Teachers have implemented oral history at every level from grade school to graduate school and in continuing and community education programs, including workshops for senior citizens. Interviewing techniques can be taught to students at all levels of ability. In secondary schools, oral history more often has been directed toward honors, gifted and talented, and advance-placement students but has demonstrated that it can motivate slow learners and otherwise indifferent students as well. Doing oral history helps students break loose from their textbooks and become their own collectors of information—and students remember best what they researched themselves.
Oral history works for teachers who, frankly, have grown tired of lecturing and want to engage their students more actively in learning. Instead of telling students what is important, oral history projects require them to find out for themselves by interviewing people and then by processing and analyzing the information gathered. Students often prove innately able to establish the necessary rapport, since many older interviewees feel a special need to make young people understand the events of the past. In many ways the ideal oral history relationship occurs when the interviewer plays student to the interviewee as teacher.1
School oral history projects face limited funding and equipment, school boards that are unsympathetic to new student electives, and department chairs and colleagues who are dubious about anything outside the standard curriculum. A teacher can grow discouraged over the time and commitment that oral history requires. Some lack training and personal experience in using oral history and have no mentor to turn to for advice. Teachers complain about the difficulty of completing oral history projects within the limited confines of a semester; others complain of students who do not prepare adequately for their interviews. Teachers also recognize the need for more structured assistance to help student projects succeed.
Admittedly, oral history is no panacea for all that ails modern education, and not every student readily adapts to it. But those teachers who have used oral history offer enthusiastic assessments of its pedagogical advantages and attest that its rewards are worth the effort. Julia Letts, who set up oral history projects in several schools, reported how she often witnessed “a rapport developing between generations, watched skills being learnt, friendships made, goodwill created, not to mention the value of the interviews themselves.”2
With “history” in its name, oral history has shown up most often in history and social studies programs; teachers can use it to study family, culture, community, and government. But interviewing has also flourished in English, journalism, drama, folklore, science, and other disciplines. The innovative Foxfire program sprang from an English composition course designed to get students to develop content and grammar skills by writing about what they saw and did. A composition or language skills class can assign students not only to conduct interviews and write descriptions of the experience but also transcribe, which is an exercise that calls for language skills in sentence structure, syntax, and punctuation.3
Students may never have associated their own everyday language with the standard English of textbooks and classroom assignments. One English teacher was surprised when her inner-city students complained that Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple (1982) sounded odd and was hard to read, despite the teacher’s observation that Walker’s prose perfectly captured her students’ own “black English.” None of them, she concluded, “had ever learned how to read and write their own verbal system of communication.” An oral history project that had students recording and transcribing their own speech patterns would offer rare opportunities for self-revelation. Interview transcriptions similarly provide students a means of examining regional dialects, colloquialisms, and jargon.4
Civics classes are another natural venue. The American Federation of Teachers has sponsored an international Civic Voices oral history program to train teachers to enhance civics education by incorporating the power of first-person narratives in teaching core democratic concepts. At the same time, students develop a website that serves as “a memory bank of oral history interviews with social activists from around the world.” The project partnered with teachers’ unions in Colombia, Georgia, Mongolia, Northern Ireland, the Philippines, Poland, and South Africa to train students to interview participants in iconic political moments over the past half century.5
Familiar to mass audiences through the stage play, television movie, and series of best-selling books, Foxfire is the pioneering secondary school project that combined oral history and folklore as instructional devices. It began in 1966, when a teacher at the Rabun Gap-Nacoochee high school, in an Appalachian community in Georgia, realized that his lectures were just not getting through to his students, who were deficient in language skills and uncomfortable expressing themselves in writing. “How would you like to throw away the text and start a magazine?” he asked. Soon, Foxfire proved so effective in motivating students that it spawned countless other school interviewing and journal-writing projects across the country.6
A typical Foxfire class lasts one semester. Before students begin interviewing, they listen to a short story read aloud and try to write down everything they heard. A sample reading of these papers easily demonstrates why the original is richer and fuller than any of the remembered versions. Then the same story is read again, slowly, with the students trying to take it down as dictation—a task they quickly find impossible. These exercises demonstrate the problems involved in listening and also make clear the need for recording interviews. But this leaves the question of how to get the story off the recording, a discussion which in turn leads to an explanation of transcribing, followed by students attempting practice transcripts. Other class sessions cover the varying sound quality of different recorders and microphones, with demonstrations on how to set up equipment properly. Foxfire classes include sessions on cameras as well, since students are encouraged to take photographs of the people they interview and to collect other items related to the subject matter.
Foxfire seeks to involve students in all phases of the oral history project. The class picks the theme of the project, whom to interview, and what questions to ask. Before going out to conduct interviews, students watch a practice in-class interview, in which someone—perhaps another teacher, a school administrator, cafeteria worker, or a parent—is invited to the class to be interviewed. The in-class interview is not a drill but an actual interview designed to impress on the students the seriousness of their responsibilities as interviewers.
In-class interviews give students the chance to analyze not only the interviewing process but also the transcription and the effects of different transcription styles on the content of the interview. Students begin to realize how easily a careless transcriber can alter the meaning of an interview. With all this in-class experience and discussion absorbed, the students finally go out to interview for themselves.7
Foxfire spread its message to other schools, recommending a “fieldwork enterprise” that mixes research, interviewing training, and community school relationships. A term’s project might be a slide-tape or PowerPoint presentation or a video, but quite often it has resulted in publication of a school journal. Since the publication of the first Foxfire Book, numerous schools have produced similar magazines combining oral history, folklore, and local history. Two of its offspring, in Kennebunkport, Maine, and Lebanon, Missouri, similarly made the transition from local school magazines to nationally published books: The Salt Book and Bittersweet County: Long, Long Ago, an intermediate school student magazine in Bell Gardens, California, contains interviews with local community members, while seventh graders in Northern California’s Anderson Valley published Voices of the Valley. Students with learning disabilities in Littleton, Colorado, published Aspen Glow, while the children of migrant farmworkers in Boulder produced El Aguila. Bloodlines is the student oral history journal in Holmes County, Mississippi, one of the poorest counties in the nation. In southern Maryland, Slackwater records interviews with local tobacco farmers and watermen in an effort to get students involved in the community. Increasingly, these publications have migrated to websites and have become multimedia.
Many school oral history magazines have not lasted long. Some were identified with a particular teacher who moved on, and others were eliminated by school budget cuts. One well-regarded publication was canceled when its budget allotment went to pay for the school’s heating oil. Its director bemoaned the project’s death from “administrative ineptitude.” Yet new oral history journals, newsletters, and websites continue to appear, facilitated by the greater availability of school computers.8
If a teacher did not have an opportunity to take an oral history course in graduate school, courses and workshops are regularly available at universities and community colleges and in adult education programs. Between school years, summer institutes and week-long oral history workshops are conducted around the country. Historical societies whose collections contain oral history interviews often can be enlisted to help.
Baylor University’s Institute for Oral History offers “Workshops on the Web” for teachers, and the Internet provides an abundance of other online tutorials and tips for teachers. Oral history archives maintain websites that provide bibliographies, sample deeds of gift, and teaching tips about using their collections that amount to “workshops on the web.” Some provide step-by-step guides to doing oral history, along with recommendations on how to incorporate interviewing into every level of instruction. History Matters, which describes itself as a “U.S. Survey Course on the Web” offers extensive introductory material on using oral history as a teaching tool. A number of teachers have blogged about their experiences with oral history in class. The various oral history associations provide links to many of these sources, and others can be found by using any of the search engines on the web. Some of the online projects will be specific to a particular locale, which can suggest local history themes to explore. Others are located in different places around the world, but share relevant methodological and pedagogical concerns, some related to specific events or to institutions. Among education-oriented websites are the Bland County History Archives, maintained by the students at the Rocky Gap High School in Virginia, and the D.C. Everest School District Oral History Project in Wisconsin, a student volunteer project that began by interviewing Hmong immigrants from Laos and has expanded to general life experiences of the broader population during the twentieth century.9
The Oral History Association and its several affiliated state and regional oral history associations regularly run workshops and offer sessions aimed at teachers. They publish practical pamphlets, such as Oral History Projects in Your Classroom. Talking Gumbo: An Oral History Manual for Secondary School Teachers, a how-to guide for using oral history in history, English, and social studies classes, has a companion thirty-minute video, You’ve Got to Hear This Story, designed to teach African American students how to conduct interviews and engage in primary research, so that they can become creators of their own theories and analyze the evidence they collect.10
The National Council for the Social Studies produced a variety of pamphlets in its How to Do It Series, and the Teachers and Collaborative Workshop has published Like It Was: A Complete Guide to Writing Oral History for junior and senior high school teachers. The Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage has posted online Discovering Our Delta: A Learning Guide for Community Research. Its twenty-six-minute video component follows five students from the Mississippi Delta as they do fieldwork research—largely through interviewing—on their communities. Also available on the Center’s website are useful student and teacher guides that accompany the video.11
These organizations recognize that overworked teachers are usually too busy preparing lessons, grading papers, and dealing with their supervisors to attend many extracurricular programs. Some have made their oral history workshops more attractive by offering certificates or qualifying as “in-service” teacher training during scheduled release time. Although these occasional workshops are usually brief and unable to cover much ground, they provide teachers with basic models for classroom projects. Teachers have also recognized oral history as a highly positive way of meeting state mandates and performing evaluations of students’ advancement.
Acquiring equipment on limited school budgets has always called for ingenuity. Some school audiovisual departments will have recorders, microphones, video cameras, and computers, but in general teachers can expect anything from a complete lack of equipment to a severe limitation on its availability. Poll your students to see how many can use their own recorders, smartphones, and other digital devices. Local merchants have cooperated with school projects by lending equipment. One California camera store annually lends a local high school all the equipment it needs for filming and editing its History Day media entries. Local support groups, from parent-teacher associations to alumni, should also be tapped for funds and equipment. With its objective of publishing a magazine of its interviews, the Foxfire program sent its students out to solicit contributions from local merchants and townsfolk. They listed gifts of any amount in the magazine, and each donor received a copy signed by all the students.12
Funding can range widely. Charles Price of the City University of New York led an oral history-community history project for Brooklyn high school students and their teachers, teaching them basic methods in oral history and sending them out to do field research. The project’s chief problem was a shortage of equipment. Despite this disadvantage, students absorbed the complexities of designing a project and interviewing, developed an interview guide, and assessed which strategies to use to get different kinds of people to tell their stories. Some managed to transcribe their interviews without any transcribing equipment. When motivated, students can often make do with what they have in remarkably creative ways.
