The Rushnyk Maker was first
developed for use with college students taking folklore
courses. One of the central principles of folklore is variation.
What makes an object of folk creative art beautiful is that
each piece is unique, developed on the basis of tradition
rather than reproduced from a pattern. At the same time,
because it is part of a tradition, other members of the
particular folk culture understand a folk item and its message.
An item of folklore like a rushnyk can thus serve as a vehicle
for individual expression and cultural communication.
To teach this to college students
in a hands-on, experiential way, we developed a program
that would allow them to take images that we had isolated
from real rushnyky collected in Central Ukraine (the Cherkasy,
Kyiv, Poltava, and Chernihiv oblasts) and to combine them,
altering placement and size as they saw fit.
The students were first asked
to read a web page discussing rushnyky an their uses. The
page also contains a collection of photographs of real rushnyky
and a glossary of images typically used in the region of
Central Ukraine, along with their meanings.
After gaining some knowledge
of the Central Ukrainian rushnyk tradition, students were
asked to compose their own rushnyk and print it out for
submission to the instructor. They were also asked to write
an explanation of their rushnyk: what it was supposed to
"say" and how this message was expressed in the
composition that they had produced.
