Students’ participation in oral history projects

From the Idea to Action

Gholamreza Azari Khakestar
Translated by: Zahra Hosseinain

2015-8-22

The use of educational capacity to raise the level of knowledge is an issue that has been somewhat neglected in history. Unfortunately, teachers and educational planners do not use it enough in history teaching methods and indeed, to some extent, contenting with teaching of history in narrative way led to disinterest in history lesson among students. Oral history can be used as a practical way to teach history lessons. For students objectively familiarize themselves with research methods and posing question, and will learn events of contemporary history from witnesses’ language.

However discussing this issue sounds simple, but there are difficulties in practice that can give us relatively good performance of a student project by some process. First we should find whether teachers or students in training centers are willing to do oral history? How we can involve students in such projects and what we expect from students? What’s the application of students’ interviews?

Late last year, for example, a family oral history project was conducted at one of the schools with the help of a teacher who interested in oral history research. The obtained results, which will be discussed briefly in this paper, were significant. Although it was expected at the beginning of the project that students welcome this subject, but for reasons, such as lack of adequate training, the results was not good. It seems that, if there aren’t two basic elements of teaching and interest in oral history projects, the projects in the schools fail or may not have significant output.

This project was done experimentally in one of vocational schools in the city of Mashhad. After defining the plan, 150 students were asked to participate. Around 40 students welcomed it and after receiving sample questions, they were given basic training for interviewing. Given that the majority of students’ elderly relatives lived in different cities or far away from where they live, only 8 of students interviewed about 10 hours and delivered it in the final stage.

The most important experiences of this plan were as follows:

1. Training students the interview process will help them to conduct oral history projects. It is suggested that students be associated with oral history centers and closely familiarize with the interview.
2. Motivation and interest: history teachers can encourage students enough with certain tools to make them to be active in an oral history projects.
3. Six months opportunity to every student for interviewing (in mentioned plan, each student should do their interview in 40 days). If enough time is given to students to interview, they would be better able to plan and to conduct adequate interviews.
4. Lack of confidence for questioning and stress befell for some interviewers in oral history projects.

Part of concerns of this plan: Are students interested in recording the family history? Are family history and ancestors important in students’ beliefs? Will the recognition of family help to students’ identification?

After the expiry of interviewing and receiving their files, the problems of recording family oral history could be stated from the perspective of students as follows:

1. Lack of facilities and equipment: several numbers of students did not show interest in oral history due to lack of equipment for recording their interviews. So, availability of equipment can solve this problem.

2. Unavailability of persons: some of elders of students’ family weren’t available. Therefore, due to time constraints, students have not been able to communicate with family elders for interviewing.

3. Lack of cooperation of relatives and family patriarchs: in the program, students were told to interview with their grandfather, grandmother or uncle or other family patriarchs over the age of 60 years. Due to the fact that high school students went to interview with family patriarchs, they didn’t take them seriously and refused to interview.

4. Fear and stress of interviewing were other issues that students mentioned.

5. Finally, some students cited that the lack of adequate training for interview is of other barriers.

Teachers’ approach to enable students to conduct oral history projects can create rich archives on various subjects in schools. Although this has not been done in the country and even students haven’t participated in such comprehensive programs, but using students in oral history projects can help researchers to have more accessibility to variety of documents.