Textbooks and Teaching

"Bringing History to Life":
Oral History, Community Research, and
Multiple Levels of Learning

A. Glenn Crothers

In the past three decades, as college pedagogy has come to emphasize the benefits of cooperative classroom environments and experiential learning and as more historians study their subject from the bottom up, focusing their research on traditionally ignored or disempowered groups, history teaching has increasingly moved away from the top-down lecture format toward new methods of presenting history. The benefits of new methodologies are widely recognized. Cooperative classrooms and experiential learning enable students to engage more fully with historical materials, to enjoy multiple perspectives on historical evidence, and, it is hoped, to gain a better understanding of the past and the process of writing history. In contrast, a parallel innovation in college teaching—community-based research, or service learning—has few advocates in the field of history. Service or community-based learning engages students in meeting local needs in order to link the classroom and the community and thereby to create more civic-minded individuals and a more engaged academic scholarship.1 That historians should have generally ignored this method is ironic; after all, many historians claim that their teaching aims to help produce individuals who are highly engaged in civic and political life. This report, based on my experience running the Floyd County Oral History Project at Indiana University Southeast (IUS), demonstrates how service learning benefits pedagogy. Community-based projects heighten student awareness of the local impact of broader historical events. Equally important, service learning increases the opportunities for cooperative and experiential learning inside and outside the classroom. Finally, service-learning projects can bring the community together, connecting college students and senior citizens to foster both the preservation of local history and a sense of the responsibilities of citizenship.

1

First, a little background. I initiated the Floyd County Oral History Project in fall 1998, primarily as a way to engage students enrolled in survey-level history courses—"The World in the Twentieth Century" and "U.S. History since 1865"—in the study of history. IUS is a four-year comprehensive college with an essentially open admissions policy enrolling approximately six thousand students on its campus in New Albany, Indiana, on the Ohio River. I wanted students to understand how the broad historical events described and discussed in textbooks and in class had profoundly shaped the local community and the lives of its inhabitants. I hoped that by talking to local people and reflecting upon those conversations in short papers, class discussion, and presentations, students would come to recognize the impact of historical events—the human consequences of depression, war, and ideological conflict in their own communities. History would become immediate, tangible, and relevant.

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