|
|
|
Oral History: An Inclusive Highway to the Past
Larry E. Hudson, Jr.1 and Ellen Durrigan Santora
University of Rochester
It felt like jumping waves at the seashore. The quizzes kept coming and No. 6 was particularly challenging. The room got noticeably quiet as the single sheets were handed out."Quickly jot down what you consider to be satisfactory substitutes for the following words: Non-white, tribe, minority, primitive...."2 | |
|
"WHY DID WE DO THIS? So what are we trying to do with this exercise?" asks co-author Larry Hudson, lead historian for our first American History as Dialogue Summer Institute. Teachers had applied to attend the eight-day Summer Institute, directed by co-author Ellen Santora, so they could consider how American history should record the stories of all people. The focus of this project was both historical inquiry and the history of race in America. We hoped to involve teachers in doing the work of historians in a setting in which they were apprenticed to and in dialogue with historians. Our principal goal was to enhance teachers' desire and ability to engage in historical inquiry so that they would be more likely to engage their own students, in grades 3–11, in the construction of historical knowledge and understandings using history's most natural evidence—the stories that are told by common and uncommon people who were present at or keenly affected by key events in American history. The Summer Institute is part of an on-going American History as Dialogue Project funded by the United States Department of Education Teaching American History grant program. This project serves American history teachers in an eleven county area surrounding the City of Rochester, New York. |
1
|
|
During the last two decades, work linking cultural psychology and history education has shifted our thinking about history in the direction of context, perspective, interpretation, dialogue, and meaning.3 This work, much of which is grounded in the qualitative study of ways in which historians and students think about history, has a number of implications for teachers' knowledge, skills, and dispositions to develop students' historical understanding and ability to locate, read, interpret, assess, and synthesize historical texts. Preparing elementary, middle and high school teachers to facilitate, coach, and learn from students actively involved in constructing historical understanding necessitates shifting teachers' beliefs about history learning. The need for that shift and teachers' general need for a deeper knowledge and understanding of American history are the forces that propelled our Teaching American History Project to use our first Summer Institute to focus on the nature of history and the role of oral history in constructing the history of race and ethnicity in America. |
2
|
|
Research in professional development and history education underlines the need for collaboration among history and education faculties and schools to provide content-rich professional development experiences that support teachers' need for dialogue, partnership, and reflection in the creation of coherent and critical theories and practices that engage students in the authentic tasks of collecting, reading, interpreting, talking about, and writing history.4 Our project is the result of a collaborative effort by the Social Studies Program and the History Department at the University of Rochester and Monroe #1 Board of Cooperative Educational Services. The Summer Institute is the linchpin in a cluster of related American history professional development activities for teachers in the Rochester City Schools and sixty-six surrounding suburban and rural school districts. In this article we will focus on the goals and activities of the American History as Dialogue Summer Institute and the ways in which elementary, middle and high school teachers experienced and gave meaning to them. |
3
|
| | |
Theoretical Foundation | |
|
The Summer Institute was heavily influenced by the liberatory work of Paulo Freire and the practical ways in which oral history might transform learning in communities, schools, and classrooms. We wanted to create opportunities for dialogue between teachers and professors that would model the dialogue needed between teachers, their students, and the communities in which they teach. We looked forward to expanding school boundaries into the community in ways that would help teachers to engage in reciprocal learning with their students as both developed what Freire calls a "critical consciousness" that is grounded in political and social responsibility.5
|
|
Enhancing teachers' and students' "critical consciousness" can erode their propensity for passive citizenship and energize them for active participation in a culturally pluralistic democracy. Schenk and Takacs, Carnegie scholars in 2000–1, invite us to consider how oral history may be one way to encourage the dialogue needed to develop teachers' and students' "critical consciousness" and thus their desire to become more active and ethical participants in the lives of their communities. Schenck and Takacs describe the primary goals of their teaching as encouraging students "to use their historical knowledge to become more effective, self-aware, and ethical participants in the life of their communities."6 |
4
|
|
Given the continued existence of the inequalities resulting from what Freire, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, terms the "banking" concept of education whereby "knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing," oral history is a means by which the most "ill-equipped" student could be empowered.7 It is because of oral history's potential to destroy (or at the very least suspend) this one-directional flow of education "where the teacher teaches and the students are taught"—that it is offered as an alternative or additional approach to educating our children. This approach to the past and the making of history has the capacity to "resolve the teacher-student contradiction" by allowing students to play a partnership role in the process of their education.8 Through the exploration of their own personal histories, students are better positioned to connect themselves, their families, and their community to the larger issues and places that comprise the world.9 |
5
|
|
