A student’s guide to doing oral history
A gift of stories
A complete guide to conducting oral history projects in schools, by Michael L. Umphrey, the director of the Heritage Project, sponsored by the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress and the Montana Historical Society.
by Michael L. Umphrey
An illustrated version of this article
You have important work to do. The Library of Congress and the Montana Historical Society are collecting oral histories of America’s veterans, and they want your help. You are invited to work as a partner with them to interview veterans and those who served on the home front and then to write up what you learn.
The tapes, transcripts and histories you create may be stored in the archives of the Library of Congress and the Montana Historical Society for future researchers. An archives is a collection of materials like a library, but a library usually stores published materials and an archives usually stores materials that are not published, such as letters, business records, and photographs.
Over the past nine years, the Montana Heritage Project has shown that high school students can do first-rate oral histories. Although doing oral histories well takes a lot of work, it is rewarding. If you will commit the time and effort needed, you can create historical records of permanent value.
This article can serve as an introduction to doing oral histories, and there are many more resources available that you may want to explore, including books and internet guides.
Decide on a Purpose
The first thing to do is to decide on a purpose for your oral history project. There are many reasons someone might want to do an oral history project. Projects come in all sizes and shapes so to plan a project, begin at the end: what do you want to end up with? What do you want to learn?
Maybe you’re doing a service project, and you want to give elders at a local retirement home a chance to tell their life stories so you can create biographies to give back to the families. If people just suffered a natural disaster, such as an earthquake or bad storm, you might want to find out how people in the past handled similar challenges. Or maybe the disaster happened years ago, and you want to create a detailed history to commemorate the anniversary of the event. You might want to gather the viewpoints of officials who organized responses, victims whose homes were flooded, emergency workers who helped at the scene, or people who were children at the time and saw things from that perspective. You could create audio tapes and transcripts for the local museum as well as articles based on the interviews for the local newspaper.
Or maybe you wonder who pushed to get the town’s library built, or how the local ambulance service got started. You might want to write a history of an organization—a gardening club or the women’s club—mixing oral history with information from documents and photographs to create a pamphlet that records the significant dates and developments and the perspectives of people involved.
Maybe you want to nominate a local building for the National Register of Historic Places and you want to find out as much as possible about how the building was used during different periods of its history. If so, you will interview people who were familiar with the life of the building during different years.
Perhaps you’re interested in women’s history, and you want to know how the lives of women in your community have changed over the decades. In that case, you will interview older women, focusing on their perceptions of social events and situations in town. You want a permanent record of their stories as well as an essay summarizing what you found out.
Or maybe people in town are arguing about whether to build a new school, and you want to investigate a similar controversy in the past to see how such things tend to unfold.
Part of living is constantly re-examining the past, looking for inspiration, guidance, illustrations, and ideas that might clarify today’s issues. History is not the past but what people say about the past. It changes constantly as people develop new questions or new ideas.
A good way to start is to ask what dilemmas the community is facing today, what stories are in danger of being lost, and what questions people disagree about most strongly. Of course, sailing directly into controversies with our notebooks and tape recorders can be risky. But the more we stick to the role of questioner and avoid the role of advocate or activist, the more likely we are to help rather than hinder. The scholar’s role is to understand and as scholars, we will be more successful with people who question what we are doing if we add their viewpoints and concerns to the record in a spirit of inclusion.
Asking the hard questions can help you to think about the things that you most need to understand. Asking questions is the heart of oral history projects. Every community has people who have unique insights into past events or aspects of culture whose voices are not yet on the historical record. Future historians will not have a chance to ask them questions. The better we can anticipate what those scholars will want to know, ask those questions, and create a record of their answers, the more important our work becomes.
For the most part, people in the future will be more interested in how people felt about events and about the details of their daily experience than they will be about dates and facts. Dates and names are often found more reliably in written records than in people’s memories. But personal memories capture best the perceptions, the nuances, and images that historians will find most important.
We often organize oral history interviews around questions about specific events. But hovering in the background are the larger questions that we ultimately want to understand. What is the purpose of life? What is a good person? What is the right relationship between individuals and community? What is beauty and why does it matter? What can we know and how can we know it?
The Essential Question
Of course, if you are joining the Veterans History Project, some of the purpose will be decided for you. We start with an essential question, which is a big and important question that can’t be answered with a brief set of facts. The essential question that high school students across Montana will tackle this year is "How did the Vietnam War change America and Montana?" To answer this, you will need to learn something about what America was like before the war, and what happened to the country during the war, and, most important, what people who lived through it say about how it changed them.
