Document Type
Lesson Plan
Publication Date
Spring 2024
Abstract
Informal Family Archives & Oral History was modeled on and meant to complement the Oral History in Interdisciplinary Community College Pedagogy Funded by NEH for 2023-2025. Therefore, the description is taken from the NEH description except I modified my class to be focused on informal family archives. Students picked a family member they wished to interview for this project. They started with a cultural object exercise and built from that starting point. The class was inspired by Nairy Abdelshafy’s Informal Archives: Capturing Family Memories.
“Oral history is an interactive method and inquiry process on a topic, as well as how a topic is remembered. These interviews help document and preserve experiences, cultures, and events that may otherwise be lost to the historical record and provides insight into how people recollect and derive meaning from those experiences. Through interviewing, participants can reflect on complex issues and experiences from multiple perspectives. Oral history helps illuminate personal perspectives for complex events like war, pandemics, immigration, persecutions, health care, housing/food insecurity, and community activism. In short, oral history is a method for combating institutional biases and highlighting marginalized perspectives, an issue that the humanities strive to address.” (Oral History in Interdisciplinary Community College Pedagogy Funded by NEH for 2023-2025)
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