Two of the principles laid out in Freire, and emphasized by Schenk and Takacs, are particularly well suited to oral history. The first recognizes and values the knowledge students bring to the class from their lived experiences. They term this "an assets model" of education in contrast to the more traditional deficit model that emphasizes fixing students' deficiencies. This, they write, is closely related to, and in fact inseparable from, the second principle, which is "praxis." They see praxis as the process by which people reach deep understandings of themselves and their world by cultivating a conscious, active, and purposeful engagement with that world. In addition, praxis also emphasizes that individual positionality relative to systems of power strongly influences how the individual understands those systems of power.10 |
6
|
|
In the Summer Institute on oral history, our primary goal was to persuade (or offer our support to) teachers to utilize oral history methods as a means of providing students with opportunities to learn history through praxis. We aimed to encourage the teachers to ask their students to collect their own personal and family histories and, from there, to connect those to the broader histories they were expected to learn. As Schenk and Takacs point out, the hope is simply that the students first see themselves as products of history and then see themselves as actors in history.11 |
7
|
|
In the following section of this paper, Larry Hudson12 uses his own voice to reflect on the strategies he and his colleague, Victoria Wolcott, employed to engage teachers in the consideration of oral history as a tool for involving students in learning history through inquiry and praxis. |
8
|
| | |
Introduction to Oral History | |
|
I wanted to raise questions about our understanding of "history," its production, and its consumption. Drawing on the work of Michael Frisch, we asked the teachers to complete five short "tests," the goal of which was to replicate what Frisch terms "a modest exercise in empirical iconography."13 I asked them to jot down the first ten names that came to mind in response to the following prompts: "American History from its beginning to the end of the Civil War," the same prompt but "excluding presidents, generals, and statesmen," and so on until the fifth and last prompt which asked for the names of Asian-Americans during the same period. Not surprisingly, even for these teachers, the responses were fairly uniform. Most easily filled the available time (no more than about two minutes for each test) for Test #1 with a list of names of presidents and generals, etc., and with few women or African-Americans. With Test #2, they struggled but came up with the names of more women and African-Americans, popular among which were Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. For Test #3, they managed to average about five names of African-Americans and a few less for the Native American Test. They almost completely blanked out on the fifth and final test, Asian-American names. |
9
|
|
Having conducted these tests for several years, Frisch, at the University of Buffalo, and I, at the University of Rochester, have recorded similar results. Both Frisch and I became concerned not only by the names of people who seem to be systematically missing from the lists, but also by the suggestion that the students' (and their teachers'??) "historical memory may not in fact be shaped so much by their education or lack of it as by collective cultural mechanisms and structures we need to understand better."14 What I hoped would become clear to the Summer Institute teachers was that students need to see history as populated not simply by "quasi-mythical figures," but by "three-dimensional human beings, the famous as well as the forgotten, who live in and act on a real world that is always changing."15 Students, particularly those who do not immediately or fully identify with the people whose names regularly appeared on Test #1, need to see themselves first as products of history before they are ever going to immerse themselves in American history courses.16 |
10
|
|
On the second day, we moved from the Names Tests on to the Language Test in order to make clear how the production of history is often constrained by the very language we use in everyday conversation. A list of names, including words and terms such as non-white, Negro, Tribe, Minority, were discussed at length following the teachers' attempts to identify suitable substitute words and phrases. The power of words like "non-white," which uses "white" as a presumably agreed upon point of reference, might well have the effect of discouraging the full participation of students of color who feel marginalized and disempowered in the classroom. Teachers need to become more critical of such words and more careful that they do not, inadvertently, disgruntle students by discrediting their identities. |
11
|
|
Having introduced the potential of oral history, the remaining three classes of the first week were given up to the practical execution of oral history, followed by some lengthy discussion of its uses and, of course, its abuses. Teachers were encouraged to follow up the Summer Institute with some attempt to engage their students in oral history projects that might lead into class history projects. They were left with a list of oral history sites on the Web that could further assist them in constructing oral history projects for themselves and their students. In some sense, however, the practical part of the Institute was secondary. My primary goal was (where necessary) to shake the teachers out of their traditional way of reaching their students and to give some serious and critical attention to the assets students bring with them into the classroom. These assets may be in the form of life experiences of themselves and their families, their experiences living outside the so-called American mainstream, outside America, or, last but not least, their knowledge of a different language or culture. |
12
|
|
As Freire points out, the teacher should not be "merely the-one-who teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach."17 This is not a beverage easily consumed by all teachers. |
13
|
| | |
Teachers Generate Meaning from Critical Discussions of History and Oral History | |
|
Professional development for social studies teachers too often suffers from a focus on mechanistic strategies that either are fragmented and removed from any curricular context or promote the type of vacuous thinking about fractured content emphasized in statewide testing programs.18 Seldom are teachers challenged by the opportunity to think like historians about historical evidence and even less often are they asked to engage in collecting historical evidence. In the remainder of this article, Ellen Santora explores ways in which the Summer Institute's elementary, middle and high school teachers gave meaning to the experiences Larry described in the first portion of this article. |
14
|
|
Based on Larry's conclusions about how students and their teachers learn about history and the work of Levstik, Barton, and Epstein, we have every reason to believe that students as well as their teachers develop historical understanding within the sociohistorical reality of their lived experience. The ways in which they understand history are situated in their assumptions about reality—assumptions that are influenced by the collective experiences of families, neighborhoods, and groups of people with shared understandings.19 |
15
|
|
Teachers in the Summer Institute generated a number of themes as they made sense of what they were learning about history, including especially oral history. Not surprisingly, their explorations centered on two aspects of their lives: the role of history in their personal lives and the lives of their families, and history learning in their classrooms. We hope that this bi-modal understanding of scholarly, public and personal histories will lead to history teaching and learning that emphasizes teachers and students as dialogically and reciprocally constructing historical understanding.20 We believe that the dialogue created may be less reproductive of existing hierarchies in society and more inclusive of those who dwell on the margins of the American mainstream. Also, we hope that teachers who see themselves as part of history as well as researchers and teachers of history may have a stronger commitment to a transformative and more liberatory history education that upsets the one-way flow of knowledge from teacher to student and allows students to become partners in their own education. To assess the results of our efforts, over the next two years we will track the ways in which teachers participating in the project and their students give meaning to historical inquiry within the classroom setting. |
16
|
| | |
Evidence | |
|
One of the goals of our American History as Dialogue project is to develop, document, assess and disseminate a replicable model for professional development in American history education that is grounded in theory, research, and best practices. That task has been Ellen's responsibility. We have pursued that goal through our first Summer Institute, with the informed consent of our teacher participants, by videotaping each of the sessions. This included videotaping a daily one-hour focus group discussion in which small groups of teachers reflected on what they were learning. In addition to this, teachers maintained a reflective log in which they addressed questions designed to focus their thinking and wrote freely about their reactions to what they were doing and learning. Our preliminary analysis and the understandings we have gained are grounded in these two sets of data. |
17
|
| | |
Participating Teachers | |
|
"Write down quickly what your first memory of an historical event was.... What is your first historical memory?" asked Victoria Wolcott. Teachers responded: "Nixon's resignation." "Elvis hits the big time." "Queen Elizabeth being crowned." "The assassination of Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy." "M-TV." "The birth of my baby brother." "The Ayatollah." "The moon landing." These responses in many ways characterized the diverse group of teachers who participated in the Summer Institute: fourteen men, twenty-three women, fourteen from the Rochester City School District, eight from private schools, eight from the suburbs, and seven from rural districts. Twenty-one taught in high needs districts, forty-four percent had from one to five years of experience and five and one-half percent had over twenty years of experience. Four were African-American, two Hispanic/Latino(a) and thirty-one were European-American. Many came as part of a school team. Others were independent. Each came with a curriculum goal. For their reflective discussions, we assigned them to heterogeneous groups balanced for gender, school location, school demographics, and years of experience. A teacher leader or a university professor facilitated each of the groups. |
18
|
| | |
What is history? How is it constructed? What is the role of oral history? | |
|
"Let's take the Challenger explosion. Is this thing you see on TV history? Dr. Hursh's baby brother? Is that history?" Hudson asked. "The question is whether past events are history?" While some came to the Institute with ideas that history consisted of "memories, dialogue, and documents" (Lucinda James,21 7/22) related to significant events, others believed that history was the result of scholarly research and writing. With 9/11 in the background, a tension developed over "history" as a disciplined study, public representation, and/or collective memory of the past. Scholarship, for example, was seldom considered in its full relationship to oral history. Oral history was viewed critically for its distortions, biases, and presentism while, at the same time, it was celebrated for its inclusive and humanizing approach to historical study. Like most tensions, these were never resolved. |
19
|
|
In her reflective group the second morning, Rochester City Schools elementary teacher Alicia Washington struggled with history's authorship and purpose. "Yesterday raised a lot of questions like who determines history, whose perspective are you taking.... I was really frustrated with the second handout about Asian-Americans. I went on the web last night, and I couldn't find the names of Asians—two men and one lady up to 1865." |
20
|
|
"Imagine sitting down and trying to research that; you're trying to write about these people, and they have no names," said John Middleton, a suburban middle school teacher. "Gus Grissom and those guys aren't in the history books. What if it hadn't been televised?" |
21
|
|
Not only did teachers reflect on who was included in the writing of history, they also explored how history, in the age of television, can be censored in the making and how children, for example, can be left out as witnesses of historical events. |
22
|
My son realized [9/11] was such an historical event that he came to me at school.
He stopped at my classroom and said, "You need to get your television on to show the children." Then a call came into the school to turn off the television. I sat there, and I could not believe. Something is wrong here.
I was coming home from school, and I had heard from teachers and administrators that they had been told to turn off the TV.
Were they right to tell us to turn off the TV?
There were rumors. People were talking about it in school. | |
|
Teachers made comparisons with the assassination of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement as one of the small groups explored the meaning of witnessing historic events in their own lives. While one part of a group wrestled with the question of who determines what is important, others discussed how events and people in history were represented and thus viewed by students—how a collective memory of history was constructed. |
23
|
|
For many participants, oral histories seemed to play a unique and valued role in the construction of historical knowledge because, as MaryAnn Johnson wrote in her July 23rd journal, "They tend to provide the perspectives of people who seem to be forgotten or left out of the other sources.... Oral historians shift their focus to groups such as women, Native Americans, African Americans, people of lower socioeconomic status, or any other group that was marginalized throughout history and whose voices were never, or rarely, heard." Oral histories provide opportunities to explore "the various experiences that can all come from the same event." According to John Middleton's July 23rd journal entry, oral history is inclusive in other ways as well. "It has the ability to really reach people. More than any other way, it can incorporate 'real citizens' into the historical process," sidestepping the "spin" in the oral testimonies and speeches of political leaders and other high profile figures. Oral history, as a more inclusive genre of historical evidence, highlights the ways in which we have all been actors in and affected by historical events. |
24
|
| | |
Personalizing History | |
|
"The moon landing was a family thing. I can remember everything that went on with the family that night. Like 9/11, that's the first thing we return to" said one of the participants. "When I saw my teacher crying about the Challenger, I realized it was history," said another. On Wednesday of the first week, teachers prepared to gather oral histories about their first historical memory from other members of their reflective groups. Armed with the printed guidelines that Larry had discussed and what they had read in Doing Oral History,22 each group organized its own oral history experience. Some groups worked collaboratively on a single questionnaire that was used for each interview; others paired up and prepared independently to interview each other. At least one young teacher spent considerable time in the library researching the topic about which she was to interview her much older partner. After seeing her "awesome" interview, most in the group agreed that you needed some knowledge of the topic in order to get the most out of the interview. On Thursday, as each pair took the "hot seat," others in their group acted as observers. One group was videotaped, and all experienced learning about history through the personal stories of each other. |
25
|
|
On July 23rd, Alicia Washington wrote in her journal, "I left class today overwhelmed with a desire to interview my family and friends." She followed this up in her group on Friday, saying, "Now I want to know everybody's story. Last night I went to the beauty salon and I was sitting next to a person, and I asked her, 'Where were you when Martin Luther King was shot?'" And she knew exactly where she was, and she went on to talk. I thought, 'Everybody has a story. ... There's so much history sitting next to me, all of us; everyone does have a story.'" |
26
|
|
Grasping that histories not only shaped events but also individuals, Alicia wrote, "I began to think about all the historical memories I've had in my life. I can tell you that I get choked up when I think about how different events shaped me into the woman I am now." Peggy, another participant, expressed the fact that it made her group become more aware of oral histories in their own families. "When my parents burned their mortgage, my Dad said, 'There's a restrictive convenant in here.' There was a restrictive covenant in it that said he couldn't sell to Italians." Others like Lucinda James saw the need to explore those histories, to record them, to make them part of the family's legacy. Lucinda was going to a family wedding the following weekend; she vowed to bring a tape recorder to capture the stories of the family elders. |
27
|
| | |
Oral History's Role in the Classroom | |
|
In terms of student learning, teachers explored oral history's utility in promoting essential understandings described in state and local curriculum documents, they compared its historical value with "textbook histories," and they explored ways in which oral histories gathered about September 11 might impact students' perspectives of history in a more generalized way. Some shared Becky Moreno's thoughts. "When I thought about history, I thought about a group of people sitting down and deciding what to put into history books. But now I see that they do want to know what took place through the eyes of people in history." Alicia saw oral history as an opportunity for her children to hear about historic events from those who were participants. In spite of the biases and distortions of their stories, she felt it would also help students discover a sense of time and chronology, to make real connections to the past. |
28
|
|
Many were keenly aware of the value of oral history and written narratives in providing multiple perspectives on historical events and reflections of the effects of events on those who have been invisible to mainstream history. Rosa Parks' testimony to the effects on her family of her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement typified the details that teachers felt would be more relevant to children. While expressing ambivalence about teaching from her own perspective without adequate knowledge of other points of view, Sarah described how her students listened when she shared her own stories with them. "There's a desire [by students] for people to sit down and talk to them, to tell them stories. It's not happening at home." During their oral history interviews, she shared stories about her father's work during the Civil Rights Movement in the South and how deeply he was hurt by the assassination of Martin Luther King. |
29
|
|
Alicia said, "I think when I go back to class this year, I'm definitely going to teach history with a different perspective. I'm going to start off by letting the children know that each one of them has a story, and hopefully that will perk up their interest in learning about history because another area I have reflected on is how many memorable things in my life [have] caused me to have a love for history." |
30
|
| | |
Oral History Learning Modules | |
|
We asked teachers to prepare an oral history learning module for their students as part of their obligation to the project. A number of themes have emerged in these modules that can best be epitomized by Beth Barnes' description of the project she and her teammate worked on for their seventh grade suburban students. |
31
|
We've come up with about four or five parts to this learning module.... [T]he first couple of days of school, we spend quite a bit of time talking about what history is...before we get into content. So we thought it would be a good time to do a similar activity to what we did. So we'll do the "what is history" and all the background in school and then arm the kids with a questionnaire to go home and ask their parents what is their first historical memory, just like what we did. And then about a week later, we thought we'd devote September 11 to their first historical memory, because for many of them it will be September 11. And we'd actually do oral history in the classroom and arm them with tape recorders and questionnaires, and they could collect oral histories from each other. Then about two months later, for Veteran's Day, after some extensive work in there, they [will] start to learn how to develop a questionnaire because, obviously, for the first two it would be us pretty much guiding them through it and providing it. But for Veteran's Day, we thought maybe they could create a questionnaire and interview a veteran, whether it be someone in the family or someone we provided for them. Then our World War II unit, it would be like a culmination. It would be: use everything you've learned about oral history and either collect an oral history from someone or role-play someone who was in World War II; take that role and be interviewed by someone and visa versa. So that's where we're headed with that.... It's a progression. We thought it would be easier to start with their parents because in middle school, they don't like to talk about themselves. | |
|
Beth's narrative illustrates the fundamental concern teachers had about 9/11, the need to scaffold for students' developing ability to collect oral histories, the key role of family and community, and the pedagogical connections made between the nature of history and narrative inquiry. |
32
|
|
As mentioned earlier, 9/11 was with us throughout the Summer Institute and the opportunities it presented appeared in a number of projects. Many of the teachers have already implemented those parts of their module that focus on 9/11. At our invitation, Laura Risso, a doctoral student at the University of Rochester and a participant in the Summer Institute, wrote about the implementation of this phase of her module. |
33
|
September 2002 was a special and somber time in our nation's memory. The first full week of school was marked by memorials, moments of silence, and many student questions about our national identity and our role in the world. With so much reflection and retrospective work in our communities and media, it was the perfect time to implement an oral history project. The first week of school, my seventh grade students...became historians and practiced the craft of historical interview and research. This project [was] initiated with a parent or family interview in which students documented their informant's first historical memory. Students then created a classroom timeline of Twentieth Century historical events experienced by their relatives. It became clear: history is all around us! Students were inspired to learn and eager to discover more about those events described by their family members. Motivated to learn more about history, my students were primed for the course.
My goal for part two of the oral history project was to have students experience authentic museum work by collecting and cataloguing artifacts. In addition, I wanted the students to begin to shape and refine their historical memory of the September 11th events which occurred one year earlier. Fire hats, pins, flags, calendars, airline tickets dated 9/11/01, personal poems, artwork, and newspapers from 9/12/01 were among the artifacts students found. Students catalogued and labeled the artifacts with description tags (with the assistance of my partner English Language Arts teacher) and hung them in school display cases....
Students recorded personal interviews and revelations about September 11th using oral history procedures and techniques, adding an audio component to our museum. Interviews centered around four questions, "Where were you on 9/11/01? How did you learn about the attacks? How did you feel about the attacks? How did these events impact or change your life?" Students conducted their interviews taking on the roles of historian and informant and kept an audio tape recording. In preparation for the museum display, a student committee reviewed the tapes to find the interviews that were most revealing. Visitors to the museum listen to the student responses on headsets. A power point slide show about the events of the past year, assembled using digital recording techniques and photography, also serves as a teaching tool for visitors.
Creating an exhibition of their learning and their experiences was inspiring and empowering for students. The horrific events juxtaposed with tremendous displays of human courage, resolution, and American spirit emerged in the student work. Students captured both sides of the story and provided insight into how they were experiencing our world. This is their history, evolving, created, and exhibited by them. What our young people remembered will be critical for our national memory and the preservation of our past. | |
|
While captivated by a somewhat romanticized view of 9/11 and the power of history in creating a "national memory," Laura has provided for more than utterances on tape. She has realized the need to embed oral histories in a broader context, one that includes artifacts and documents, and she has recognized the power of sharing (oral) history in public places as a means of expanding the classroom into the community and disrupting traditional hierarchies in which children learn from adults and not vice versa. |
34
|
| | |
Conclusion | |
|
It seems that four powerful factors encouraging teachers to become partners with their students in reciprocally learning through historical inquiry and oral history emerged as we studied participants' oral and written reflections. The first was their developing sense of what constitutes history and historical understanding. The second was their almost innate interest and curiosity about each other as actors in the play of historic events. The third was a proclivity to engage in collecting oral histories themselves, and lastly, the enthusiasm with which most of them have moved through the initial planning and implementation of their oral history learning modules. |
35
|
|
With this foremost in mind, we, however, also recognize essential areas for future work. In reading teachers' modules over the past couple of weeks, we have noticed that few have purposefully planned time for students and their teacher to consider the critical questions and related evidence used by historians to weigh the significance of what is learned and not learned from oral histories. While students may be gathering documents and artifacts related to their oral histories, how are the documents and artifacts helping them to interpret the narratives? What can be learned from the collection of oral histories that is not apparent when considering them one at a time? What are the sources of and influences on people's memories—both individual and collective? What other types of evidence is needed? Whose perspectives are there and whose have been left out? How do these stories relate to the larger picture of events available in both academic and public history, and what purposes can be served by the collection of oral histories? Are students aware of how oral history may challenge more traditional history? |
36
|
|
We will not know until we move into classrooms to explore the ways in which teachers and students give meaning to acts of oral history whether students have actually gained a deeper understanding of their world through their engagement with history, or whether assignments such as these become so bound by process objectives that there is little time to interpret what is being learned in terms of how one relates to his or her world, a world that is circumscribed by systems of power and status hierarchies. |
37
|
Notes
1. Authors' names are listed alphabetically. Each author contributed equally to this article. No implications should be made about the relative contribution of the authors from the order in which the names are listed.
2. We are indebted to Sharon Dickman, Public Information Coordinator in the University of Rochester's Public Relations Office, for our title and this lively introduction. We also want to acknowledge the contributions of Jennifer Gkourlias, Makini Walker-Sharp, Claire Deloria, Gail Walker and Chuck Smith to this article. In addition we are grateful for the thoughtful work of all Summer Institute teachers.