At the other end of the spectrum, the Virginia General Assembly and Chesapeake Bay Foundation provided funding for the Northside Middle School in Norfolk to equip and send a group of eighth grade students by ferry to interview the residents of Smith Island. The project required the students to learn the islanders’ unique dialect. Teachers reported that they could cover every discipline with an oral history and that students processed and retained the information because they felt so positive about it. Their test scores were the most improved in the state of Virginia that year, proving the value of the investment.
Every classroom oral history project needs a teacher who is sincerely committed to it. “It’s not all fun and games,” as Barbara Gallant, a high school teacher in Gainesville, Florida, reported. “It has to be part of the curriculum and not something extra. I don’t think you need the money to start, because I think that can be found. I do think there has to be a person who cares and wants to do it; who feels that there is some real value in it.” Gallant began supervising an oral history project at a time when federal courts had ordered racial integration of her school system. Teachers and administrators at her school felt it essential to get white and black students communicating with each other and to build stronger ties with the community. Using borrowed tape recorders, she assigned her students to interview family members about how the county had changed over the past fifty years and brought local historians and anthropologists to class to talk to the students. The project worked well—although she discovered that after a while her students grew tired of using school integration as the only subject. She subsequently had her classes branch out to other areas. Still, the interviews they conducted helped the students through a time of dramatic changes and created a useful resource for future research on their school.13
At the elementary school level, oral history is used less for teaching subject matter than for helping students become more aware of their surroundings. Recognizing that children wonder about themselves before they begin to appreciate others, elementary school teachers have had students interview their parents on the theme, “What was I like when I was younger?” Elementary school students have collected anecdotes about their families and learned about their neighborhoods. Educators note that children “grow socially” when they interview adults.14
In one project, students were asked to describe the route they typically took to school. They recorded what types of buildings they passed, such as businesses, churches, and other schools. Accompanied by an adult, students interviewed someone identified with one of the buildings on their daily route. They asked shop owners why they chose the location, how long they had been doing business there, and whether most of their customers came from the local community. Drawing from such programs, the District of Columbia school system published Earth Waves, a newsletter that reported on oral history in elementary schools, offered sample projects and questions, and reproduced portions of student interviews. Fourth graders in Middlebury, Vermont, published a similar journal, called Village Green.15
Oral history has become a recognizable part of children’s popular culture. In the movie version of The Grinch, little Cindy Lou conducts oral histories to uncover the reasons for the Grinch’s antiholiday prejudice. The children’s book The Berenstain Bears and the Giddy Grandma recounts a school assignment in which Sister Bear must interview a member of her family. She chooses her grandmother but has second thoughts when she learns that others in her class have interviewed famous relatives. “And Gram is just...well, just Gram.” The interview, however, uncovers surprising facts about Grandma’s past as a circus bear, lures her out of retirement for a school talent show, and produces “the best oral history in the history of oral history.” For younger readers, the book’s message is that history can be found at home and that oral history can help them discover things they never knew about their own families.16
Young children can focus their interviews on what their parents and grandparents did when they were children. What types of games did they play when they were young? What did they ever do before television? Was their schooling different? What types of songs were popular then? How has household technology changed during their lifetimes? Children seem most comfortable interviewing grandparents—perhaps, as has been said, because they share a common enemy.
For elementary school students, the information gathered is often less important than the experience gained. Folklorist Dale W. Johnson, who worked with fourth graders conducting interviews with “hard of hearing and cantankerous old folks” at a nursing home observed that as the students ran out of prepared questions, they began talking more directly with the seniors and “leaped cognitively” to questions on their own. The process, he concluded, improved both the students and the elders, regardless of the documentation.17
A Pennsylvania educational project, designed to meet academic standards for reading, writing, speaking, and listening, aimed at engaging students—beginning in the fourth grade—more fully in their surroundings. The community-oriented project taught students how to conduct interviews and encouraged them to collect artifacts related to those interviews for display at the school. Teachers found that the research was enlightening for the students, even when interviewing their family members. The students displayed what they learned in presentations in class and in the school library, culminating in an Oral History Fair, held at the school after hours with refreshments in conjunction with another event on the school calendar.
The schools’ communities represented all strata of race, religion, and income. Similarly oral history is accessible to all students, regardless of their learning abilities. Teachers reported that the process did not discriminate: “It is a can-do project for all students. Few students can go through it without being changed or enhanced.” As a measure of its success, after the fair ended none of the students discarded their exhibits. They valued the information collected, felt a sense of “ownership” of their projects, and showed pride in what they had learned.18
A good model of such a partnership is Brown University’s program in which graduate students train elementary school students for an oral history of Fox Point, a community near the university’s campus in Providence, Rhode Island. The university had acquired a large photography collection of the community, so graduate students conducted interviews with current and former residents and combined the illustrations and interviews to create an exhibit that lined the halls of the local elementary school. They trained sixth grade students to serve as exhibit docents, leading tours for younger students, parents, and community members. The graduate students conducted oral history and photography workshops for fourth and fifth grade students, who drafted questions and engaged in class interviews with longshoremen, oyster factory workers, and others who shared memories of the Providence waterfront. The graduate students observed how the younger students approached their interviews “with a great sense of responsibility, sincerity, and empathy.” The project succeeded on both levels: elementary school students learned more about their community, creating and presenting exhibits, and oral history; and the graduate students developed skills in bringing together scholarly research and community interests to benefit their future careers as arts administrators and cultural workers.19
Both the objectives and levels of sophistication in oral history advance as students move toward adolescence. For middle and junior high school students, oral history has been used more for dealing with the “affective domain,” or issues pertaining to emotions and feelings. Since adolescents are struggling with their personal identity, oral history helps refocus their attention from themselves to their families and the community in which they live. Middle and junior high school social studies curricula often emphasize local history and provide local history texts that can be the basis for doing a locally oriented oral history where students get to practice social studies “almost without realizing it.”20
Schools in Quincy, Massachusetts, involved sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students in a Family Ties program. Students visited the Quincy Museum and studied Eliza Susan Quincy, who throughout the nineteenth century had recorded all the furnishings and objects in the Quincy family home and had collected reminiscences of other family members. Returning home, students were asked to list what items their families counted as “treasures” and to prepare their own family inventories in album form. The albums documented the students’ families, homes, and times, with the idea that the albums could someday be passed along to their own children.
As part of this project, the museum staff helped train the students how to interview family members. The interviews assisted in creating their family inventories by helping students understand not only what the items were but also their emotional significance. Little-noticed bric-a-brac took on new meaning as mementoes of the past. For students who were first- or second-generation immigrants, family treasures were cherished reminders of a former life in a different culture. The experiment helped the students use primary source materials, gave them experience in different kinds of writing, and raised their curiosity about local, historical resources. Students completed the project with a stronger sense of being both “rooted in the past” as well as an “active part of the present.” An unexpected by-product of the class discussions was students’ increased consciousness of the different backgrounds of their classmates, and it was a result the project directors trusted would foster greater tolerance in a multicultural environment.21
While they were studying the civil rights movement, middle school students in Montclair, New Jersey, revealed that they were largely unaware of the efforts to desegregate their own schools a few decades earlier. In response, four teachers organized an oral history project to help students appreciate civic courage in their community. The students watched portions of the civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize and read past articles from local newspapers and documents from the Board of Education. Then they conducted interviews with educators, parents, activists, and those who had been children in the local schools during the struggle for equal rights. Students learned about housing segregation, unequal school facilities, and school busing. After they completed the interviews and prepared the transcripts, the students decided to interview each other about what they had learned, a process that reveal their new awareness of “what has been” and vision of “what must be.”22
What especially sets oral history apart from traditional history instruction, according to high school teachers who have used it, is the requirement for students to develop greater depth of subject knowledge, from using primary and secondary source materials and other student oral histories, to prepare for their interviews. In a project designed to interview Holocaust survivors, for instance, the interviewees provided both private material and published works for the students to use for preparation.23
In high school, oral history tends to be more closely connected to the subject matter being taught in the classroom. Students learn the same oral history techniques but apply them to a wide range of subjects. Often the interview subjects are particularly relevant to the local region but may have national significance as well and fit into a curriculum that includes world and U.S. history. Topics that high school students have tackled include native villages of the Aleutian Islands, Japanese American relocation during the Second World War, the Buffalo Soldiers, the Three Mile Island incident, multiculturalism in Hawaii, and the changing Lower East Side of Manhattan. One high school student evaluating an oral history course reported: “It helped me understand the human causes, not just ‘the war began because’...but why it began, who was involved and most importantly—how they felt.”24
School administrators in Northern California’s Anderson Valley experimented with a variety of ways of incorporating their Voices of the Valley oral history project into the high school English curriculum. At first they offered it as a regular class, with students in alternating years selecting a theme and conducting the interviews and those in the following year transcribing them and producing a CD. Since that plan allowed none of the students to experience the whole project from beginning to end or receive the same learning skills, the school revised the curriculum to offer Voices of the Valley as an elective course for ninth through twelfth graders. With the valley’s large Mexican American population, the interviewing and transcribing requirements helped many students learn English. “When I got here, I didn’t know any English,” one student in the program reported. “But now that I’m doing this [project] I’m getting better at it. I know how to transcribe faster and to translate Spanish to English or English to Spanish.”25
A good way to start is to have the students read other oral histories before they do their own interviews. If previous classes at the school have done interviews that are available in the school library, students can read a sampling of the best ones. Many oral history recordings and transcripts can also be accessed on the Internet, including interviews conducted by high school students. Especially useful sources are History Matters, a website maintained by George Mason University, which includes first-person narratives and oral histories; and Ordinary People Living Extraordinary Lives: The Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi, which includes audio clips and transcripts. Since the spoken word is less formal than written text, published oral histories are usually easy to read and their stories can be gripping. Reading these oral histories stimulates classroom discussion, engages students’ interest, and gives them some of the needed background to conduct their own interviews. By reading other oral histories, students get a better idea of the type of information that interviewing can elicit, and they see that interviewees often present contradictory accounts.26
The class textbook can also become a research tool; it provides the broad outline and some of the specifics for the subject being studied, and sometimes bibliographies suggesting further reading. When interviewees cover information outside the scope of the text or contradict something in the text, students must weight the conflicting evidence and consider the complexity of the issue. Old magazines, newspapers, memoirs, and histories are all standard sources, but research can also include photographs, music, physical artifacts, and any number of other sources. There is a story behind most every photograph in a family photo album. The same items that provide inspiration for doing the interviews can also serve as illustrations for the transcripts, videos, exhibits, and other projects that grow out of the interviews.27
Pre-interview research is absolutely essential. An unprepared student is likely to conduct a poor interview and will miss most of the learning experience that oral history offers. If student interviewers have not done their homework, they will not know all the questions to ask, will not be able to assist interviewees with faulty memories, will not recognize new leads that require follow-up questions, and will neither fully understand nor appreciate what they are hearing.
