Oral History (2)_Preparing students to conduct oral history interviews

[0:00] - Yeah. Hello everyone, and welcome back to our series of video recordings on the use of oral history in history education. This is the second of our three sessions recorded together with Bridget. Our sessions are part of the webinar series on history outside of the classroom, and here with us as a speaker we have Bridget Martin, who is a member of the Historiana Teaching and Learning team but also a history teacher and has been working with us at EuroClio on several projects including a oral history. In the first session we talked about things to consider before using oral history with your students, and now Bridget will tell us more about how to prepare students. So Bridget, the floor is yours.

[0:44] Thank you. Okay. So we are in part two. where I would like to focus specifically on preparing students to conduct oral history interviews themselves. I'm assuming at this point in the teaching and learning process that teachers have introduced the concept of oral history to their students, that they have a general idea about what it is, how it's special and specific, and some of the key features of oral history as a field of study. And now we're really getting into the practicalities of how we can those interview skills for students. So I'm hoping to give you lots of really practical ideas in this section.

[1:26] I think the first strategy that's really useful before we get into students acting as interviewers themselves in role plays or in practice interviews is actually asking them first to watch other interviewers, and the best way I find to do this is using videos of different interviews and analyzing those and looking at how different interview techniques and strategies and so on can impact on at the way that the interview unfolds and the narrative and the story that we hear. So this was one example or activity that I use with my grade seven students. So we're talking 12 year old students more or less. Where actually I started with interviews that weren't oral histories, I looked at interviews that had entirely different purposes, just to take the idea of interviewing more broadly and to start with something that's maybe a bit more familiar to the students, which is of course celebrity interviews.

[2:25] feminism, but you could choose to do this with any celebrity. The idea is to find someone, the same person, talking about the same topic in general in very different contexts, and that way you can compare the different interviews and so on. So in this case, I think I found just on YouTube one that was a very serious journalistic interview, one-to-one with a very blank black backdrop and so on, and the other one was on the red carpet, very excited, in a rush, and all those kinds of The interviews themselves had different styles and purposes, but the overall topic was different.

[3:00] So we watched both of those interviews, and then I asked the students to discuss these questions. What was different about the way the interview conducted their interviews? And which one do you think was more effective and why? And the students pointed out lots of different things around how many questions were asked, how quickly they were asked, and how much time was left for her to answer them, about the atmosphere, whether it was noisy or calm, and all of those kinds of things. interviewing. So this can be just kind of a fun accessible starting point.

[3:34] And then what you might do is show them some actual genuine oral history interviews to get a bit of an idea of how professional oral historians conduct their interviews. Now, I've put two examples of online archives here. One is from the British Library. One is from the Columbia Center for Oral History. But there are mountains and mountains of archives of oral histories online from all different countries about all different topics. segments of interviews that might be relevant to your students.

[4:08] And you can do the same thing, have a look at a few different interviews conducted, particularly by different interviewers, and see what the students can observe about the different strategies and techniques and aspects of the interview, what makes a better or worse interview and why, and so on. So this can be a really nice starting point. From here, we can get into some fun sort of role play and practice interview activities. And I do think this is really important because we want to make sure that the first time students are actually going out and conducting their interview with a family member or a member of the community or whoever it may be, is not their first experience of interviewing someone. We want to make sure that we've developed those skills already in the classroom as much as we can, and that then they're really ready to do a good job when they go and conduct their real interviews.

[5:03] So, one aspect that we should be encouraging students to practice is deep listening, and I've actually pulled this from our guide that was made with Judith Pereira and myself, and it's written here deep listening means that students will be able to sense and to understand that there's a disconnect between what the interviewee is saying, and how they're saying it. And this is linked to the idea that even in everyday conversation, the words that we say don't always correspond to our meaning and whether we're.

[5:36] being sarcastic perhaps, or trying to hide an emotion, or all kinds of different reasons, might make it that our facial expressions or our tone or our posture convey a very different meaning than the actual words that we're saying by themselves. And so this activity is trying to help students to be able to achieve that deep listening and identify those disconnects and try to interpret what they mean. I think it's probably important to acknowledge here that may find this type of task really challenging. And you as a teacher probably just need to use your judgment about what is reasonable expectation for those students, or perhaps an alternative activity. But beyond that, I think it is important that we're teaching all students these types of skills.

