This workshop is designed for educators who want to bring oral history into their classrooms or learning spaces. We’ll begin with a rigorous introduction to oral history theory, methods and practice before reviewing existing curricula as a jumping off place to design our own.

We’ll think about how oral history’s best practices dovetail with our learning objectives, seizing upon the field’s potential to support active listening, ethical documentary practice along with considerations of: primary sources, myth, memory, the archive as a future history, silence, talking across difference, problem solving, shared authority, collaborative analysis and historiography…..Read More

*photo by Walter Hergt

Project Design is one of the most important and dynamic phases of oral history practice, giving oral historians a chance to discipline their thinking, address ethical challenges, identify sites for potential collaboration, assess their resources, define “success,” and brainstorm potential future uses beyond the archive. Project Design, which we can think of as our projects’ “superego,” stands in contrast to the wild and wooly nature of narrative, itself--offering coherence, rules, solutions and a preemptive evaluation of project limitations. Working on our Project Design at the front end can be enlivening, inspiring and revelatory when developed in chorus with peers and collaborators, as “problems” become our guides and part of our projects’ ultimate resolution.…Read More

*photo by Walter Hergt