Far+Travelers+Project

//Far Travelers Project// Reflections on Teaching Oral History Washburn University, Spring 2006

Patricia Michaelis, Ph.D. Director, Kansas State Historical Society Library & Archives

[|__http://www.washburn.edu/cas/history/stucker/fartravelers/reflections.html__] Interviewing family and friends has long been a staple of information gathering exercises for social studies classes. In recent years, with the rise of project based learning, such interviews, often called ‘oral history projects,’ have come to take a leading role as service learning components for these projects. As such, the typical interviewee is no longer relegated to a student’s immediately available family members or social network. High school students are finding their way to the offices of community leaders, senior citizens, immigrants and just about anybody else who could be construed as a witness to history or social development. Teachers implementing oral history components into their class curricula must consider several elements of instruction to ensure that students have a meaningful, useful learning experience. Dr. Patricia Michaelis, Director of the Kansas State Historical Society Library & Archives, noted in a reflection over her experiences teaching an oral history based class, the //Far Travelers Project// for Washburn University, that she was somewhat alarmed to discover that all she could impart to her students in the way of instruction were general procedures. “I could share with students what was necessary to be prepared to conduct an oral history interview. However, I could not make them good oral history interviewers as the qualities of good oral history interviewing are almost impossible to teach.” Does this mean that instruction for these sorts of projects reduces the teacher to a purveyor of tips and suggestions? Well, to some extent, yes it does. However, as with all good teaching, modeling is the key. Dr. Michaelis spent time with her students helping them to develop good questions and polish their thinking flexibility by assigning students to interview each other to educe specified sorts information. She also had her students critique transcripts from other oral history projects. In the end, however, “…it wasn't until they were in their own interviews that the students really understood how the quality of the questions, their knowledge of the context of their interviewee's experiences, and the ability to follow up on good information provided by the interviewee really became apparent.” Dr. Michaelis recommends that all members of an oral history class engage in the research of a single topic. This allows students to compare findings and gather a more encompassing understanding of the work. This is worth mentioning, because it deviates somewhat from the direction educators generally expect project based learning assignments to take, i.e. small groups making student centered choices. It could be argued that for students to really get a positive experience from oral history surveying, a certain amount of from-the-front decision making by the teacher is necessary. Having participated in two fairly intense oral history projects here at Newman, I tend to agree with this assessment. Though both experiences were rewarding, I believe that a more useful learning experience was created by my whole-class experience versus my small group experience. The whole-class project highlighted a diversity of experience and worldview that was simply missing from the more limited presentations proffered by groups of three or four interviewers. A large part of this methodological critique centers on available time. Dr. Michaelis noted in her article that it is extremely difficult for students to develop good questioning and flexible interviewing skills during a single semester class. It is noteworthy that she is also talking about a group of //college students// with //sixteen weeks// to develop these skills, not a group of high school students with a likely maximum of two or three weeks. Shifting the experience away from a small group format into a whole class project offers each student a better chance to learn from one or two well planned engagements rather than three or four perfunctory interviews. As the most that an educator can do to teach these skills is offer technical suggestions, designing the best possible circumstances and time frames for student application should characterize the intent of an oral history activity.