Child’s Play: Dorothy Howard and the Folklore of Australian Children (review)

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Reviewed by: Child’s Play: Dorothy Howard and the Folklore of Australian Children Jan Rosenberg Child’s Play: Dorothy Howard and the Folklore of Australian Children. Eds. Kate Darian-SmithJune Factor. (Melbourne: Museum Victoria, 2005. Pp. vii + 231, 20 black-and-white photos, 33 illustrations, two appendices, bibliography.) Child’s Play: Dorothy Howard and the Folklore of Australian Children is a celebration of Howard, the pioneer of children’s folklore study in [End Page 372] Australia. Edited by historian Kate Darian- Smith and folklorist June Factor, the book consists of ten Howard articles and three contemporary essays contextualizing her work. These are written by Factor, Darian-Smith, and Brian Sutton-Smith, whom Howard first met when she visited New Zealand during her Fulbright tenure. When Howard (1902–96) landed in Victoria in 1954, she resolved to stay for ten months to document the games of Australian children. To cover as much of the country as possible, she traveled by bus and rail and overcame many obstacles along the way. Folklore was something Australians didn’t regard highly at the time, and they said that Australian children had no folklore of their own. Rather, Australians believed that their traditional expressions had their basis in the lore of the British Isles. A Fulbright scholar sponsored by the University of Melbourne, Howard came to Australia interested in the traditions of English-speaking children outside the United States. She had spent the past twenty-five years working with schoolchildren in the United States, teaching language arts by encouraging students to collect their own verbal lore, and she wholly believed that one learns by experiencing one’s own world. Although she didn’t teach in Australia, she let hundreds of children teach her what they knew. Child’s Play starts out with the two essays by Factor and Darian-Smith. Factor’s essay outlines Howard’s life, beginning in 1902 when she was born in the Sabine Bottom of East Texas and following through to her teaching career and discovery of children’s folklore while observing students on a school playground in upstate New York. Howard developed one of the first modern folklife-in-education programs through her introduction to children’s rhymes; there, she had students record their chants and rhymes and then study them for their literary structure, content, and merit. She did the same thing with students’ names, having them spell the names and research their origins. She applied John Dewey’s concept of experience—the interaction of the individual with the environment— in a way that met the school curriculum with ease. In Factor’s essay we learn that Howard first heard the word “folklore” from a professor her sister encouraged her to meet in New York City. The discussion led to Howard’s entry into the education program at New York University, where she shaped her exploration of children’s play life into a dissertation titled “Folk Jingles of American Children,” accepted by her committee in 1938. She collected the folklore of children’s play and taught in New Jersey at a junior high before transferring to teach at Frostburg State Teachers College, located in the Appalachian mountain range of western Maryland. Howard taught folklore and literature at Frostburg, encouraging her students to collect and analyze child lore. Given all of her experience, she became curious about the child lore of English-speaking students in other countries. When she proposed to document the child lore of the entire country of Australia, she was awarded the Fulbright fellowship for her 1954 trip. According to Darian-Smith, Howard arrived on the cusp of the postwar period in a country that was finding its feet as an industrialized nation. Her visit preceded two important events: the Olympics, held in Melbourne, and the introduction of television, both in 1956. During her Fulbright tenure, Howard experienced an Australia that was developing its modern national pride and the anticipation of communications technology. It was a country increasingly immersed in traditional Christian values, moving forward in the midst of economic upheaval. Howard does not mention these changes, so Darian-Smith’s essay deftly contextualizes the experience. What we do learn from Howard is that children’s folklife...