Oral Histories of Education and the Relevance of Theory
Claiming New Spaces in a Post-Revisionist Era
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9883545 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Caroline Eick (Mount St. Mary's University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2011 |
| Volume | 51 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 158-183 |
| Publication date | 2011-05-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | History of Education Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0018-2680 • E-ISSN: 1748-5959 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1748-5959.2011.00328.x |
| OpenAlex | W1617384338 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 8 |
Almost forty years since the publication of Cutler's landmark “Oral history—its nature and uses for educational history,” growing numbers of historians of education have adopted oral interviews as the basis for historical analysis. Furthermore, questions about the objectivity of oral sources in view of memory's fallibility have been more productively redirected toward exploring, in light of credibility standards borrowed from the social sciences and literary theory, the many hues of subjectivity of oral historical testimonies, and their implications for understanding same past events from multiple perspectives. As Portelli aptly states, “the first thing that makes oral history different, is that it tells us less about events than about their meaning ” He boldly asserts that “what informants believe is indeed a historical fact “that is, the fact that they believe it”, as much as what really happened.” Oral historians not only reproblematized memory for historians by focusing attention on understanding the subjectivity of memory as a manifestation of historical consciousness, but they also brought to our attention how memories are gendered, racialized, and class based. They brought to our attention the importance of examining why different individuals and groups experience the same event in very different ways. Today, oral sources, particularly since the 1990s when historians began investigating the construction of identities, are compared less pejoratively with documentary sources by academic disciplinarians. And oral historians continue to break down “boundaries between the educational institution and the world, between the [history] profession and ordinary people.” However, they also continue to be faced with the challenge of articulating “the connection between individual and social historical consciousness.”
Aesthetics · Epistemology · Historical Thinking · Meaning (existential · Objectivity (philosophy · Oral history · Pedagogy · Social science · Sociology · Subjectivity · Anthropology · Critical Race Theory in Education · Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy · History · Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis · Philosophy
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,14 |
| Citation span | 2012 - 2021 (10) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |