Teaching folk heritage to contemporary university students

Abstract

Folk heritage, understood as the living artistic traditions of a community rather than museum artifacts, occupies an uncertain position in contemporary higher education. For Uzbek music, which encompasses epic recitation (dastan), ceremonial songs (yor‑yor, kelin salom), instrumental folk pieces (katta ashula in its instrumental form), and regional dance melodies, the transmission from older generations to university students trained in globalized listening habits presents profound pedagogical challenges. This article argues that teaching folk heritage effectively requires educators to move beyond two inadequate models: the romanticization of folk music as timeless and unchanging, and the reduction of folk heritage to simplified notation exercises for beginners. Instead, a viable university pedagogy must treat folk heritage as a dynamic, adaptive system whose stylistic features can be analyzed, practiced, and creatively extended by students. Drawing on fieldwork in Uzbek regional centers including Surxondaryo, Qashqadaryo, and Xorazm, as well as classroom observations at three Uzbek universities, this article proposes that folk heritage teaching should be grounded in four interconnected principles: contextual immersion, stylistic pattern recognition, oral replication with guided variation, and contemporary relevance through creative projects. The article also addresses persistent obstacles including students’ unfamiliarity with rural dialects, the fragmentation of folk ensembles due to urbanization, and the lack of accessible teaching materials that bridge oral and written transmission. Ultimately, teaching folk heritage to contemporary university students is not an exercise in nostalgia but a forward‑looking act of cultural continuity, one that requires pedagogical innovation without stylistic betrayal.