Students generally start with their own families. Oral history gives them a chance to collect more systematically the many stories they have already heard at the dinner table or at family reunions. They can interview one person in depth as a full life history or several members of the same family in a family history. Their interviews might cover many generations, since grandparents can tell stories about their own parents and grandparents. Questions can include: When did their family immigrate to America? When did they move to the state they are now living in? How long have they have they lived in their community? What wars have family members fought in (or against)? What types of jobs have they held?
But the oral history experience is enhanced when students use it to interview people whom they normally would not have met and talked with. Working with the students, teachers can suggest likely places to seek interviewees. A class working on a group project can contact the local historical society for advice about potential interviewees. Local newspapers and informed citizens, nearby colleges, senior citizens’ centers, veterans hospitals, and national organizations such as Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and the American Legion are all potential sources of interviewees.28
Whether they interview their family, neighbors, or members of the community at large, students will discover how historical events affected people like themselves, a revelation that will expand their historical consciousness and make their classwork more meaningful. A school oral history project can also lead students to reexamine their communities and to break down the walls between the classroom and the “real world” outside.29
Student oral history projects can examine great national and international events and their impact on the local community—events of the magnitude of the Great Depression, the war in Vietnam, the 1970s energy crisis, the environmental movement, the civil rights movement, and the women’s rights movement. Churches and other religious centers in the community, a housing development, a manufacturing plant, an event like a flood or tornado can be documented through oral history.
The humorist Garrison Keillor once wrote a spoof about students living in a housing development so new that it had no cultural heritage to document. The only local craft was that of placing boards across stacks of bricks to make bookcases. But most communities have existed long enough to have a history. Possible subjects are neighborhood organizations, civil rights groups, local charities, newspapers, radio and television stations and their personnel, as well as local entertainers. Students can even document their own school by interviewing current and past administrators, teachers, and graduates. Student oral histories have recorded local folklore, crafts, skills, trades, occupations, and customs. Students have studied local government by interviewing political candidates, office holders, and civil associations. The purpose of these interviews is to record what people and organizations did (and why), and how people, events, and practices changed over time. The result will not be simply a snapshot of how things are today but a record of how they used to be, and how and why they evolved.30
Students can be quite unpredictable in choosing whom to interview. One student noticed an elderly man at her local library. After introducing herself, she asked him to give her an interview for her oral history project. The man replied, “I’m honored by so charming a young lady, but...no! I don’t like publicity.” Undeterred, the student approached her subject again a week later and persuaded him to give an interview about how different their city was during his childhood.31
Some students have no hesitation in going to the source. They will read a name in the newspaper or a book and call or write for an interview without any trepidation. A group of students from North Carolina interviewed the eminent historian John Hope Franklin for a documentary they produced on slave spirituals as a History Day project. When asked how they came to interview Professor Franklin, they explained, “Oh, Coretta Scott King recommended that we call him.”
Other students will be too shy to go next door and interview a neighbor, and feel ill-at-ease speaking to adults. To help them overcome their shyness, teachers should encourage students to interview someone they feel comfortable with, a family member or a friend. Students may also feel more at ease if someone else, a family member or a fellow student, accompanies them. There is no reason why students should not work in teams, with one asking the questions and the other operating the recorder and perhaps taking photographs, an arrangement that helps maximize the use of the equipment. Sometimes team interviewing works when each student handles a specific set of questions, although it requires a certain degree of practice and coordination to the keep the interviewers from interrupting each other. Instead of interviewing, other students prefer preparing and editing transcripts or writing up the results. Even veteran interviewers get butterflies before starting a new interview, but the experience of doing interviews can help students build their self-confidence.32
Yes, but various combinations have worked well. For fieldwork interviewing, Elaine Thatcher, director of the Mountain West Center for Regional Studies at Utah State University, has recommended having interviewers work in pairs, one with a recorder and the other with a camera, to capture the landscape that people are describing. Another advantage to having two interviewers is that one can give attention to their technical concerns with camera or recorder, while the other can ask the questions and keep the conversation going.33
A high school in San Francisco has students doing video oral histories in teams of four: a “lead” interviewer to ask the prepared topical questions, a “secondary” interviewer to listen carefully and ask follow-up questions, a camera operator, and a backup operator to handle the equipment and also ask follow-up questions. A trickier strategy is the “tag-team” approach, where two interviewers take turns asking questions on predetermined topics. This strategy works best with two strong interviewers who are in tune with each other.34
At the Digital Storytelling Project, which promotes partnerships between high school and college teachers and students, three high school teachers and their students paired with a college teacher and her writing class to collaborate on an oral history research and writing project. The project promoted collaborative learning and created connections between their schools and the local community. Assuming the role of mentors, the college students formed teams assigned to different high school classes, where they helped teach oral history research methods to high school students, assisted with research and preparation for their interviews, and worked with them on the writing component of the project. They experimented with formats: one class conducted one-on-one interviews outside of class time, another invited interviewees to the school to be interviewed by the whole class, and the third class held interviews via a team of students.35
A good deal of historical detective work is involved in doing oral history that can help students identify the ways in which historians operate. Interviewing turns the student into the primary historical investigators; they learn how to choose a topic, find people to interview, do the research, and prepare the questions. The more students prepare, the more they recognize what they do not know, as well as how much more they need to learn in order to ask meaningful questions—and understand the answers. Student interviewers are likely to be confronted with contradictory evidence: different people give different versions of the same event, and an interviewee’s story can differ noticeably from the textbook and other sources of information. In short, students begin to appreciate how history is collected and interpreted and perhaps even begin to think like historians themselves.36
Once students have done their interviews, via in-class discussions or in written papers they can analyze the varying responses and appreciate that historical events do not affect all people the same way. Not everyone stood on breadlines during the Great Depression, nor was everyone a hippie in the 1960s. Interviews with family members reveal a wide variety of economic and social circumstances, and vastly different attitudes and lifestyles. Oral history helps students learn about cause-and-effect relationships and to confront historical concepts.
Doing oral history helps students not only see firsthand what historians do but also better appreciate the jobs of journalists and other professional interviewers. Educators have found that oral history teaches students “how to learn,” as well as what to learn. Students develop problem-solving skills and come away with an understanding “that history is risky, as is any enterprise that attempts to arrive at the truth.” Writing papers about oral history experience further sharpens analytical and composition skills.37
More than ever before, schools study everyday life over time, looking at past several generations of immigrants, ethics, racial minorities, and women. Textbooks have struggled to keep up with these new trends, and teachers incorporate more outside materials into their classes. The historian Peter Stearns noted that high school experiments with social history had “generated enthusiasm among students who were intrigued with issues also familiar in their own lives, and some teachers, extending these same experiments, were able to move toward more sophisticated analytical training on issues of periodization or causation.” But Stearns concluded that too many school assignments continued to require merely factual research. In family history projects, students gathered information about their own families but rarely analyzed the material or tried to relate their families to the larger generalizations of family behavior in different time periods. Stearns wants high school students to go beyond the recording of facts and discover not only “how it happened” but also “what is the meaning of what happened?” They can do this only by learning how to handle various types of primary evidence, from documents and statistics to oral sources, to compare the activities, beliefs, and behaviors of their lifetime with past eras.38
Teachers who use oral history report that it an especially powerful tool for addressing social issues such as racism, the civil rights movement, human rights, the nuclear arms race, war, and environmental issues. As a teaching device, it allows students to meet, hear from, and engage in discussion with people who have played a personal role in these social issues; it also presents students with different points of view and demonstrates the individual beliefs, opinions, and experiences that underline people’s social concerns. Students—and other researchers—can be impressed and swayed by a single strong-minded interviewee. But they need to be made aware that social issues are inherently complex and that the opinions from a single interview will not represent all sides of the issues. To obtain as complete a picture as possible, they must interview a variety of people representing different, conflicting points of view.39
The timing of an oral history project depends on many factors, from the school calendar to the subject matter being studied, and varies from project to project. Teachers try to coordinate interviewing to correspond with the study of periods from the past. Those who are interviewed might have lived through the events being studied, or their experiences could be compared to life in a much earlier era. Teachers often plan oral history projects around text schedules and holidays, whenever students may have a block of time to complete their assignments. Glenn Whitman, who regularly incorporates oral history into high school teaching, finds that the long Thanksgiving and winter holiday seasons work best because the extended breaks give students more time and flexibility to conduct their work, and “the interviewees are often generated from family dinners.”40
Oral history provides a direct means of engaging students with the past. Approaching the fiftieth anniversary of racial integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, where federal troops had been needed to protect the first African American students, civics teachers assigned their students to interview a relative who lived through the civil rights era and learn about events that occurred decades before the students were born. More than 1,500 students became involved in the project, which resulted in a book, Beyond Central, Towards Acceptance, and a website. When asked about the benefit of the project, one teacher explained that it had started “a conversation among young kids that they would never have had.”41
Oral history is certainly no more than an educational accessory, but studies have shown that students respond more positively to it than to traditional methods of learning and take more from it. One analysis of the entire eleventh grade in a Baltimore County, Maryland, high school—including honors, average, and basic-ability students—compared oral history and traditional methods of instruction. Half the students considered immigration and black history using oral history, the other half studied these subjects using regular teaching methods. Tests given at the beginning and end of the four-week curriculum revealed that the oral history students at all levels of ability showed greater instructional gains than students taught by the traditional methods.
