To Educators

You are a professor thinking about how to integrate oral history into your class as a way to engage students in your subject. You heard that it can be a means to enable students to apply, rather than just absorb, sociology, political science, anthropology, history, English, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, Africana Studies, Judaic Studies, Women and Gender studies, music, or art — or whatever your area of expertise. Or you have had a little experience doing interviewing in your own research and want to learn how to teach it to your own students. Or you’re trying to shake up your class, try a different approach so that students throw off passivity and really get involved in your field.

Or you are an elementary school teacher about to embark on a family history unit. Or you are a middle school teacher trying to get your students to see that neighborhood history fits into a larger understanding of history. Or a high school history teacher hoping to get your students involved in original research to investigate issues that affect their community or to use primary source material for a research paper. Or a high school English teacher who wants to help your students create material for a project about a social issue they care about for a performance.

But the big question is how to realize an idea. For example, I want my students to interview family members or neighbors about the availability or lack of healthy food in their neighborhoods and the presence of food deserts. Or I want them to interview people on the role that work plays in their lives. Or I want my students to do a deep dive into family history through the lens of some of the issues raised in my class. In other words, you have an idea for a project, but how do you train your students to really go deep and not be satisfied with short Q and A interactions?

What is Oral History?

The Oral History Association (the professional organization for oral historians) defines it as “a field of study and a method of gathering, preserving and interpreting the voices and memories of people, communities and past events.” While you can have your students do oral histories with their city council person or a celebrity, the best oral histories are conducted with people who are not celebrities, who are not used to being interviewed, whose voices, for the most part were not collected by historians, whose experiences were often overlooked.  You may already know the genesis of oral history in the U.S. It wasn’t until the 1930’s when the Federal Writers’ Project (part of the Works Project Administration) was formed when unemployed writers and artists were sent out to interview diverse groups of Americans: including immigrants, workers, formerly enslaved people and others, that oral history began to get its start.

Sometimes your students, when they approach someone to suggest doing an interview, will be told, “Why do you want to interview me? I’ve never done anything important.” And it will be up to your students to cajole, persuade and encourage them that their stories matter; that what they have experienced will have an impact on what people know about a neighborhood or an issue; that their experiences, their stories will add a lot to common understanding. Or as the University of North Carolina’s Southern Oral History Program puts it: “You don’t have to be famous for your life to be history.”

Creating an Oral History Assignment for Your Class

So how do you go about integrating oral history into what you do? How do you create an oral history project for your students?

Think about your class. What are the big ideas/issues you want your students to come away with? Where can their own research (for that is what their oral history interviews will become) enrich what you are teaching? If you are teaching a macro economics class, how might interviews with immigrant businesses enrich what you are discussing in class? If you are teaching a Caribbean women’s literature class, how might interviews with Caribbean women and men get at (or call into question) some of the gender issues that the authors may have raised? If you are teaching a history course on the Iraqi or Afghani wars, how might interviews with American veterans and Iraqi or Afghani immigrants deepen the students’ understanding of the war?

Steps to Create Your Assignment

• Think through your class. What issues or themes are so rich you want your students to immerse themselves in them? Where can they help you deepen your class by reaching out to people In their own or other communities in Brooklyn or N.Y.C.? Whose voices are missing in some of the texts that you have been reading together?
• Look through your syllabus. Where can you introduce a project like that? After a month of classes where the grounding and framework for the class and the key essential questions have been established? Towards the end as a challenging summative assignment?
• Commit several sessions or classes to setting up and clarifying the assignment and training students in oral history skills.
• Listen in class to excerpts from old oral histories. (There are many archives with outstanding oral histories.) Or play one or two of our site’s oral history excerpts. Or let students select one that interests them. Have them write down quotes or parts that they like. What makes them particularly moving, riveting or revelatory?
• Have students listen to Pedro Batista’s oral history excerpt. There are no questions included in this excerpt. (They were edited out.) Play it a second time and have students write down what they imagine Ivanna Machuca asked Pedro Batista. Compare their answers. The kinds of questions and how they are asked can determine how good the resulting oral history is.
• Divide the class off into pairs who that don’t know each other well. Have the class come up with a list of 10 questions to ask each other that enable them to get to know each other more deeply. Critique the questions together. Discuss open-ended questions versus yes/no questions. Spend a good portion of the class letting them interview each other. While they are interviewing each other, go around and nudge them to model how to ask follow-up questions, which is often difficult for new interviewers. Have them discuss the experience both as an interviewer and as interviewee.
• Have your students decide whom they are going to interview for their project (it might be several people, depending upon how you shape your project.) Have them come up with a list of 20-25 questions for their own oral history project. Give them feedback on their questions in writing to help guide them.
• Look over “Interviewing Pointers and Strategies” in the Materials section of this website. Feel free to use the handout as is or to cull pieces from it to prepare your students for their interviews. There are a lot of nitty-gritty suggestions in it.
• As part of your oral history assignment, what do you want them to do with the resulting oral history/ies? Present them to the class? Write a paper analyzing them? Turn them into a performance? There are many possibilities.
• At the end of every semester, the BCLP often runs an event where students present excerpts from their resulting oral histories, what they learned and their experiences doing them. Encourage them to participate and bring your class. You and they have much to be proud of and to share with others.

Below are some resources to help you plan an oral history project in your class. There are many more: