PROPOSAL TYPE
Workshop
SEEKING
- Seeking Additional Presenters
- Seeking General Feedback and Interest
RELATED TOPICS
- Leadership
- Preservation
- Teaching and Training
ABSTRACT
This workshop teaches storytelling as a public history practice — giving communities, particularly veterans and historically marginalized groups, a structured framework to document their own narratives before those stories are lost, flattened, or erased by institutional forces. Using the Signature Story Framework, participants will craft, refine, and preserve a personal narrative during the session itself, leaving with both a documented story and a facilitation toolkit they can bring back to their own communities. The workshop reframes personal narrative not as performance, but as an act of historical resistance and community-led preservation.
DESCRIPTION
This workshop proposal sits at the intersection of oral history methodology, community-based documentation, and structured narrative practice. I am submitting it as a topic proposal because I want to strengthen it with voices and expertise I don’t yet have in the room — and because the NCPH community is exactly where those voices live.
What I’m bringing: A tested facilitation framework (the Signature Story Framework), 24 years of military service across the Marine Corps and Army, and years of practitioner experience training veterans, community leaders, and underrepresented professionals to document and communicate their stories. I understand firsthand how military culture shapes, suppresses, and sometimes erases individual stories in favor of institutional ones.
What I’m looking for:
A co-facilitator or respondent with public history credentials. I am a practitioner and trainer, not an academic historian. I would benefit from a partner who can situate the Signature Story Framework within the broader public history literature — connecting it to oral history theory, community archiving movements, and the field’s ongoing conversations about historical agency. If you work at the intersection of oral history and community empowerment, I want to hear from you.
Someone with experience in BIPOC or women veteran communities. The workshop is designed to be universal, but the communities most affected by historical erasure deserve specific, intentional representation. If you work with women veterans, veterans of color, or marginalized military communities — as a historian, advocate, archivist, or practitioner — your perspective would sharpen this work considerably.
An archivist or oral historian who can speak to documentation standards. The Signature Story Framework was built for communication and influence. I’d welcome a collaborator who can help participants understand how a well-structured personal narrative connects to actual archival practice — what makes a story not just compelling, but recoverable and useful to future historians.
My goal is simple: I want participants to leave St. Louis having produced something real — a documented story that didn’t exist before they walked in. If we can teach communities to document themselves, we don’t have to wait for institutions to do it for them. I believe NCPH 2027 is exactly the right room for that conversation. I just want to make sure I’m bringing the right people with me.
If you have a direct offer of assistance, sensitive criticism, or wish to pass along someone’s contact information confidentially, please get in contact directly:
Taddeus McNeal, [email protected]
All feedback and offers of assistance should be sent by June 5, 2026. If you have general ideas or feedback to share, please feel free to use the comments feature below.