in their understanding of 

the strengths and challenges of cultural and linguistic diversity and what they might 

offer to a humane multicultural society. In the end, I believe, no one who has 

considered closely the semantic intricacy of a children’s riddling session can doubt their 

cognitive abilities; no one who has analyzed the poetic and kinesic intricacy of a 

handclap session can doubt their capacity for verbal virtuosity; no one who has 

observed the structural acuity of a schoolyard clown in his inversive parody of a line 

play, can question his capacity for reflexive awareness; and no one who has witnessed 

the social finesse of a girl leading a ring play can deny her rhetorical skill and 

effectiveness in managing complex interaction. 

 

Richard Bauman is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Folklore and Anthropology at Indiana 
University, Bloomington. The principal foci of his research include narrative, oral poetics, 
performance, genre, and language ideologies. Among his publications are Verbal Art as 
Performance (1977), Let Your Words Be Few (1983), Story, Performance, and Event (1986), 
Voices of Modernity (with Charles L. Briggs, 2003; Sapir Prize 2006), A World of Others’ 
Words (2004), and A Most Valuable Medium (2023). Bauman has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a 
fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recipient of the Lifetime Scholarly 
Achievement Award of the American Folklore Society, and the Franz Boas Award for Exemplary 
Service to Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association. 
 

References Cited 

Abrahams, Roger D. 1962. Negro Folklore from South Philadelphia: A Collection and       
Analysis. Ph. D. dissertation in Folklore, University of Pennsylvania. 

_____. 1969. Jump-Rope Rhymes: A Dictionary. Austin: University of Texas Press. 

https://doi.org/10.14434/cfr.2024.vol42.39019


 
Vol. 42, No. 1 (2024)                                                                                                                     15 
 

Children’s Folklore Review, Vol. 42, No. 1 · /doi.org/10.14434/cfr.2024.vol42.39019/ 
 

Baratz, Joan. 1969. “Language and Cognitive Assessment of Negro Children: 
Assumptions and Research Needs.” ASHA 11(3) :87-91 
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED022157.pdf 

Bauman, Richard. 1970. “An Ethnographic Framework for the Investigation of 
Communicative Behaviors.” ASHA 13:334-340. 

_____. 1975. “Verbal Art as Performance.” American Anthropologist 77(2): 290-311. 
https://www.jstor.org/stable/674535 

_____. 1977. Verbal Art as Performance. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. 

_____. 2020. “The Texas School.” In Folklore in the United States and Canada: An 
Institutional History, Patricia Sawin and Rosemary Zumwalt, eds., pp. 129-141. 
Bloomington: Indiana University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv16h2ngc.14 

Bauman, Richard and Joel Sherzer, eds. 1974. Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking. 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

_____. 1975. “The Ethnography of Speaking.” Annual Review of Anthropology 4:95-119. 
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2949351 

Brady, Margaret. 1984. “Some Kind of Power”: Navajo Children’s Skinwalker Narratives. Salt 
Lake City: University of Utah Press. 

Brady, Margaret and Rosalind Eckhardt. 1975. Black Girls at Play: Folkloric Perspectives on 
Child Development. Austin, TX: Southwest Educational Development Laboratory. 

Galvan, Mary and Rudolph Troike. 1972. “The East Texas Dialect Project: A Pattern for 
Education.” In Language and Cultural Diversity in American Education, ed. Roger D. 
Abrahams and Rudolph Troike, pp. 297-304. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. 

McDowell, John 1975. The Speech Play and Verbal Art of Chicano Children: An Ethnographic 
and Sociolinguistic Study. Ph.D. dissertation in Folklore, University of Texas, 
Austin. 

Roemer, Danielle. 1977. A Social Interactional Analysis of Children’s Folklore: Catches and 
Narratives. Ph.D. dissertation in Folklore, University of Texas, Austin. 

Stoeltje, Beverly. 1978. Children's Handclaps: Informal Learning in Play.  Austin, TX: 
Southwest Educational Development Laboratory. 

The School Desegregation in Texas Policy Research Project. 1982. School Desegregation in 
Texas: The Implementation of United States v. State of Texas. Lyndon B. Johnson 
School of Public Affairs Policy Research Project Report No. 51. Austin, TX: 
Lyndon B. Johnson School Of Public Affairs. 

https://doi.org/10.14434/cfr.2024.vol42.39019
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED022157.pdf
https://www.jstor.org/stable/674535
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv16h2ngc.14
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2949351


 
16                                                                                          CHILDREN’S FOLKLORE REVIEW 
 

Children’s Folklore Review, Vol. 42, No. 1 · /doi.org/10.14434/cfr.2024.vol42.39019/ 
 

 
1 See the TCFP bibliography (page 147) in this issue. 
2 L. Harlan Ford to Américo Paredes, 9/17/71. Américo Paredes Papers, Nettie Lee Benson Library, 
University of Texas, Austin. 

https://doi.org/10.14434/cfr.2024.vol42.39019