Those students using oral history felt that it had made their historical instruction more realistic. Particularly in the honors program, oral history students were more motivated to continue their learning about a topic even after the unit of study had been completed. Students appreciated oral history as a change of pace; as a highly creative activity; for making history seem more believable by associating real people with historical events; as an activity open to a great deal of input; and as a project with “a real purpose.” They also showed an appreciation for learning from fellow students rather than from their teachers.42
There are definite benefits that accrue from having all the students experience and discuss oral history, but interviewing can also be done by a single student, or a small group, as part of their own project. With the increasing popularity of cooperative learning, oral history offers ideal strategies for getting students to work together in teams (and many state performance assessments are concerned with cooperative efforts). Oral history can be a onetime project or an ongoing series of projects. Many individuals and groups of students use oral histories as part of their History Day projects.
Sometimes called a “fish bowl” approach, in-class interviews offer a good way to demystify oral history for the students. The teacher can conduct an in-class interview, or one or more students might serve as the interviewers. Invite someone connected with the school, an administrator, another teacher, a support staff member, or a parent to be interviewed. Be sure to conduct the interview as seriously as possible. To be most effective, the in-class interview should be a real experience rather than playacting. As the class watches the interview, students observe how to conduct an interview and what types of questions elicit the fullest answers. They should be encouraged to ask additional questions after the initial interview is finished. Although adolescents adapt more easily than adults to using the technology of oral history, they still need experience in setting up the recorder and microphone to ensure the best sound quality.43
Before conducting the in-class interview, have the class as a whole plan the questions. Teachers find that students have more interest in the interview because their questions will be asked. After the interview is finished, the class can discuss the effectiveness of different questions. Which questions encouraged the interviewee to open up and talk? Which questions gathered new information? Which questions proved to be dead ends or were poorly phrased? Did the interviewer follow up on unexpected leads? Record the in-class interview, so that portions can be replayed in the discussion.44
As the class scrutinizes the in-class interview, it should consider whether the interviewer interrupted the answers or failed to pay attention or to follow up on information. The hardest thing to teach a student, or any interviewer for that matter, is to sit and listen to the interviewee’s answers and not be too quick to ask the next question. Too many student interviews become a long string of questions followed by short, sometimes one-sentence answers, suggesting that the questions are too narrow, not open-ended, or that the interviewer has moved on to the next question too quickly.45
To better prepare his students at Baylor University to be interviewers, Stephen Sloan has them first play the role of interviewees, a practice that increases their sensitivity to their narrators. Having been interviewed, students can appreciate how interviewees experience the interview. Students learned that in answering questions, interviewees underwent an internal dialogue: How do I answer that? Would that be relevant? Or too personal? They also found that interviewees picked up on signals when the interviewer was not fully attentive, fidgeting, or checking the time, signals that left the interviewees less inclined to elaborate. Then they went out to do their own interviews better prepared.46
Even though they probably will not accompany students to the interviews, teachers need to impress upon students the responsibilities and ethics of conducting interviews, especially in someone’s home or office. Like any other interviewer, students need to schedule an appointment in advance and then keep it. Interviewers must appear on time, act courteously, and be careful not to damage people’s property. Interviewers have an obligation to explain to their interviewees the purpose of the interview and to respect any wish they may express not to talk about certain subjects. Students should have their interviewees sign release forms. Finally, they need to remember to thank interviewees for their cooperation, either verbally or in writing, and should give them a copy of any transcript that might be made. If the school produces a magazine, exhibit, slide-tape or PowerPoint presentation, video documentary, or stage production based on the interviews, invite the interviewees to the performances or functions; doing so ties the student, the project, and the school more firmly to the community, and makes for good public relations.
Two schools in Maryland have experimented with public exhibitions of their oral histories. In Baltimore, the Loch Raven Academy features an oral history open house where its eighth grade students display their oral history projects to other students, their parents, and the community; the St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in Potomac runs an annual evening “coffeehouse” for student interviewers, their interviewees, and members of their families. At his high school, Glenn Whitman requires students to communicate their interviews to a general audience in the form of an exhibition, a one-act play, or a PowerPoint presentation, designed to celebrate the students’ work and showcase the history they uncovered.47
Writing for the National Educational Association, John Neuenschwander strongly recommended that students be made to realize that oral history interviewees “are not simply talking books” but require special handling. “The interviewer must always be sensitive to the interviewee’s personal stake in the interview and avoid any psychological harm.” Students, of all people, should not make their oral histories a test of older people’s memories. The interviewee may not be able to recall specific names and dates or answer other detailed factual questions, and the experience may leave them feeling depressed.48
There are reasonable concerns about having teenagers conduct interviews with survivors of disasters or others who have stories to tell about traumatic personal experiences. Yet, well-prepared students have done surprisingly well under these circumstances. Students rarely shy away from asking probing questions about the most horrific events—even when elderly interviewees recount painful experiences from their own adolescence. When preparing to interview about traumatic events, students will need groundwork on what to expect and on how to deal with interviewees who might become emotional. Some teachers have invited trauma therapists to speak to their class in advance, helping the class appreciate the likely impact of the experience on both the interviewer and interviewee.49
Oral history is unpredictable, so there is always the chance that an interviewee might curse or make some slur during the course of the conversation. This is less a problem during the interview than in preparing the transcript and in meeting the standards of the school library, where the transcript will be deposited. Dealing with parents, administrators, and school boards is not the time to be doctrinaire about the sanctity of the verbatim transcript. Omit the offensive language—it does not belong in the transcript, the library, or on the website. If necessary, use brackets to indicate that a characterization or an expletive was deleted.50
Interviewing is only one step in teaching through oral history. While the interview is still fresh in their minds, students should review the entire recording to make sure it recorded properly and to prepare a summary of the remarks. Students can distribute these summaries to the class, relating their experiences and playing a portion of their recording. The class can analyze the sound quality of the recording, the types of questions asked, the quality of the content, the way the student opened and closed the interview, any distorted or slanted material, and how engaged the interviewer and the interviewee were in the interview. Some teachers ask students to review and evaluate each other’s interviews.51
Transcription is arduous work, but it is not beyond the capabilities of most high school students. Students should attempt to transcribe at least a portion of their interviews, an exercise that will allow them to consider the amount of interpretation involved in converting spoken words into written form. Do people speak in full sentences or fragments? How do they determine punctuation and paragraphs? Does the transcript accurately reflect both what was spoken and the way it was spoken? How do transcripts deal with words that are spoken differently from the way they are written? What meanings are expressed when people use slang and street talk? The decisions that go into creating a transcript will force students to reexamine both the spoken and written word, and help them develop their own writing skills. The completed transcripts can be included in student portfolios—in those schools that assess and grade portfolios of student writing as a substitute for examinations.
Teachers need to supervise individual students closely as they begin their projects. As useful and motivating an experience as oral history can be, without appropriate preparation it can be a total failure. Even well-prepared students will feel apprehensive about conducting interviews. Throughout the course, the teacher should return to discussions of interviewing techniques, remind them to keep their minds focused, provide useful suggestions, and reinforce the lessons. After the students have done their first interviews, the teacher should try to meet with each one individually to review at least a portion of their interviews. Students will be anxious to know how well they performed and will need guidance on what they did right, and what needs improvement, before they do their next interviews.52
No two interviews will be alike, but all interviews depend on the interviewer’s skills, which can be graded. In monitoring the interviews, consider whether the student really engaged in an informed dialogue or merely read scripted questions. Did the questions elicit thoughtful rather than perfunctory lines of inquiry? Did the interview collect useful information? It becomes clear after listening to a few recordings or reviewing a few transcripts how much the preparation, interview technique, and demeanor invoked a responsive chord in the interviewee.
From long experience in using oral history in the classroom, Frank Fonsino devised criteria that teachers can use to evaluate student interviews. These include:
1. What was the topic or focus of the interview?
2. Does the introduction to the recording provide sufficient information for the listener?
3. Does the interviewer use leading questions or make biased comments?
4. How capable was the interviewing style?
5. How good was the sound quality of the recording?
6. What is the historical value of the interview?53
The recordings and transcripts should be given to the school library. If the interviews are of particularly good quality and deal with the community, consider giving copies to the local public library as well. Collected oral histories in a nearby library will provide a valuable resource not only for future students preparing to do their own interviews but also for researchers interested in the community’s history. Since oral history is often conducted with the elderly, they may no longer be alive when others seek to interview them, and the students’ interviews could be the only record they left. The librarian may prefer not to receive the poorer examples, but students will value their work all the more if they know it will be permanently preserved in a library collection.54
Consider creating a website to promote the oral history projects. School projects have posted transcripts of their interviews along with photographs, essays, audio excerpts, and video podcasts. Students at the South Kingsport, Rhode Island, high school conducted interviews on The Whole World Was Watching: An Oral History of 1968, and What Did You Do During the War, Grandma?, on women and World War II. Nearby Brown University’s Scholarly Technology Group helped the high students display the interview transcripts and audio recordings on the university’s website. High school students in Richfield, Utah, similarly interviewed community residents about their experiences during the Great Depression, which were posted on the New Deal Network.55
Some projects also use oral history to produce creative drama. A high school teacher in Oregon teamed with a community administrator to design an oral history project for students studying American history. Students worked in groups to interview seniors at a community center, discuss what they learned, and turn the interviews into short stage presentations on topics from the Great Depression to World War II. The experience taught the students about the complexity of history, multiple perspectives, and human struggle, providing depth to the issues they were studying. It also engaged them in an exercise in teamwork. The elders they interviewed appreciated the interaction with students and the chance to share their memories, and enjoyed watching the dramas they created.56
Radio documentaries have resulted from a partnership between the University High School and the local public radio station in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. Each year the students conduct interviews at the station on some aspect of the community, from quilting to farming, and from Holocaust survivors to World War II prisoners of war. Next they determine how to organize the interviews into a cohesive narrative. Their mission, as one student described it, is to link the stories of people “whose lives were connected in ways that we could only see after reading through them, carefully cutting the blocks of stories apart, and then piecing them back together again.” The station broadcasts the completed documentary for the students and the community to hear.57
Today’s students may be “digital natives” who grew up in the digital era and who can be fearless about trying new equipment, but teachers should not assume that they know what they are doing. High school teacher Ken Woodward assigned his students to turn their oral history interviews into three- to four-minute documentaries. Working in teams, the students had to write scripts and plan the distribution of images to correspond with clips from the interviews. At first, the students proved themselves “surprisingly oblivious” to production values. Despite the training they had received in the use of audio-editing programs, and despite having worked hard on their projects, they turned in “assembled mash-ups of didactically boring and flatly delivered introductions to weirdly arbitrary cuts.” Woodward realized that he had underestimated the complexity of introducing students to the intricacies of producing a good documentary. He altered the course to have students listen to and evaluate professionally produced radio broadcasts, set more specific standards (such as time limits for each cut), and worked with the students on how to read a script more naturally. Adding video doubled the necessary preproduction planning. The effort was worth it, however, in challenging students to process their research and present their work in ways that will appeal to audiences.58
National History Day is not a specific date, but a series of contests held on the local, state, and national level that provide opportunities to see what students from schools across the nation are capable of doing. Modeled after science fairs, History Day contests are held in most states and several territories for sixth to twelfth grade students. Annually, more than a half million students and thousands of teachers participate in local and state contests, and the winners advance to national competition. Students do projects, media presentations, papers, and dramatic performances based around a common theme (“Change and Continuity,” “Debate and Diplomacy,” “Rights and Responsibilities in History”). About a third of the entries each year contain some use of oral history interviews.
Judges at History Day competitions have viewed some memorable projects based on oral history. Students from Asheville, North Carolina, videoed an interview with the survivor of a Nazi concentration camp who was living in their community. Students in El Dorado, Kansas, discovered that their town had once housed a camp for German prisoners of war during the Second World War, and they interviewed one of the former prisoners who had returned to live in the town after the war. Elementary and secondary school students in Toms River, New Jersey, interviewed shopkeepers to document the rise and fall of their Main Street. One junior high school student from Philadelphia studied the history of a chemical plant where his father worked, basing much of his information on interviews. The student made an appointment with the company vice president for public relations but told the man he seemed “too young” to be interviewed for a history project. The vice president located a ninety-year-old retired employee, who agreed to be interviewed, and whose answers indeed gave the project a long historical perspective.
Two students from Billings, Missouri, produced a slide-tape show, “Like Losing a Member of the Family,” recounting the story of a century-old general store, The Mercantile, which had been demolished to make way for a convenience store. The students conducted a dozen interviews with people who had worked or shopped in the store, collecting their memories of Saturday shopping days, fires, depressions, bankruptcies, celebrations, and other memories to produce a touching tribute to a small-town institution that had fallen victim to the forces of modernization. They used photographs, newspaper ads, and other items submitted by their interviewees that captured the store as a patriotically decorated backdrop for parades from World Wars I and II and other town celebrations; indeed the store had long been witness to all of the town’s daily business. The project won first prize in the senior media division, and the town’s public library planned to accession the slide-tape show into its local history collection. “Our media presentation began as a local library project, hopefully to leave some record of the building when it was gone,” the students reported. “But between our project’s beginning and ending we have made so many new friends among the elderly in our town, and learned so much more about the history of the community that our research has seemed more fun than chore.”59
History Day students have interviewed Japanese Americans who were relocated and interred during World War II, and civil rights demonstrators of the 1950s and ’60s. They most often interview people in their own communities but have also interviewed over the phone, compensating for their lack of travel funds. When a high school student in South Carolina sought to interview Rosa Parks about her role in the Montgomery bus boycott, Parks agreed but stipulated that the student and other members of his school history club read her autobiography before the interview.60
Since oral history lies outside the standard curriculum, some administrators look upon it with suspicion, questioning the amount of class time necessary to prepare for, conduct, and process the interviews. It is advisable to submit a proposal to the school administration before starting an oral history project. The proposal should detail the project’s objectives and methods of evaluation and indicate how oral history supports the regular curriculum and how it develops skills and teaches computer literacy. Buttress your case with manuals and published articles on oral history in the classroom. School administrators are also attracted by the argument that oral history projects can benefit the school’s public relations with the community, both through the collection and the exhibition of the collected interviews and memorabilia.61
Some universities have established master’s degree programs in oral history. More commonly, oral history is a component of broader programs in public history, museum studies, or new media.62 The exact number of college-level oral history methodology courses is difficult to measure, since course offerings have fluctuated and appear in different departments. Oral history may be offered as a separate course or as part of larger methodology courses that deal with conducting research and analyzing historical sources or that address theoretical issues of history and memory. Most applied and public history programs include an oral history component. Anthropology and other social sciences offer their own forms of instruction in fieldwork interviewing. Oral history is as likely to appear in the course offerings of library schools, journalism departments, or American studies programs as in history departments.
Courses in oral history tend to be offered more consistently at colleges and universities with established oral history archives. Directors of the oral history archives often teach the course, and class projects contribute to the larger oral history collection. In schools without oral history archives, finding departments and teachers interested in oral history is usually more difficult than signing up students.
Community colleges have also found oral history highly applicable for adult education or transitional studies between secondary school and the university. Conducting and processing interviews can develop and tap skills at all levels, even for those students approaching English as a second language. Classroom discussions can draw not only from the substance of the interview but also from the many styles of speaking.
Some newly established universities with student bodies drawn largely from working-class, immigrant communities have incorporated oral history into their curriculum at the start. The California State University at Monterey, with many students of Mexican heritage, requires all its undergraduates to take an oral history course. One project was centered on the theme “First in My Family to Go to College,” which offered much of the student body as potential interviewees. Sweden’s Malmö University likewise built a history curriculum that would be relevant to both the region’s traditional inhabitants and its many newcomers. After taking the basic methodological courses, students at Malmö do research projects based on primary sources, which must include biographical material based on personal interviews. Since a large share of the history students at Malmö intend to teach in primary and secondary schools, officials reasonably assume that many will utilize their oral history training in the classroom.63
In some cases oral history archives have been involved in teaching methodology courses on campus, while in other cases the collection of oral history goes on entirely separately from the academics. The Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was based from its inception in the history department rather than the library and engaged history faculty and students in its projects. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, in her seminar on women’s history, had students conduct oral histories with three generations of women in their families, which helped put their own lives into historical context. She uses personal perspective to enrich “and sometimes contradict” popular views of history.64
By contrast, the Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) at the University of California, Berkeley, originated and operated for three decades entirely independently of any academic department. But beginning with the appointment of a new director in 2001, ROHO aimed to integrate its work into the university’s teaching and research missions. In addition to offering undergraduate classes, ROHO also runs an Advanced Oral History Institute for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and independent scholars, which is aimed at strengthening their ability to conduct research-focused interviews, to incorporate oral histories into teaching, and to weigh interviews as historical evidence. Eager to raise its academic profile, ROHO seeks graduate students to work with its oral history programs to develop research topics that result in dissertations.65
The historian Graham Smith agrees that “reading about how to record and use personal testimony is a rather poor substitute for actually doing it,” but he points out that all the preliminary research necessary to conduct serious interviews encourages students “to expend a great deal of more thought about research processes” than they would normally invest in their studies.66 Disciplines that employ fieldwork have periodically debated whether to teach interviewing as a methods course or to just send students out to experiment for themselves. Some argue that since all field situations will be different, students need to learn on their own and that the only methods necessary are “sensitivity and creativity.” Others concede that fieldwork requires more than simply mastering a textbook but contend that students still have to prepare themselves to do it right. Even though oral history interviewing is best learned by doing, students can learn much in the classroom, both before and after conducting their interviews.