[6:21] So in this example, you as the teacher could take on the role of the interviewee, and you ask the students to interview you about whatever agreed upon topic. And then you can intentionally include in your responses, responses that show this disconnect between the words that you're saying and the meaning that's conveyed by your voice and language. So it might be a sarcastic comment. Yeah, this is a really wonderful place to work. it might be showing sort of sadness somehow, it was a wonderful day, but with downcast eyes and a sad tone, for example. And you might, depending on the age of your students, you might exaggerate it more or less.

[7:03] But the hope is that the students are then able to identify those moments where there was a disconnect between the words and the way they were said. then have a discussion about, well, what might that mean? What can we understand from that disconnect? And also have a discussion about how they as interviewers should respond to in these kinds of scenarios. So if I perhaps as the interviewee showed that I was quite uncomfortable or upset about something that we need to discuss with the students or how should you respond? How can we make sure that we're being empathetic, that we're not pushing people to discuss things that they are not comfortable with discussing, that we're giving them explicitly an opportunity to take a break or to stop the interview or to go in a different direction and so on. So how can we make of the person, or perhaps if it was not something particularly negative, but someone hinting at something else or another truth or another meaning, maybe that's an opportunity for you as the interviewer to ask.

[8:07] more questions to get a little bit more of an idea of what they might have been hinting at. So there's a huge amount of discussion that can then happen around this kind of interaction. So that's one role play type activity. Another one that I really love and the students really enjoy is a role play of what not to do during an interview. So in this case, I'd ask two students to volunteer. One will be the interviewee and we would agree with them what the topic will be, maybe their holidays when they were five years old or something that might be a little bit difficult but something on those lines.

[8:57] that might be something like. interrupting the person they're interviewing, asking more than one question at a time, asking leading questions. and so on. And sometimes, depending again on the age of the student, you might need to workshop with them a little bit, how they might be able to show that mistake in this scenario. They come in. They act out the interview in front of the class. And then we discuss as a group, what was the problem? What was the mistake? Why was it a problem? And it's really useful to use the role play to see what was the effect that this person interrupting had on the flow of the interview or the relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee, for instance. And then how can we avoid it? What do we need to make sure that we're doing instead? OK, and then I would suggest doing a real review.

[9:45] mini interview. If you have time, it's great to do this in the classroom and then add in these regular reflections and feedback sessions. If for whatever reason that's not feasible, this is also something that you could ask students to do on their own at home for homework, for example, do a practice with a member of their family or a friend, and then get some feedback from that person and they reflect and you can share that together as well. So essentially you'd agree on a topic, you'd give students a limit, maybe five minutes.

[10:16] First, you'd have student A interview student B, and student B would give their feedback to student A. Here's what I think you did really well. I felt a little bit uncomfortable when you said this, you looked like you weren't really listening to me, whatever it is, give that feedback and try to be honest but constructive. And then also ask the student themselves to reflect. And once you've done that and the students have swapped and so on, you can then have a whole class reflection session about what was difficult, what are we doing well, what was good, what could we improve on, and so on.

[10:49] So mini practice interviews are super helpful. I even did this at the master's level. So it definitely should be an element of that preparation. you Another strategy that I have found useful in the past is also to practice doing sort of a whole class interview. So before the students go off and do interviews by themselves, you can ask the whole group to prepare an interview of a guest speaker that you invite to come and talk to the class. And this creates a bit of a safe space and the students can practice together and then they can reflect as a group.

[11:23] And you can guide that reflection a little bit around how that interview unfolded. And this can be a nice sort of safe way to start practicing with real strangers as opposed to your classmates, for instance. And then what I'd recommend doing is actually asking the students to create their own list of tips, for example. So here I've got just as an example, the list that was developed by my grade seven. So again, we're talking 12 year old students. A couple of years ago, we were doing a project about belief systems and how those belief systems had affected different people's lives.

