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| One of the best reasons for doing digital
versus traditional oral history is the ease with which
digital interviews can be made accessible to a worldwide
audience via the Internet, as well as through multimedia
projects including DVDs, CDs, books, radio and television
documentaries, museum exhibits, and live performances.
Below are some suggested resources on and examples of
publishing, performing and promoting public access to
oral history: |
- Overviews
- Community oral history
- K-12 oral history
- Multimedia documentaries
- Museum and web exhibits
- Public performances
- Publications
- The future of oral history
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In addition to the [begin hyperlink]
Teaching
resources listed in the directory on this site, there
are many ways to use oral history in K-12 classes. Perhaps
the classic school oral history project is to assign
students to interview a grandparent or other relative
about a historical event, such as World War II or the
civil rights movement, or about their memories of childhood
or other life experiences. For younger students, interviewing
each other is a good way to get started in the basics
of oral history. Interviewing relatives and leaders from
students' home communities has been a particularly effective
tool in teaching non-native English speakers and/or students
who struggle with written communication. At Turner Tech
High School in Miami, for example, students interviewed
civil rights leaders in south Miami in Spanish, transcribed
a short portion of the interview, and then translated
it into English (access the interviews via Florida International
University's Digital
Collections Center) Oral history is also
very conducive to service learning objectives (see Kathy
Barber Hersh, How
to Make History: Using Oral History in Community Studies
and Service Learning Projects )
and Stephen Warren, "Service
Learning and the Historian's Task," OAH website)
A variety of pedagogical objectives can be achieved
using oral history, such as:
- competency in working with computers and multimedia
- improving organizational, written and oral communication,
presentation, and collaborative skills
- cooperative classrooms and experiential learning
(see A. Glenn Crothers Journal
of American History )
- multicultural education (see an example
at University
of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
- encourage civic engagement and interaction
with the local community
To do an oral history project on a low budget
and still get decent audio in a web-ready
format, use inexpensive .mp3 players that
now include recording capability. Many high
school students already own them, and sound
quality can be improved with the use of a
mini-jack microphone. See the USF Oral History
Program's guide, "Recording
with iPods."
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| 2008
Oral History and Performance Conference, New York City
Armstrong, Ann Elizabeth. "Paradoxes in Community-Based
Pedagogy: Decentering Students through Oral History
Performance," Theatre Topics v10.2 (Sep
2000): 113-28
Carlin, Phyllis Scott. "From
Ethnography to Social Action through Oral History
in Performance"
Pollock, Della, ed. Remembering: Oral History
Performance.
Book description from Amazon.com: "Drawing on the work of scholars and
practitioners such as Augusto Boal, Gloria Anzaldua, and Trinh Minh-ha,
these essays advocate oral history and oral history-based performance
as means to challenge and expand upon traditional ways of transmitting
historical knowledge. The contributors' central concerns are performative
aspects of oral history itself and the theatrical or classroom "re-performance" of
oral history. The essays detail classroom and public pedagogies, community-based
interventions, processes of developing interview-based performances,
and the ethical and political implications of oral history as an embodied
form of representation. The essays collected in this volume present the
most current scholarship straddling the rich intersection between oral
history and performance, and together suggest ways for scholars and performers
to use oral history to challenge more traditional modes of knowledge." |
| See Florida and non-Florida publications
in the Directory of oral history collections, programs
and resources. |
University of North Carolina Southern
Oral History Project
Indiana University/Harvard University Sound
Directions: Digital Preservation and Access for Global
Audio Heritage |
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