The anthropologist John Forrest believes that before students go out to interview, they need to learn about the complexity of human interaction. In his methods course, he stipulated that “students had to care about what they were documenting” because their projects would take them into other people’s lives. “If they were insensitive they knew that at best they would end up with no data, and at worst they would have hurt a fellow human.” Finding subjects that genuinely mattered to them also helped motivate the students and made it less necessary for the instructor to “drone on about why fieldwork and data collection are important, or to show how good data leads on to appropriate social theory.”67
The social sciences have been more consistent than the humanities in teaching fieldwork methodology. It undoubtedly is safe to assume that the majority of history undergraduates and graduate students who use interviews as part of their research have never taken an oral history course. Interviews are done seat-of-the-pants style—sometimes recorded, more often captured in handwritten notes only; usually devoid of deeds of gift; and almost never conducted with the thought of depositing the completed interviews in an archives. Such interviews can still generate valuable information, despite needless mistakes, improper planning, and unnecessarily limiting procedures. The chief problem is that few graduate advisors have had any training in oral history; they assume that anyone can interview and do not hold their students’ oral sources to the same documentation standards as their written ones.68
Graduate-level courses in oral history deal more with theory and methodology than do undergraduate courses. The growing literature in the field has increased the amount of background reading for these courses; although most students do interviews, some classes have permitted students to write papers on theory and interpretation in lieu of interviewing. Some theoretical literature could also be introduced into undergraduate courses; the historian James Hoopes has observed that college students “should have a more ambitious goal than the Foxfire students’ objectives of merely collecting information on customs, folklore, and habits.” College students should be better able to interpret the material they collect, to place it in historical context, and to apply theory to their fieldwork interviewing.69
Instructors find that their biggest problem is the uneven ability and experience of their students. Although it is true that students at every learning level can benefit from doing oral history, teachers who seek to develop an oral history as a research methodology prefer students with some training in a particular area of study, such as ethnic, labor, cultural, economic history, or the social sciences. Students who lack such backgrounds often feel frustrated over the demands placed upon them. They discover that oral history is a tool for study, not an end in itself, and that there is more to the process than just interviewing someone. In both the research before the interview and the interpretation afterward, they must be able to place the material in its larger social or historical context. Some instructors have recommended offering oral history classes only as advanced electives—or, at the minimum, requiring students to have taken the basic survey classes in history—to ensure some control over students’ levels of preparation.70
Some teachers worry that unless properly monitored, oral history projects often amount to little more than a conversation and a paper. At Indiana University Southwest, A. Glenn Crothers required survey course students to conduct oral history to heighten their understanding of how the broader historical events they study actually affected their community, and to appreciate how historians use primary and secondary sources and move from evidence to interpretation. Crothers used advanced history majors to tutor those with little prior preparation in history, and he further pairs students in two-member interviewing teams where they can mentor each other and share the burdens of transcription. Project reports led him to conclude that oral history made “a profound impression” on the first-year students, whose knowledge of history and of the community was clearly enriched, and also on the advanced students who gained “concrete experience as teachers and public historians.”71
Some students will be unduly nervous about conducting their first interview. Sandy Polishuk dealt with this by breaking her class into pairs and having the students interview each other, switch positions, and then report back to the class. If students are still uncomfortable, she recommends they interview someone they know on some focused subject of their choice. Once the ice is broken, they will find the experience far less intimidating.72
In her oral history classes at Villanova, Mary Schweitzer found that the hardest part of the process was getting students to weigh evidence and apply historical interpretation. Students assumed that their assignment was simply to collect a variety of opinions and string them together into an interesting story. Schweitzer warns students not to take all evidence at face value. As researchers, they need to analyze the varying perspectives of the witnesses, consider conflicting viewpoints, and fit first-person observations together with other forms of evidence. By expanding the interviewing process to include interpretation, students began to “think about the particularity and generality of all experience.”73
Beyond preliminary research, the most important quality that any interviewer can bring to an interview is an ability to listen carefully and respond when some new and unexpected information surfaces. When Martha Norkunas directed an African American oral history project at the University of Texas, she read transcripts and found that the students had failed to ask thoughtful follow-up questions or to pursue a topic fully. She encouraged students to conduct re-interviews to see how they could modify their listening habits, better engage with interviewees, and actually hear their stories. She also asked students to keep “reflexive listening journals” about their experiences listening to sad and joyous stories, conducting structured and unstructured interviews, observing body language, and even to try conducting interviews blindfolded—so that they had no visual cues. Through these exercises, students developed an appreciation that listening was an active, not a passive skill, and to become more aware of their bad habits, such as interrupting interviewees before they had finished a thought. As one student responded: “This listening exercise did, in fact, help me to realize that interrupting is not only cutting in and talking when someone else is speaking, interrupting can be far less blatant. Someone who is speaking could be done with a sentence and even be amid a short pause but still not be finished with his/her thought....Sometimes the person is searching for the right words, or has more to say but doesn’t immediately know where to begin expressing it.”74
Structure and objectives will depend on the department in which oral history is taught and on whether it is an undergraduate- or graduate-level course. Library science courses, for instance, will focus more on the use of interviews in research libraries and archives; on developing standards for the acquisition and preservation of oral history materials; on integrating oral history materials into library and archival collections; and on using automated databases for the storage, retrieval, and cataloging of interviews. In other departments, oral history courses may concentrate more on the methodological literature of oral history, on designing and running oral history projects; or on the techniques of interviewing and the content and analysis of the interviews.
Since much supervision and review of student work will be required, it is advisable to keep classes small and manageable. Students may need help in finding people to interview, especially if the campus is geographically or culturally detached from the surrounding community. Because they operate best in a practical, “hands-on” manner, oral history classes should be taught as seminars or laboratories rather than in lecture halls.75
Consider having the students monitor their own progress by maintaining a log in which they make regular notes on their impressions of the course, their readings, their interview objectives and preparations, and their observations of the actual interview situations. What unexpected leads and information developed? Did the interviews differ from what they expected? How did they rate themselves as interviewers, and did they feel they improved over time? Students might submit these logs at the end of the term for extra credit.
Regardless of the discipline in which oral history or fieldwork interviewing is taught, students should be introduced to the use of oral techniques in other fields, from folklore to anthropology and social psychology. They should understand the different interview standards and objectives in different fields. Consider inviting some guest lecturers from other disciplines to discuss how they use interviews in their research. Similarly, oral history courses often study the most common forms of interviews that students have watched on television or read in newspapers and magazines, requiring them to monitor the interviewing style of media interviewers.
Review the literature in the field—particularly dealing with the ethical responsibilities of interviewing—familiarize the students with the equipment and plan for practice interview sessions in the classroom. If the students plan to interview around a common theme, have them discuss the questions that might be asked of all interviewees, to provide for comparisons, and to balance the detail and complexity of individual stories with generalizations about the historical experience. Since experiences vary so widely from interview to interview, students should be required to interview more than one person. (When one instructor discovered that his students were conducting short interviews as a means of reducing the amount of transcribing they had to do, he set a three-hour minimum for interviews.)76
After students have conducted their interviews, they should compose a brief paper not only about the interview and the subject covered, but also the interviewee’s place in local, regional, and national events. Students also should be required to transcribe at least portions of their interviews. Students are usually interested in the interview itself and impatient when learning the techniques of interviewing and processing interviews. It is imperative, however, to stress that poorly conducted interviews seriously undermine the end product—the information gathered by interview that the students hope to use themselves and to leave behind as an archival legacy.77
Finally, students should be encouraged to analyze the type of information generated by oral history, the interviewer-interviewee relationship, and the validity of oral sources versus written sources. They should consider the ways in which oral history can be integrated into the larger historiographies of the subject matter, as well as the ultimate uses of oral history in research, publication, and public presentation. More and more oral history classes also include discussion of video interviews.
In her seminar on women’s history at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Jacqueline Dowd Hall had students conduct oral histories with three generations of women in their families. Such personal perspectives enrich “and sometimes contradict” popular views of history, as well as help students put their own lives in a larger historical context. At Kent State University, Renata Prescott used oral history interviews to examine the impact of the Vietnam War on her students’ families. Their experiences demonstrate the dual value of oral history both as a teaching tool and as a source of historical content. As historians have widened their investigations beyond the public arena, oral history has helped students grapple with the more private spheres of family and community.78
Early on, women’s studies programs incorporated oral history into their curricula. At the University of Massachusetts at Boston, for instance, the women’s studies program had students conduct interviews with individuals outside the university about sex-role stereotyping, women’s roles in the workplace, family relationships, and women’s movement organizations. Summaries of these interviews formed the basis of class discussions. Many of the students had known surprisingly little about their mothers’ lives and began to reexamine and appreciate the strength of other “unnoticed, unrewarded female relatives.” Women’s history programs at Boston University and Simmons College also provided useful generational studies, requiring students to interview two or more women in the same family, such as mother and daughter or an aunt and niece. These interviews show cultural change over time, most notable in the case of immigrant families. One student was astonished to learn that her Irish-Catholic grandmother had been a vociferous supporter of birth control advocate Margaret Sanger. In another set of interviews, a father stated that he and his wife had as many children as “God had sent them,” while the mother admitted using a diaphragm. Women students reported realizing the source of many of their own ideas and beliefs when they interviewed family members.79
College oral history classes have seized on developing events within their own communities as subjects for student projects. When school integration became an issue in suburban Montgomery County, Maryland, nearby George Washington University launched an oral history. The first stage in the project was compiling newspaper clippings on the issue to prepare students to interview school officials, parents, and teachers. As it developed, the project uncovered a story that was far more complex than the newspaper reports had suggested. The students discovered, for instance, that the initiative for the most original element in the integration plan had come from teachers at the school rather than from the school board. The interviews also revealed that, although men held most of the formal leadership positions in the various organizations involved, women had been most active in the grassroots movement, “ringing doorbells, making phone calls, and using their organizational know-how to promote their respective causes.” The transcripts of the interviews were deposited at the university library, where they became instructional material for courses in political science and education.80
Digital technology has not only opened new opportunities for conducting and disseminating oral history but also for the way it can be taught. Rina Benmayor, who offers a course on Oral History and Community Memory at California State University Monterey Bay, has found that the availability of oral history collections on the Internet enables her students to view full transcripts or listen to entire recordings of interviews from various projects as a tool for engaging them in critical analysis. Students have also presented their work in the form of PowerPoint slide shows, integrating audio and video clips from their interviews with other texts and illustrations, all of which can produce a dynamic presentation of critical ideas to the class. These presentations can lead to good group discussions and encourage the students to challenge each other’s interpretations. Beyond tapping online sources, oral history classes and workshops have been taught online in distance-learning classes as well.81
Students can also learn much from reviewing other oral history websites. At the University of Texas School of Journalism, Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez has her students analyze different oral history sites and address basic questions as:
• Who is being interviewed and what is the basic central idea?
• Who does the interviewing?
• Are there audio/visual recordings?
• How does the site demonstrate its findings?
• Does it feature actual interviews?
• Can you tell how effectively the project accomplishes [its] missions/goals?
• What do you like/not about the site?
• What challenges do you think they might have?
