2024 Oral History Association Annual Meeting

Stories from the Classroom: Oral History Pedagogy, Past and Future, Jennifer Bartlett

This presentation offers a brief overview of the use of oral history as a pedagogical tool in primary and secondary education and discusses how continuing developments in oral history practice impact our work as educators.

ABSTRACT: Oral histories are an invaluable tool in education, offering a personal and often emotive perspective. They allow students to understand historical and cultural events not just as a collection of facts and figures, but as a deeply personal human experience, providing context and depth to the information provided in textbooks. As portable recording technologies became more ubiquitous in the 1960s and 1970s, educators increasingly recognized the power of oral histories as a pedagogical tool. This has led to the development of innovative teaching methodologies that seek to incorporate oral histories into the curriculum, including student-conducted interviews, analysis of archived oral histories, and the creation of digital projects based on oral histories. However, incorporating oral histories into curricula has never been a one-size-fits-all process and designing effective and memorable oral history instruction continues to be a challenge.As we seek to instill an appreciation (or maybe even a passion) for oral history in our students, what can we learn from earlier experiments in instruction? What are the key moments and foundational projects in oral history pedagogy over the years that can inform our current practice? How are recent and current events including the pandemic and the rise of artificial intelligence impacting our work in the classroom? We all have our own teaching stories, successful and not so successful. Participants will be invited to share their own teaching experiences and insights, as well as comment on others’ unique situations, with the goal of continuing to build a community of practice dedicated to effective, compelling oral history instruction.

Educating the Undergraduate Oral Historian, Rebecca Johnson

As undergraduate instruction of oral history theory and methodology rises in popularity, this presentation will offer educators and institutions recommendations for designing a successful course, with a focus on addressing the unique challenges that come with structuring and producing undergraduate oral history projects.

ABSTRACT: Oral history theory and methodology is usually taught on the graduate level, often included in public history graduate program requirements. Having taught oral history to graduate students for a decade, I hesitated offering this course to Xavier University undergraduates, given the logistical challenges of off-campus interviews and the difficulty of assigning group projects at this collegiate level. But by partnering with the university archives and digital media center to structure the course around an on-campus project, each of my students successfully completed a full oral history experience – from researching and interviewing to transcribing and analyzing. In this presentation, I will review how the following strategies worked well for undergraduate oral history education. A partnership with the university archives was integral to its success on multiple levels. The university archivist chose the oral history subject to fill a gap in the university’s institutional knowledge. An added benefit to my students was learning about archival administration, including required metadata and donor agreement forms and understanding the accessioning process. Using the digital media lab to record each interview introduced students to state of the art recording technology in a controlled and cost-free environment. I made this course as oral as possible - supplementing readings with weekly listening sessions of oral history interviews and recordings of interviews of oral history pioneers like Alessandro Portelli and Louisa Passerini. And I attended every interview, as much for emotional support for my students as for quality control. Finally, our topic – Xavier University’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic - was a trauma subject that both interviewee and interviewer had experienced firsthand. As a class, we learned about the ethical challenges of engaging in trauma oral history for our interviewees and for ourselves – a learning and processing experience far deeper and engaging than in any course I have taught.

Undocumented Stories: Latina/o/e Oral Histories and Digital Humanities Archiving, Elena Foulis & Stephanie Aubry

This presentation argues for the need to center Latina/o/e DH projects on students’ own cultural, community (Yosso, 2005), and linguistic wealth. We use our positionality as Latinas to make personal connections and reflect on the ways ourselves and our communities can be best represented via an ethics of care approach as we consider oral history and digital humanities projects, in particular at Hispanic Serving Institutions.

ABSTRACT: US Latina/o/e Digital Humanities recovery and production efforts include historical documents, periodicals, images, maps, oral histories, etc. As Latina scholars and students, Latina/o/e DH allows us to make personal connections and reflect on the ways ourselves and our communities can be best represented via an ethics of care approach as we consider DH projects, in particular at Hispanic Serving Institutions. This presentation argues for the need to center Latina/o/e DH projects on students’ own cultural, community (Yosso, 2005), and linguistic wealth. Here, we describe the development of student projects that pay attention to the process of building, engaging, and critically reflect on our personal commitments to building accessible, multilingual archives, that center on the community’s knowledge. We detail the importance of building DH projects that are student-lead based on their own identities and bring their own cultural and community wealth to inform their process and engagement. Indeed, in our positionalities as Latina educator-scholar and mentor who participates in DH work, and an undergraduate Latina student, we find ourselves personally invested in these initiatives, thinking critically about representation and agency. We will discuss a course on Latina/o/e DH and oral history and will feature one project that included oral histories of undocumented/DACA immigrants who reflect on their journeys through higher education and beyond. It details the perspective of different individuals and their circumstances and barriers each had to overcome. Using Yosso’s model of aspirational, cultural, linguistic, resistance, social and navigational capital, we discuss designing questions that reveal the ways in which this community has been able to leverage their capital to attain educational goals. The oral histories culminated in a podcast that describes the results, along with sound bites from the interviews to illustrate participants' perspectives. Along with the podcast, a digital archive was built to provide the results for this project and information, including a timeline, story map and transcripts.
Sounding Off About Judgment: Working with Oral History in Reconceiving the Role of 'Critique' in Art, Emily Verla Bovino
The presentation explores recent research into the use of oral history among studio arts students in a higher education setting. It proposes that oral history methods be used among young artists to encourage a different approach to the critique session, one that centers an aesthetics of care through the work of sharing, rather than the faculty of judgment, whether this judgment concerns a relation to beauty and the feeling of pleasure (Kant), a relation to tectonics and the corresponding feeling of structure (Bogdanov), or to what is interesting and the sensation of receiving information in circulation (Ngai).

ABSTRACT: