PROPOSAL TYPE
Workshop
SEEKING
- Seeking Additional Presenters
- Seeking General Feedback and Interest
- Seeking Specific Expertise
RELATED TOPICS
- Oral History
- Teaching and Training
ABSTRACT
Oral histories help connect students to the past through first-hand personal narratives, but what happens when we engage students in the process of conducting oral history interviews? What are the promises and pitfalls of engaging students in secondary and higher education classrooms in the oral history process? What considerations – such as privacy, consent, and access – should secondary school educators especially keep in mind in designing such projects? Participants in this workshop will share experiences and best practices and work on developing potential oral history projects of their own
DESCRIPTION
I currently teach a one-semester elective for twelfth grade students on the History of Public Health. The past four semesters I have taught this course, we end with a short unit on the Covid-19 pandemic. Because this is such a recent event, I assign my students to conduct oral history interviews of adults in our community. Oral history interviewing builds useful skills, but also helps them to develop historical empathy; students frequently reflect on how they had never considered how adults coped with the stresses and uncertainty of living and teaching through a global pandemic. Within our school community, our goal is to both record the past and to provide recommendations for future administrators, in the event of a similar public health crisis.
My goal with setting up a workshop is to share insights I have gained from running this project, but more importantly, to learn from other teachers and scholars. Are there other teachers out there – who work in secondary or university classrooms – who have insights to share about teaching oral history skills? What insights might professional oral historians lend to this project, that could help to evolve it? I would love to have teachers in the audience brainstorm and discuss projects they might design and use in their own classroom.
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:
Kelly Jones, Convent of the Sacred Heart, [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.
This is a great topic, particularly if focused on doing oral history in a secondary school setting. We don’t see a lot of sessions that look at how public history can be integrated into the curriculum prior to college/university, even though we often talk with K-12 Education majors about how learning public history skills can enhance their teaching and provide new ways to excite their students about learning and doing history.
You might consider reaching out to Dana Best-Miszak, whose proposal “From Storage to Story” on engaging students with school archives in K-12 spaces could resonate with your own work.