Oral History as a Teaching Tool

About a month ago I went to a regional meeting of the American Historical Association at a place called Immaculata College which is in Malvern, Pennsylvania. The topic of this meeting was improving the teaching of college history. College historians, college teachers of history, are at least from where I sit very uptight about the teaching of the discipline. Enrollments are shrinking. Survey courses are being abolished. Historians are in oversupply. There is a considerable amount of anxiety in the historical community which has bred a long-overdue re-examination of teaching in the discipline. My job there was to talk about oral history as a teaching tool, and I was on a panel with several other people who were speaking on the topic of regional history in the classroom---local history in the classroom. I tried to explain to my audience some of the fundamentals, as I see them, of using and doing oral history in the classroom. I tried to express the importance of planning and preparation, the importance for example of choosing a manageable topic for students to do, a problem which becomes perhaps even more difficult to resolve in the city than in a rural area simply because in the city you're confronted with so much material rather than so little that

Mathematics education · Oral history · Pedagogy · Sociology · Anthropology · History · Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis · Psychology