Oral Histories and Scholarly Research
Literacy instruction for primary source research typically falls into two categories: primary source analysis, which focuses on content and context, and archive instruction, which teaches research skills and process. In this program plan, I designed a session that uses interactive activities to combine both primary source analysis and archive instruction.
Using the principles of outcomes-based planning and evaluation, I created a one-shot instruction session for an academic library environment. The session teaches undergraduate history students how to find oral histories in libraries and archives. Through learning about oral histories, students will consider subjectivity within scholarly research, and how the format of a primary source affects how to find it and analyze it. The final product of this project contains a description of the program, a needs assessment based on research, detailed student outcomes, a lesson plan, and instructional materials to carry out the program. This was the final project in INFO 673 Literacy and Instruction.
The outcomes-based planning and evaluation model provides a user-centered approach to designing instructional library programming. Using this model as the foundation of the session, I focused my research on my user group and the environment where the session would take place. I studied the development of primary source analysis instruction at the undergraduate level over the last few decades, and how tools like archival literacy standards can standardize instruction and evaluation. I identified some of the barriers for undergraduate students researching oral histories – primarily, that archiving oral histories is inconsistent across repositories, making them often difficult to search and access in a timely manner.
I also researched the use of oral histories in undergraduate instruction. Oral histories are most often taught in academic settings as a way to document or produce history, rather than as a resource for research. Despite the challenges of using them for research, oral histories offer student researchers unique historical insight, and content that promotes critical thinking skills. Oral histories are often used to document community histories. In the archival world, they are also used as a reparative archival practice to address gaps in collections that exist due to oppressive power structures or the degradation of archival material. Therefore, these are unique records that will only enter the scholarly conversation if oral history is taught as a primary source for research. These conversations about subjectivity, bias, and silences in oral history archives can also illuminate the same issues in other types of primary sources.
Taking both the challenges and benefits of working with oral histories into consideration, I designed my program to incorporate archival literacy standards from “Archival Literacy for History Students: Identifying Faculty Expectations of Archival Research Skills,” and I chose the Center for Brooklyn History as a community partner for the program. The literacy standards guided me to incorporate both critical thinking and archival skills into the student activities, and provided a natural framework for evaluating student work. The Center for Brooklyn History has over 1,200 digitized interviews in collections covering neighborhoods, cultural groups, and periods of time. This content, as well as the organization’s user-friendly interface, is immediately usable for undergraduate work, and also would teach undergraduates about some of the complexities of archiving material in these formats.
View the program plan and materials