3. For further information see Linda S. Levstik, "'Any History is Someone's History': Listening to Multiple Voices from the Past," Social Education 61, no. 1 (1997): 48–51. Linda S. Levstik, "Articulating the Silences: Teachers' and Adolescents' Conceptions of Historical Significance," in Knowing, Teaching and Learning History, ed. Peter N. Stearns, Peter Seixas, and Sam Wineburg (New York: New York University Press, 2000). Peter N. Stearns, Meaning over Memory: Recasting the Teaching of Culture and History (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). Peter N. Seixas, "Historical Understanding among Adolescents in a Multicultural Setting," Curriculum Inquiry 23, no. 3 (1993): 301–327. Peter N. Seixas, "When Psychologists Discuss Historical Thinking: A Historian's Perspective," Educational Psychologist 29, no. 2 (1994): 107. Peter N. Seixas, "Mapping the Terrain of Historical Significance," Social Education 61, no. 1 (1997): 22–27. Peter N. Seixas, "Student Teachers Thinking Historically," Theory and Research in Social Education 26, no. 3 (1998): 310–341. Sam S. Wineburg, "On the Reading of Historical Texts: Notes on the Breach between the School and the Academy," American Educational Research Journal 28, no. 3 (1991): 495–519. Sam Wineburg, "Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts," Phi Delta Kappan 80, no. 7 (1999): 488–499. Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2001).
4. Related studies can be found in the following: G. Williamson McDiarmid and Peter Vinten-Johansen, "A Catwalk across the Great Divide: Redesigning the History Teaching Methods Course," in Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History, ed. Peter N. Stearns, Peter Seixas, and Sam Wineburg (New York: New York University Press, 2000). William W. Wilen and Larry Picicco, "Preserving Oral Historical Resources through a Community, University, and School-Based Collaboration," in Teaching Together: School/ University Collaboration to Improve Social Studies Education, ed. Mary Christenson, Marilyn Johnston, and Jim Norris (Washington D.C.: National Council for the Social Studies, 2001).
5. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1993). Paulo Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness (New York: Continuum, 1996). Ira Shor and Paulo Freire, A Pedagogy for Liberation: Dialogues on Transforming Education (New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1987).
6. Gerald E. Schenk and David Takacs, "History and Civic Participation: An Example of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning," Perspectives 40, no. 4 (2002), 30.
7. Freire, Pedagogy, 53.
8. Ibid., 56.
9. Schenk and Takacs, 30.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. The authors of this paper have worked together for over a year to conceptualize the Summer Institute. Larry is a professor of history and Director of the Frederick Douglass Institute at the University of Rochester and Ellen is a professor of social studies education at the Warner Graduate School for Education and Human Development at the University of Rochester and principal investigator and Director of the American History as Dialogue Project. Their work together began in the Spring of 2001 when Ellen was preparing the Teaching American History grant proposal that subsequently funded this Summer Institute. Because of the value of oral history in disrupting status hierarchies that are too often reproduced in traditional social studies classrooms, oral history has been central to the preparation and continued professionalization of social studies educators in the classes Ellen teaches.
13. Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Albany: State University of New York, 1990), 29.
14. Ibid., 31. This is a process that is well documented in the education literature as sociohistorical and sociocultural perspectives of learning. According to these theories, learning is dialogical; it takes place within social contexts and is mediated by cultural constructs, artifacts, and collective memory. See James V. Wertsch, Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991) and L. S. Vygotsky, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).
15. Frisch, 54.
16. Frisch, 30.
17. Freire, Pedagogy, 61.
18. S. G. Grant, "Opportunities Lost: Teachers Learning about the New York State Social Studies Framework," Theory and Research in Social Education 25, no. 3 (1997): 259–287.
19. Keith C. Barton," "My Mom Taught Me": The Situated Nature of Historical Understanding" (paper presented at the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, CA, April 1995). Terrie L. Epstein, "Sociocultural Approaches to Young People's Historical Understanding," Social Education 61, no. 1 (1997): 28–31. Levstik, "Any History," 48–51. Levstik, "Articulating," 284–305.
20. Levstik, "Any History," 48–51.
21. While the names of professors and project staff are real names, in order to respect their confidentiality, pseudonyms have been used for all teacher-participants.
22. Donald A. Ritchie, Doing Oral History (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995). Because teachers received these texts only a few days before the beginning of the Summer Institute, they were asked to read as much of the book as they could before the first day of the Institute. Consequently their reading was not uniform. Many, in fact, self selected their readings from the parts of the text that most interested them.
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|