Overview: An oral history collects memories and personal commentaries of historical significance through recorded interviews. Oral history projects give students the opportunity to explore the intersections between “data” and “text” as they engage in primary research with an interview subject.

The resources on this page provide a three-hour First-Year Writing workshop. Beginning with the embedded tutorial, students engage in inquiry in the classroom, prepare for an interview with a family member, and plan an interview with an individual from their wider community. Students learn about interview preparation strategies, oral history protocols, and public sharing of materials. Oral History projects can be extended by further research or contributions to one of many local oral history archives provided in this unit.

Guiding Questions: What is oral history? What are the guiding principles of this methodology? What do students need to know to collect archival quality oral histories? What are the potential uses for oral histories?

Learning Outcomes: • Students gain an overview of the scope of oral history projects in the US and the guiding principles of oral historians. • Students develop a focus for a hypothetical family interview. The project can be completed by collecting an actual interview, creating a digital storytelling project, or writing a reflective piece in response to a prompt. • Students engage in primary research: conducting interviews, drawing conclusions, interpreting narratives, and tagging and indexing. • Students prepare an archival sound recording with potential for use in additional multimedia projects (including audio slideshows, videos, or podcasts).





Download the Powerpoint and notes/slide narration for your own classroom use:
Oral History Workshop.pptx


Oral History at Oakland University
If you are a student or faculty member at OU, watch this video to see how our students are using easily accessible digital tools to record oral histories for projects in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric.

Sample Prep Assignment
This hypothetical interview assignment is an excellent first step for first-year writing students at the invention stage. Complete with links to video resources, a writing prompt, and extension ideas, this activity can be completed in a 90 minute class session, with up to one week of follow-up work for students to complete on their own.

ROHApracticeinterview.pdf

Model Lesson Plan

The Library of Congress offers teachers valuable resources through Exploring Community Through Local History, a lesson plan on using Oral History. The step-by-step guidelines and extension ideas will be especially valuable to high school and First Year Composition college instructors in conjunction with the tutorial and other resources on this page.


Projects for Inspiration

The Storycorps mission translates well into classroom projects: Providing Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share and preserve the stories of their lives. Students can listen to excerpts of thousands of oral histories on a wide variety of topics. The website also includes animated shorts of recorded excerpts. Storycorps sponsors the National Day of Listening every November to encourage Americans to record memories with family members.

The John Novak Digital Interview Collection consists of interviews about immigration, migration, and the Civil Rights Movement. Housed at Marygrove College in Detroit, the collection began in 2004, seeking to document experiences of those moving to and within the United States.

The Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives invites people of all ages, races, communities, backgrounds, and interests to contribute stories about how — and in what circumstances — they read, write, and compose meaning, and how they learned to do so (or helped others learn). The DALN allows contributors to upload their submissions digitally from any location and invites supplements of narratives such as samples of writing (papers, letters, zines, speeches, etc.) and compositions (music, photographs, videos, sound recordings, etc.). The DALN is well-suited for teachers and students interested in recording and sharing narratives about literacy.

Telling Their Stories Oral History Archives Project is a high school student initiative that features student interviews of elders who witnessed key historic events of the 20th Century. Presented by the Urban School of San Francisco, the project is beginning to collaborate with students in other high schools. The site features numerous examples of student video recordings.

If you are working on any exciting project on Oral History in the classroom, large or small, I invite you to share your resources and published projects with the ROHA project. Email at pokrzywa@oakland.edu for collaborative initiatives.