[11:59] And they developed this list for themselves based on all of the previous work that we had done. And this is a really useful thing for them to remind themselves before they do their real interview what they need to pay attention to. So asking the students to then generate a list like this can be really helpful. All right, so once we've developed all of those skills and so on, or perhaps in conjunction with that, we should also be talking about writing questions and how to write quality questions and so on. So I've got a few.

[12:32] Very simple tips. There are of course many more that we could add to this list, but just to keep it simple. As we mentioned in the first video, it's really important that students are conducting research about the historical topic and about the person they're interviewing. And they're using that research to write really targeted and relevant questions that will help them answer their own research question for the project. And we'll also make sure they're getting the most out of that interview. So it should always be informed by research. you Students should always be asking open and not closed questions. So a closed question is one that will have a very short answer like.

[13:11] 1961 or yes or no or these kinds of things occasionally you might need to include a couple, just to get some contextual details right, but you definitely want to avoid a scenario where you have a big long series of closed questions, because you won't get that dialogue which is what we're looking for in an oral history interview, so i always say to the students that essentially in an oral history interview. The interviewer should do almost none of the talking, and their role is really to make sure that the interviewee is able to share their experiences and memories and commentary. And it might just be the role of the interviewer to guide that discussion, but they should be doing very little of the talking themselves. So open questions are the way to go. Could you tell me about, can you describe, why did, etc. This will invite much broader and more developed answers from the interviewee.

[14:10] you Along with that, students also need to be careful to avoid leading questions. So a leading question is one in which you've implied the answer, already in the question that you're asking. So for example, you might ask, did you move away from that village because of your parents? Now you've already implied that because of your parents was the reason that the person might have left. It's also a closed question, which is not great. So a less leading question might be something more like, why did you move away from that village? And then you're leaving all possible answers open to the person. So especially when students have particular research focus, they can sometimes ask these leading questions without really thinking about it. So trying to raise their awareness and making sure that questions are as open-ended as possible is really important.

[15:05] Students also need to be cautious of questions on sensitive issues. So it's really important that students are aware of which issues might be sensitive to people and often, well not often, but sometimes they might not be aware of what is or is not sensitive. So I'd always encourage you as the teacher to ask the student to submit a draft question list to you first so that you can perhaps flag any areas that they're going into that could perhaps be sensitive for the interviewee.

[15:36] so that they're prepared for that. It may be that some interviewees are very comfortable to talk about issues that are sensitive. It may be that some interviewees are not comfortable and again we need to have discussions with students around allowing interviewees to pause or stop or change the direction of an interview if they're not comfortable, and also making sure that we are respectful in the way that we're asking questions about sensitive things. So this is just something for you and the students to be aware of.

[16:09] Another key is not to write too many questions, especially when they've done a lot of research. Students get very excited and write a big long list. But what we really want to avoid is a situation in which the interview is something like question one, question two, and so on. And they're working through this very long list systematically. And again, we're losing that dialogue and that openness and that relationship with the person. So I would suggest a few key questions that can focus the discussion. And then students also need to be ready to change and remove and add questions, so whatever questions they prepare beforehand should not be exactly the same as what they've asked by the end of the interview, because naturally.

[16:53] They might need to add questions, especially follow up questions, are really important. Could you tell me a little bit more about X or whatever it was that was mentioned. They might need to remove a question. This is a mistake that I see often, especially with younger students, that they've got their list and they arrive at question six, but actually the person had already discussed that topic. The students still ask the question anyway. So they need to really be listening to the conversation and be ready to remove a question if it's no longer relevant or appropriate, or perhaps change the question a little bit if they need to.

[17:27] So that brings us to the end of the second video. This should get the students in a really great position to be conducting wonderful oral history interviews. And in the next and final part of this mini series, we'll have a look at how they can then analyse those interviews once they've completed them. Thank you, Brigitte, once again, very, very much for sharing with us your thoughts about how to prepare students for oral history interviews. part of the video.

[18:03] *sniff*