Textbooks and Teaching

"Forgotten Voices and Different Memories": How Students at California State University, Monterey Bay, Became Their Own Historians

David A. Reichard

Working on the Fort Ord Project just reinforced my attitude that we need to dig a little deeper and listen to those stories not quite heard. —Student evaluation, 2001

During the spring 2001 semester, twenty-seven students in "Out of Many—U.S. Histories" (HCOM 253), a lower-division course at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB), researched, designed, and installed a public history exhibition titled "Forgotten Voices and Different Memories: Fort Ord from Native America to the Twentieth Century and Beyond." Because CSUMB, with about twenty-seven hundred undergraduates, many of whom are commuters, was created in 1994 after the closing of the military base, this topic held particular interest for members of the class. "Ever since I have been here on Fort Ord," one student explained, "I have had many questions about the history. The fact that I was going to school on a military base was enough to pique my curiosity."1	1
"Out of Many—U.S. Histories" fulfills two University Learning Requirements (ULRs) in CSUMB's general education program. One of those ULRs, U.S. Histories, asks students to develop skills that will enable them to become their own historians. In past semesters students had completed independent research papers, collected oral histories, or written historically informed autobiographies in order to attain this outcome. During the spring 2001 semester, I wanted to explore whether public history could make the experience of "becoming your own historian" a more active and collaborative one. What happened confirmed my hope that students would deepen their appreciation of historical practices, enhance their interest in historical content, and become more engaged in their learning experience.2 We reached back to uncover histories of indigenous people who lived (and still live) around the Monterey Bay area, learned more about the Spanish colonial and Mexican histories of Monterey, examined the origins of the U.S. Army's presence in the area, and speculated about the future. As a result, our own backyard became larger, and our understanding of what it means to interpret the past more complex. One student summed up the process many of us experienced: "We became historians digging up the untold stories of Fort Ord from the indigenous times to the present day. . . . I had never thought much past the fact that I was living on an old army base. I never thought of the indigenous tribes that lived here even before the army bought this land. This really makes me think that there is such rich history engraved everywhere."	2
Course HCOM 253 encountered numerous challenges. We identified a topic by exploring a variety of ideas in seemingly chaotic brainstorming sessions. We painfully reached consensus on most, if not all, issues. We divided ourselves into working groups to make completion of the project possible in one semester. We had many difficult class discussions that highlighted differences in communication style, historical interpretation, and political positions. Research groups spent hours researching in libraries and on the Internet and interviewing former soldiers and other members of the community. We took digital images of the campus and parts of former Fort Ord. We shopped for materials, designed and constructed kiosks to display our research, wrote text, and tried to keep organized! We completed all of this work on a very tight budget.3	. . .