BOONE—Susan Mills has received $6,000 from the Appalachian Music Fellowship Program at Berea College to develop materials that elementary and middle school teachers and others can use to teach the music and customs of the Appalachia region.

Mills is coordinator of music education and an associate professor in Appalachian State University’s Mariam Cannon Hayes School of Music.

The fellowship is funded by a grant from the Anne Ray Charitable Trust at Berea. It also will help Mills fill what she sees as a gap in the training most music education majors receive.

“When we train music teachers, they spend most of their years at the university studying conservatory-based music that leads to recitals and mastery of their solo instrument,” Mills said. “They get very little or any training in ethnomusicology or world music.”

Mills will study the works in the Leonard Roberts Folklore Collection while at Berea this summer. Materials in the Roberts collection include oral histories about songs that were sung and games played by Kentucky residents during the early 20th century.

Mills will use information and digital sound recordings from the collection to create Web-based lessons on traditional Appalachian life and culture for children that teachers of social studies, language arts and the arts can use.

“Teaching materials about Appalachian folklore are available, but they tend to overlook the music and art of the region as a central component,” Mills said.

Mills’ lesson plans will include folk dances, games and music from the Appalachian region. The project follows a philosophy Mills learned from one of her professors while pursuing her doctorate at the University of Central Florida – that the arts, not just history or language arts, can be a doorway to teaching children about other cultures.

“To learn something about the way music is created, enjoyed and appreciated in other parts of the world provides an insight into culture that is accessible for children,” Mills said.

Mills plans to apply the model she develops for teaching about Appalachian culture to lessons plans about the music and culture of South Africa, the Caribbean, Puerto Rico and the Gulf Coast region of the United States.

“What I’d like to do is develop a pedagogy that even someone who doesn’t have extensive training in the folk music tradition can teach equally as well,” she said.

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