The State Board of Higher Education’s Academic Strategies Committee met Thursday to assess and approve the University’s proposed new bachelor of art program in folklore.@@http://www.ous.edu/state_board/committees/asc@@
The undergraduate major is intended to replace the University’s existing undergraduate certificate program, for which there are already adequate resources. The new major will therefore require no additional resources. The certificate will be eliminated when the new major is implemented.
“What we’re doing now is basically formalizing the program and giving students the opportunity to delve more deeply into folklore,” program director Lisa Gilman said.@@http://directory.uoregon.edu/telecom/directory.jsp?p=findpeople%2Ffind_results&m=staff&d=person&b=name&s=Lisa+Gilman@@ “The new major is going to be very useful for students who are interested in a wide range of different professional goals or who are interested in continuing their academic studies.”
The folklore program was established in the late seventies and has grown into a department with more than 40 faculty members. Initially just a collection of lower-level introductory courses, the program will now offer its own degree.
“I think if you’re gonna get a certificate or minor that means you have a great deal of interest in the topic, and for some people it would be advantageous to get a bachelor’s degree in that topic, but until now they were restricted,” Professor Emeritus Sharon Sherman said.@@http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~flr/faculty/fac.htm@@
Sherman, a cinema studies professor, served as the folklore program director for over 30 years and is excited about the changes. She witnessed the astounding growth and development of the cinema studies program and hopes the folklore program will have the same success.
“This is the first time we’ve had this bachelor’s degree here, and there’s really only one other place in the country that has a bachelor’s degree in folklore, and that’s Indiana University,” Sherman said.@@http://webdb.iu.edu/folkethno/scripts/index.cfm@@ “That makes this program a special and very key program.”
Students studying folklore receive comprehensive training in scholarly approaches and methods to researching, documenting and presenting traditional arts and cultural practices within the United States and abroad. Though interdisciplinary, the folklore major is distinct from other undergraduate degrees offered at the University in its focus on traditional cultural practices and artistic expressions in everyday life, which are two dimensions of human behavior that are often overlooked in other disciplines.
“I just feel lucky, because this is the path that I wanted to initially take for my bachelor’s degree, but I felt like I had to settle for something else,” new folklore major Mia McMullen said. “So this new program is super exciting.”@@http://directory.uoregon.edu/telecom/directory.jsp?p=findpeople%2Ffind_results&m=student&d=person&b=name&s=Mia+McMullen@@
The Oregon University System Provosts’ Council@@http://www.ous.edu/about/provcouncil@@ recommended that the Board’s Academic Strategies Committee authorize the University to establish an instructional program leading to a bachelor of arts in folklore, effective Fall 2012. With committee approval, a five‐year follow‐up review of this program will be conducted in 2017‐18. The Academic Strategies Committee also approved a new bachelor’s of applied science program in technology and management for Oregon Institute of Technology, as well as a new Master of Science program in bio-statistics for the Oregon Health and Science University.