She finds that once students begin to compare different sites, they develop ideas about what they want to do themselves. However, she encourages them not to concentrate solely on the best-funded collections, since “there are dozens of smaller, excellent ones that would also be fascinating.”82
Students, faculty, and alumni have participated in recording the histories of their schools, often in connection with school anniversaries. For the University of Kentucky oral history project, interviews have been conducted with former and current presidents, administrators, faculty, and graduates. Interviews on the subject of campus life and history conducted by students from Bryn Mawr to Stanford have been compiled not only as archival collections but also as highly profitable books and videos marketed to alumnae. The North Carolina State Student Leadership Initiative uses oral history to connect students to their university’s history.83
When Northern Virginia Community College reached its twentieth anniversary, five historians in the system began interviewing those who had started the community college system, and those who had built it, taught in it, and attended its first classes. They published twenty-seven interviews with these “prime movers” and pioneers. “At the end of our labors as oral historians, some of us working within the methods of this subdiscipline for the first time, we have come to feel great pride in what we have been privileged to compile—this history of our college—as well as renewed pride in the college itself,” they concluded. “We often felt ourselves in the presence of that admixture of pragmatism and idealism characteristic of so many of our once and current colleagues who have stamped these traits onto our colleges.” The recordings and transcripts were housed at one of the college’s library, where they would form the nucleus of a research collection on the institution’s beginnings. Some of the interviews have also been posted on the college websites.84
Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University, founded as Roberts College in 1863 as the first American college outside of the United States, was transferred to the Turkish government as a state university in 1971, after which its history department underwent a major reorganization. Thirty years later the department began an oral history project to document the surviving “founders,” along with the second and third generations of faculty who followed. These interviews documented the original and evolving philosophies that shaped the department’s development and recorded how larger events in Turkey had influenced academic life. Although initially designed to commemorate an anniversary, the oral history unexpectedly provided a beneficial self-analysis, and the department has used the interviews in evaluating the curricula, methods of teaching, and standards of historical research; and for charting its future development.85
Doing oral history of one’s college or university is not always a celebratory practice. In May 1968, when student demonstrators took over Columbia University, the Columbia Oral History Research Office hired three advanced fellows from the School of Journalism to interview students, faculty, administrators, and mediators. Within a month’s time they had collected more than 1,500 pages of testimony. Interviewers from Cornell University conducted oral histories connected with the killings of two Jackson State University students by Mississippi state police very shortly after the incident. Cornell similarly conducted interviews related to the dramatic 1968 demonstrations at its own campus.86
One project even sought to examine the “everyday narratives” that scholars construct as teachers and mentors. They interviewed students and teachers to dispel myths and render visible the personal sides of the professorate.87
The old “town and gown” relationship between a university and its neighbors is ripe for oral history exploration. Brown University’s graduate program in public humanities developed the Fox Point Oral History Project to examine the neighborhood along the university’s border, which had undergone gentrification after years as a working-class waterfront community populated by immigrants. The stately renovated houses in the area display bronze plaques establishing their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century dates of origin, but there is no historic memory of the “living history” of more recent years. Recognizing that the lives of Fox Point residents had been altered by economic changes, city planners, and other forces, the project aimed to capture changes that occurred during the last seventy years through recorded life history interviews with those who have memories of community life. Brown students sought out older Fox Point residents and business owners to inquire about their stories and collect their photographs; the students also created a website and produced a cell phone audio tour that tapped the interviews from the collection. Beyond its educational rewards, the project helped heal the sometimes frayed relations between the university and its neighbors.88
When Hurricane Sandy devastated the New Jersey coast, Abigail Perkiss, a professor at Kean University, designed an upper-level undergraduate seminar on conducting oral histories of three hard-hit communities in nearby Bayshore. Aiming to “situate the story of Sandy within the broader history of the relationship between natural disasters and the communities they impact,” the students attended community meetings, conducted interviews, and shot photographs and videos of the storm damage—some cases included their own homes and neighborhoods.89
Undergraduates take oral history for any number of reasons, usually because they sound interesting and easy. Once enrolled, they find the subject much more complex than they imagined. Oral history challenges their preconceived notions and makes them rethink how they research and analyze.
One prelaw student in an oral history class chose a topic on the impact of judges on the law, assuming that it was “a very easy way to get a good grade.” Nothing came easy, however. The busy lawyers he interviewed kept taking phone calls during sessions, disrupting their answers, which strained his efforts to build rapport. Some answered precisely and briefly, quibbled over words, or evaded his questions. A circuit judge insisted on having his three rather obnoxious law clerks sit in on the interview. Despite these obstacles, the student collected valuable perspectives. What surprised him most was how often their answers disagreed with his written research. From his interviews, the student concluded that “the way a practitioner looks at the corpus of law differs greatly from the way a scholar investigates the law,” a finding he suspected was true of other fields as well.90
It helps students to get away from the campus and into the community to ask people for information. One student at the University of California, Berkeley, was studying Latino culture in Richmond, California, before, during, and after the industrial boom years of World War II. He found a longtime barber who agreed to be interviewed but only at his shop. The student spent four days recording his reminiscences, and left the recorder running while the barber bantered with fellow Mexican American customers who shared their own recollections, expanding his understanding of the community, which enhanced his thesis.91
Time, essentially. A class might extend over a fourteen-week semester; a workshop might last for only a single day. Many state and regional oral history organizations hold annual and semiannual workshops to serve as introductions for those just beginning and as refresher courses for those in midcareer. When oral history projects begin, they often seek an experienced oral historian to conduct a workshop to train volunteer interviewers and processors to ensure consistency in their product.
The Appalachian-based Highlander Research and Education Center has pioneered a style of participatory group learning for adults. Their economics education curriculum taught community members how to assess community needs and resources to begin community-based development. Education began with the students’ own experiences, and with oral histories of other members of the community, “to analyze their past development history and family employment histories, to understand the economic changes which they had experienced. Asking questions of grandparents, parents and peers about their work and means of survival, and then charting those responses became a way of understanding broad economic changes through people’s own experiences.”92
Oral history courses are offered in adult education programs and as summer institutes. People take such continuing education courses to aid them in changing careers, refreshing their knowledge, doing freelance interviewing, or interviewing family members or longtime community residents. A variety of such courses are publicized in the newsletters of the Oral History Association and its many state and regional affiliates.
Some of the most active oral historians are those who came to the field as a second career, often after raising families or retiring early, sometimes simply because they were looking for something interesting to do. Some study interview techniques and return to conduct oral histories within their previous profession. Others shift during a career, such as librarians and archivists seeking training to start or continue an oral history collection within their institution. If you want to do oral history, it is never too late to get some formal training.
Considering all the time and effort that goes into planning, conducting, and preserving oral histories, practitioners have argued that universities should count them along with publications in awarding tenure. Oral historians have advocated this, arguing that interviews are not “just collecting” but are a coproduction that requires research and interpretation. Once completed and transcribed, the interviews are usually deposited in an archives and made available to all scholars, beyond the interviewer. A published collection of oral history might not resemble a monograph, but it would be a mistake for academic colleagues not to recognize the scholarly contributions that went into compiling and interpreting the material or in creating the oral history archive.93
Similar issues have arisen when scholars sought to have online publications and public history projects counted in their tenure reviews, often meeting resistance from more traditional academics. One report on public history recommended strongly that those seeking tenure be careful to provide clear documentation of the ways in which their work qualifies as scholarship in the eyes of the historical profession, that they should work with their department to establish the criteria by which they will be evaluated, and that faculty should negotiate to adjust their workload distribution and expectations to better reflect the nature of their scholarship.94
Academics around the world face increasing ethical scrutiny of any research that deals with human subjects. In some nations there are research ethics boards, research ethics committees, or human research ethics committees. In the United States, there are institutional review boards (IRBs), which date back to the 1980s, although most oral historians did not encounter them for another decade.
American IRBs grew out of the public outrage following revelations of a forty-year syphilis experiment in Tuskegee, Alabama, where researchers had allowed a curable disease to go untreated for some of the participants. In 1979 The Belmont Report of the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research recommended rules to govern federally funded research involving human subjects based on three basic principles: respect for people’s ability to make decisions about their own behavior; beneficence, or the minimizing of harm and maximizing of benefits from research projects; and justice, as in the equitable selection of research subjects. Colleges and universities that received federal funds were required to establish institutional review boards to review faculty and student research protocols and make sure they complied with the federal code. At first these regulations applied only to medical and behavioral science research funded by federal agencies that specifically subscribed to them, such as the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, but not the National Endowment for the Humanities.95
Given that IRBs were created to police and prevent serious harm to an individual’s physical and mental health, it seems puzzling that they should divert their attention to the social sciences and humanities, where interviews pose far less risks—if any at all. That escalation began in 1991 when a revision of the federal regulations broadened the definition of human subject research to include any “interaction with living individuals.” Reasoning that research standards should not differ simply because of a project’s source of funding, government officials encouraged universities to regulate all research, regardless of whether it received federal funding—and warned that an entire campus could lose all federal funding if any research involving human interaction failed to undergo review. Universities wanted to protect human subjects but also wanted to protect themselves, and campus IRBs stepped up their vigilance accordingly. They turned first to the social sciences, where quantitative methods most closely resembled scientific research. Peculiar situations developed on team interviewing projects, with the sociologists and anthropologists on the team submitting their interviewing protocols to the campus IRB, while the historians went ahead interviewing without review, unaware of the very existence of the review boards.96
In a stunning move in 1995, the University of Delaware declined to accept a doctoral dissertation that its history department had approved until the graduate student obtained retroactive exemption from the IRB for interviews she had conducted. Other graduate students in the department had used oral history before without incident, and the history department had no prior notice of any IRB requirements. The university then announced a compulsory review of all faculty and student research conducted with human participants, regardless of the discipline or source of funding. After some anxious moments, the graduate student received her exemption and her degree. Graduate students in general are most vulnerable to review, since their work will eventually be read at the graduate level, where IRBs are generally located, and their degrees can be withheld pending compliance.97
Since IRBs devote their primary attention to biomedical research, they naturally recruit most of their board members from the sciences. A few larger universities have established separate IRBs to deal with other forms of research, to which they appointed members from the social sciences and humanities, but most college campuses have only a single board (some have none). Board members trained in scientific methodologies assumed that everyone used the same research practices, such as standard questionnaires that record anonymous interviewees for quantitative analysis, rather than the qualitative, free-flowing, open-ended interviews that oral historians conduct. The result was to deny oral historians true peer review.
IRBs regularly return research proposals for further fine-tuning before authorization. In the process they have asked oral historians to submit a list of questions they intended to ask and rejected questions that might place the interviewees in an embarrassing light. Boards have recommended—even insisted—that interviewees be anonymous. Graduate students have been told not to ask certain questions—including such “invasive” questions as asking about a mother’s maiden name (so much for using an oral history for biographical purposes). One student met with resistance for naming the scholars in her field whom she had interviewed. Another was asked to sign an agreement that all her research data would be destroyed within five years to protect privacy. She had to remind the board that the whole point of doing oral history was to preserve the interviews for posterity.
