Learning Together
Young people often find their time structured by the daily and seasonal rhythms of formal school, from pre-K to the end of high school and the beginnings of adulthood. Yet school is hardly the only place that emerging artists and artisans learn.
Family businesses, apprenticeships, camps, and community organizations create spaces for other kinds of learning. Whether in formal programs or through informal meetings with neighbors and family friends, these extracurricular teaching relationships ensure that traditional knowledge and skills are passed from generation to generation.
Making is a way of coming to know things: environments, histories, and ways of living and belonging. In such settings, creative skills are connected with ways of life and enduring values. When people gather together to weave, when ranchers use the tools their loved ones or neighbors have made to earn their living, and when makers and musicians pull sounds out of handcrafted instruments, the stories of families and communities are told and retold.
In the Learning Together area at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, see family and community workshops come to life on the National Mall. Learn how handmade objects—and the skills and stories behind them—contribute to distinctive ways of life and cultural legacies across the United States.
