What is Oral History?

Oral History serves to remind us that history is made up of the stories of generations of individuals and communities, all with a story to tell. According to the Oral History Society, it is something “that we all gather as we go through life” and that it “fills in the gaps and gives us history which includes everyone”. The Heritage Lottery Fund document adds that it is also “traditions, folklores and stories passed down from generation to generation by word of mouth”.

What are the advantages to an oral history project?

• It’s immediate, concrete and exciting.

• It involves students directly in the collection and organisation of data about ordinary people.

• Gives different insights and perspectives of the same event, leading to a more critical approach to what the history books say.

• Helps to forge links and understanding between generations.

• Preserves stories in detail from a variety of individuals which could have been lost.

• Allows students to work with primary sources and to organise this information.

• Speaking and listening skills.

• Uses technology as part of the project.

How do you conduct an interview?

It is often advisable to choose a specific area to investigate, making this one that all interviewees are likely to have experienced, such as school days or early childhood memories. This allows us to think more clearly about what has changed. For the purpose of this project the class could think about journeys to Sheffield or early memories of the city. Depending on the time given over to the project, the project could work in different ways:

• Children interviewing each other or older children in the school.

• Children conducting family interviews at home with parents, grandparents etc.

• A selected group of older people invited into school, which may include some relatives, former, retired teachers, people from local history groups, local care homes etc.

When conducting interviews, there are a number of points to bear in mind:

• Research the background in order to prepare questions.

• Use these to guide the interview but try not to interrupt; allow the interviewee to talk as you may obtain unexpected information.

• Use open ended questions where possible to allow for a full and unrestricted answer.

• Be relaxed, keep eye contact and respond with smiles.

Processing the Material

(If there is not time for the students to conduct interviews, the following activities could be based on the stories on the CD. Listen to the stories as a class or make more copies so that pairs or small groups can work from them.)

Once the interviews have been conducted, the class will need to listen back to them a few times to decide on the most interesting moments. These can then be presented in a number of different ways:

• A short play script.

• A drama to show back to those interviewed.

• A piece of first person creative writing / a short story.

• A poem.

• A letter/diary extract/newspaper report.

• A piece of art work – a painting, a collage or a sculpture. What colours are suggested by the story? What textures?

• Story telling booths. Students work at retelling the story of the person they interviewed – they will be in role as that person when in the booth. Set up a number of booths, which could be as simple as large sheets of supported card decorated with photographs or drawings from the past. Class members sit in the booth and visitors (other class members, those who were interviewed, parents etc) visit each booth and listen to the story being told.

Creating the play from the interviews

When writing the play, Richard Hurford listened to the many interviews conducted for the project and then needed to decide which ones to use and how to make sense of them.

Using the Oral History tracks

• The resource contains extracts from interviews with eight people, whose stories have been combined in the play to create the four characters we meet.

• Listen to the stories . Can the class identify the characters in the play? Which stories have been combined to make one character’s story in the play?

• Playwright Richard Hurford, talking about how he selected the interviews to use, says that he was looking for “images, moments, flashes from different people’s lives.” What events do the class remember when they listen to the histories? Which captured the class’s imagination?

• Ask the class to select other stories and to create new characters from these – name them and give a character description. How could they be woven into a new story?

How Reliable are Oral Histories?

Although there are many advantages to an oral history project, it is as well to be aware that there are limitations to the method, the most obvious of these being that they are personal accounts and subject to interpretation and memory.

Ask the class to listen to news items over the course of a week, paying particular attention to direct interviews with eyewitnesses or people such as politicians commenting on events. How do they vary? Sometimes, completely conflicting opinions are offered. At other times people witnessing the same event may select different aspects as important. Editors, too, will chose which parts of interviews to broadcast, and the class need to be aware that people writing up oral histories for a particular piece of research could also be selective.

Even on a personal level, students can experiment by asking two family members about the same event, for example a parent and a grandparent about a 21st  birthday, the day you were born or adopted etc. Are there conflicting accounts or did somebody focus more on one aspect or detail than another? Compare the accounts of students who asked about a recent event and those who asked about events 10 or more years ago.

The Process Reversed

The characters in the play were created through amalgamating ideas from a number of interviews. Here, the process is reversed as the class recreate an interview with one of the characters. You may wish to work with all four characters or just Leonardo and Rita, who we know more about.

Draw an outline for each character or use the costume drawings, enlarged and stuck onto an A1 sheet of paper.  (See Appendix One.) Either work through each character as a class or divide the class into four groups. Ask the class to write down as much as they can remember about the characters – this will sometimes be direct knowledge and will sometimes be an assumption, based on what we do know. Start the process with “What we know”, (eg Rita grew up in Crookes and was a child during the war) then “What we think we know” and finally “What we imagine” in order to get a more rounded picture of each character. Some classes may need the final section structuring by asking the children to think through categories such as “Family” or “Likes/Dislikes”. Assumptions should be in keeping with what they know of the character.

Now the class work in groups of four, with each group assigned one character. The group split into pairs and devises interview questions for the character. They now exchange questions with the other pair in their group. Finally, one student acts as interviewer and the other is in role as the character answering the questions.

Show and discuss some of the interviews.

For further information visit:
http://www.ohs.org.uk/
http://www.youthsource.ab.ca/teacher_resources/oral_
overview.html
http://edsitement.neh.gov/view_lesson_plan.asp?id=406

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