IRBs have tried to dissuade researchers from asking questions that might invoke painful memories about traumatic events. Yet oral history frequently deals with sorrowful recollections—about the Holocaust, wartime experiences, floods and other disasters—events in which interviewees have suffered grievous losses. Confronting these memories can have a cathartic effect, and interviewees will often express gratitude for the opportunity to tell their personal stories, even after the most emotional sessions. Oral history is not an adversarial form of interviewing, although it does require asking the difficult and sometimes embarrassing questions. Responses will range from direct to evasive and denial, providing further areas for analysis. Interviewers need to be free to pursue any line of inquiry that interviewees are willing to discuss.
Review boards have also cautioned interviewers against asking questions about illegal activity—even civil rights activists, who remain proud of the civil disobedience that led to their arrests. At their most illogical extent, some boards tried to require researchers to obtain permission from third parties who were mentioned during an interview, and some urged archivists to require researchers to apply for IRB clearance just to read oral history transcripts or listen to the recordings in their collections.
Burdening research proposals with unfeasible or inappropriate requests has disrupted and prolonged the research. Some projects were simply abandoned. For years, one teacher had arranged for her college students to work in partnership with local high school students to conduct community-based oral histories, until her IRB asked for certification that all participants in research activities were over the age of eighteen. The board was mistaken on several accounts: most IRBs have exempted from review classroom projects that are designed to be pedagogical, and federal regulations governing human subject research are concerned only with the subjects and say nothing about the age of the researchers. Boards have also expected faculty advisors who supervise theses and dissertations using oral histories to take a standardized test on research ethics—despite its painfully clear orientation toward pharmacology.98
The U.S. government does not mandate review of oral history projects, although initially there was confusion over whether such interviewing fell within the parameters of “human subject research.” Because oral historians believe that people have a right to be identified with their own stories and that researchers have a right to verify their sources, they regarded many IRB requirements as inapplicable to their work and questioned whether this really was what the federal Office of Human Research Protection’s (OHRP) rules were intended to govern. In 2002, delegates from the Oral History Association and the American Historical Association met with the staff of the OHRP to determine whether oral history actually fell under the federal definition of research that needed to be regulated.
The oral historians argued that their professional associations had already set high standards for the ethical treatment of interviewees. The director of the OHRP criticized those principles and standards for not addressing “research,” but the oral historians remonstrated that research lay at the heart of those standards. It soon became clear that the two sides were defining “research” differently. OHRP officials explained that they meant the type of “generalizable knowledge” gathered by questionnaires with anonymous individuals, for which any notes on individuals would be destroyed once the survey was completed. Whenever asked for an example, the OHRP officials invariably cited blood samples. The oral historians, by contrast, were talking about people who had provided their informed consent to give recorded interviews. This revelation prompted the drafting of a policy statement that recognized oral history as an entirely different form of research than what the federal agencies intended to regulate. The OHRP concurred with the policy statement, edited its final version, and encouraged the AHA and OHA to disseminate it.
The policy statement concluded that oral history should be exempt from IRB review because it does not conform to the regulatory definition of research as seeking “generalizable knowledge”—historians “do not reach for generalizable principles of historical or social development; nor do they seek underlying principles or laws of nature that have predictive value and can be applied to other circumstances for the purpose of controlling outcomes.” In other words, they recognized the difference between conducting oral history and collecting blood samples.99
One IRB informed an oral historian that her project was exempt from review because “oral history is not research.” That board had misunderstood the OHRP’s explanation that oral history is a different form of research than what federal rules intend to govern. After the oral historian stopped being annoyed over the mislabeling, she appreciated being ignored by her campus review board.100
Some oral historians have argued that their interviews do indeed contribute to generalizable knowledge, even if the process does not exactly fit the scientific definition. Scholars working on the history of medicine or in the social sciences have worried about their institutional standing and their ability to obtain grants. Concern has also been expressed that “by agreeing that oral history cannot be defined as research in terms used by granting bodies, oral historians acquiesce to a subordinate position in the hierarchy of scholarship.” This view argues that “admitting lack of rigor and scholarly impact” would marginalize oral history in the eyes of university administrators and granting organizations, which some judge as a “far greater risk to the current development and future health of this field than a few overreaching IRBs.” Those suffering from such status anxiety should feel free to submit their projects for review.101
The response from universities has been mixed. Several leading institutions developed model agreements that allow oral historians to avoid interference from IRBs unless their projects fall within the parameters of the generalizable research IRBs were meant to regulate. Columbia University, for instance, agreed to exclude most oral history from IRB review on the grounds that “oral history interviews that only document specific historic events or the experiences of individuals or communities over different time periods would not constitute ‘human subject research’ as they would not support or lead to the development of a hypothesis in a manner that would have predictive value. The collection of such information, like journalism, is generally considered to be a biography, documentary, or a historical research of the individual’s life or experience; or of historical events.”102
Other universities, however, extend autonomy to their IRBs, which continue to insist on reviewing oral history proposals. The most vulnerable within the academic community—graduate students and untenured faculty—run the risk of being penalized if they fail to comply. While some academic oral history programs have been able to develop good relations with many IRBs, gaining blanket exemptions, other have found that what the IRB has given, it can take away. It has not unusual for new personnel to revoke policies set by their predecessors, sending the oral historians back to square one.
In general, IRBs are risk averse. They design regulations to protect research subjects from medical and psychological harm, and to protect their universities from lawsuits or bad publicity. If capriciously enforced, these worthy ends can undermine legitimate research. Meanwhile, interviews conducted by independent scholars, government historians, elementary and secondary school teachers, and others outside colleges and universities are not subject to review. When the federal Office of Human Research Protection conducted its own oral histories, it needed no prior approval from an IRB.
The conundrum for university-based oral historians is whether to fight or to collaborate with the IRB; another alternative is to reason with its members. Oral historians have pointed out that federal regulations specifically exempted certain categories of research from any review: Information that is already on the public record, such as newspaper articles and official documents; interviews with political candidates and elected or appointed public officials; and interviews that do not place identifiable individuals “at risk of criminal or civil liability” or damage their “financial standing, employment, or reputation.” These broad categories cover most oral history research, yet many IRBs still require that projects file for review anyhow, reasoning that the board rather than the researcher should determine whether the project is exempt. If not exempted entirely, boards will often provide expedited review that entails less delay and does not require annual review. Expedited review usually involves having the chair or the IRB or an experienced reviewer, designated by the chairperson, examine the proposed oral history project, rather than having the full board conduct the review. Oral historians who follow the OHA’s best practices should be able to qualify for exemption, since the guidelines exceed the federal regulations.103
Teachers have gained exemption for interviews conducted for pedagogical reasons rather than for research. IRBs have given blanket exemptions for students’ assignments that include classroom review procedures for interviews and informed consent forms. University-based oral history archives have also been able to establish IRB-approved standard protocols for interviewing that eliminate the need to seek separate clearance for individual interviews.
Faculty members who conduct and teach oral history should volunteer to serve on their campus IRBs. Valerie Janesick served three years on an IRB and found herself the only active qualitative researcher, let alone oral historian, on the eleven-member board. She made it her mission to reduce the unreasonable demands and excessive delays the IRB had inflicted on her graduate students’ research. “Avoid caving in,” she recommends to oral historians who are dealing with IRBs. “Persistence is critical.”104
No formal appeals process exists, but oral historians who have confronted unreasonable rulings have successfully managed to have those rulings modified or reversed. Students who feel that an IRB was excessively restrictive or applied inappropriate standards to their work should enlist graduate advisors and department chairs to help explain oral history methodology, and its safeguards, to the IRB’s members or compliance officer. A little rational discussion goes a long way.
Those who have stood up to their review boards recommend that researchers not be docile but assert their professional expertise against unreasonable demands. At the minimum, researchers should demand peer review. Someone on the IRB should have at least minimum expertise in oral history if they intend to regulate it, whether they have conducted an interview, attended a workshop, or read an oral history manual. Without such basic credentials, having a medical or psychological specialist review interviews in the humanities makes as much sense as having a historian or social scientist set standards for medical procedures. If no one on the IRB meets these criteria, then the researcher should request a departmental review as a substitute.105
If a board’s policies continue to inhibit free inquiry, appeal can be made to the university official (usually the president or provost) who is specifically responsible for enforcing federal regulations on the campus. If all else fails, report the problem to the Office for Human Research Protection in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
No matter how well-intentioned, IRBs run the risk of becoming modern versions of Anthony Comstock, the overzealous postal inspector who a century ago crusaded against pornography, prostitution, gambling, and other “traps for the young.” While protecting home and family and defending decency were noble missions, Comstock’s inability to distinguish between pornography and art, or obscenity and science led him to ban books on sexual primers for newlyweds and human anatomy, attempt to shut down the Art Students League for displaying pictures of nudes, and denounce George Bernard Shaw’s play Mrs. Warren’s Profession as depraved. Shaw retaliated by labeling American censorship as “Comstockery.”
Comstock frightened university administrators. When he spoke at Princeton in 1888, the university draped a red velvet garment over its nude statute of “The Gladiator” to avoid offending him—and had to hire the local fire department to later undrape it. Comstock’s biographer, Anna Bates, was drawn to the subject as a feminist historian who assumed that pornography degraded all women and should be illegal. Yet in grappling with Comstock’s motivations, she changed her mind. “Now, I see that although some obscenity does insult women, laws that define women according to their biological composition and ascribe their social roles accordingly have historically done far more harm to women than pornographic pictures,” she wrote. “During the ten some-odd years I worked on this project, I grew increasingly committed to free speech, which I consider a liberty above price.”106
Oral historians stand committed to free speech and critical inquiry. Good intentions alone are insufficient for effective regulation. Discernment and common sense are equally essential ingredients for protecting human subjects without imposing censorship. By concentrating on the protection of human subjects from actual physical and mental harm, rather than from the benign interaction of interviews, IRBs can best steer clear of further “Comstockery.”