2024 Oral History Association Annual Meeting

This interactive, crafts-based session explores the value of the sensory as a key to encouraging intergenerational research participation. Using a primary school oral history case study, it invites attendees to reflect on ways to creatively share authority with both children and adult participants in oral history projects.

ABSTRACT: This session demonstrates creative approaches to testing the sensory as an oral history research technique with intergenerational participants. It stems from the UK-based project ‘The School Meals Service: Past, Present – and Future?’. The project combines oral history and ethnographic approaches to explore the aims, achievements, and limitations of the UK School Meals Service from its inception in 1906. Through semi-structured interviews and school and community-based events, a focus on the sensory has proved useful for eliciting school food memories, while creating opportunities for participation across generations through creative methods like food tasting, drawing, and craft activities. Our focus on sensory experiences has helped to bridge temporal boundaries, encouraging participants to reflect on school food in the past and present to outline their hopes for future provision. This hands-on session models a particular activity used within the project to facilitate children and adult participation. Using arts and craft supplies, conference participants are invited to create their own elicitation object(s) focusing on school food. In our work, this has provided children with opportunities to engage not only with their present experiences of school food, but also to materialise imagined pasts and futures, encouraging reflection on what might have changed over time and what could change going forward. Their creations then underpin interviews between children and adults that span past, present, and future experiences of school food. In this session, conference participants are invited to test similar conversations with one another using their newly created elicitation objects, before ending with reflective discussions about the benefits and challenges oral historians might face in applying such creative methods to their own research projects. Ultimately, the session explores how methods centring the sensory can support and empower intergenerational participation in oral history projects, helping to creatively share authority and challenge understandings of the ‘researcher’/‘researched’.