We know that something profound happened in the sixties. It was an unsettling time. In 1968 alone, President Lyndon Johnson bowed to protestors and announced he would not run for re-election; student protestors at Columbia University shut down the campus with a sit-in; presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King were assassinated; the Tet Offensive by the North Vietnamese triggered doubts that the United States was winning in Vietnam; the Democratic National Convention in Chicago was besieged by unruly mobs that led to open violence between citizens and the Chicago police force.
Of course, thousands of other things were going on as well. Apollo 7 succeeded as the first manned orbit of the earth, and Yale announced that it would begin allowing women to attend school. "Hey Jude," "Harper Valley PTA," and "Midnight Confessions" were hit songs.
Significant evidence demonstrates that beginning around 1960, several new trends emerged in America, many of which continue today. Here are a few bits of information gathered by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone: In 1960, 55 percent of Americans agreed with the statement, "Most people can be trusted." Today, fewer than 35 percent agree. In 1960, America employed about eight police officers per thousand citizens. Today, the number is nearly 15. In 1960, about 47 percent of parents of school age children belonged to a Parent Teacher Association or PTA. Today, about 13 percent do. In 1960, two Americans per thousand belonged to an environmental organization. Today, about 37 persons per thousand belong.
You can’t explore these issues without exploring yourself and thinking about what you desire and what you believe and why. To think about such things as fully and deeply as you can may be life’s greatest adventure. Nothing is more fun or more important than thinking.
People you interview will want to know what you are after, what you hope to learn, what you plan to do with the information once you get it. The better you can answer such questions, the better your interview will tend to go. You will need to tell them that you are trying to find out how they were changed as individuals by events in the sixties, to help us all understand how Montana and America changed. You will also need to tell them that the tapes and transcripts of the interview will be placed in the archives of the Library of Congress and the Montana Historical Society where future researchers can find them. You will even need to have them sign an official release so that others can use their stories.
Look at Models
To get an idea of how much is possible with oral history, you might want to read Studs Terkel’s book The Good War about World War II, or the more recent books Citizen Soldiers and D-Day by Stephen E. Ambrose. You’ll see how a medley of different voices, each describing a small part of the big picture, can become stunningly powerful when they are put together.
Terkel shows us what World War II looked like to an American citizen of Japanese descent living in Hawaii during Pearl Harbor, to a physician doing field surgeries during the Normandy invasion, to an ordinary soldier in the confusion of combat, to a woman working at home during the War, to an admiral facing critical decisions, to a guy making money from all the war business. Dozens of voices give testimony about what they experienced where they were. It becomes impossible to sum up their experiences in a slogan. No one person can see or understand all of what happens, and so the truth emerges in more of its complexity when many points of view are included.
Trust the Stories of Ordinary People
Whoever you interview, be confident that his or her part of the story is important. History is not made just by famous people. It’s made by the millions of ordinary people whose lives intersect in time. Ordinary people are actors in history, and every person has some power to change the story. As you help tell your community’s stories in its own voices, you will bring to life the past in a way no outsider ever could ever accomplish. You will put real people into history who would otherwise remain invisible to the record. You will accomplish work of enduring value.
The more people you talk with about your project the better. This is especially true if part of your goal is to help the community have a conversation with itself about itself. Few things are more powerful than oral history projects for that.
If a local historical society or museum discovers that high school students are available to do interviews, they may want to get involved. Such support could make a huge difference. Local museums could provide training, background research to prepare for interviews, equipment, assistance with planning which areas to explore, and suggestions for interview subjects who might be especially valuable. They might also provide an important place to put copies of your finished project, so it will be available to other people in town now and in the future.
Do Preliminary Research
It’s often been said that the past is a foreign country, and it is full of surprises. Without some basic research, you won’t know which topics may be most fruitful to explore, and you won’t be a good judge of what is new and interesting information as opposed to what are commonplace observations.
Inadequate preliminary research is the most common weakness of classroom oral history projects. Professionals use a rule of thumb that it takes eight hours of research to prepare for each one-hour interview. Of course, if you interview several subjects on the same topic, most of the research you do for one will work for the others too.
Reading a couple books while making a list of possible questions will be a great help. You should be asking yourself what was on people’s minds, what they did for fun, what their work was like, and so on. You can read fiction, watch movies, listen to music from the time period, and read contemporary magazine articles. A visit to the local archives to read newspapers from the time period would be time well spent. It’s an excellent way to start t feeling at home in that time period. Everything is informative--not only the headlines but also the advertisements, the letters to the editor, and the comics.
Consider creating a time line. Especially when working on a group project where many researchers are contributing, a large time line posted on a wall can become increasingly useful as the project moves forward. You can place every event or pattern that you read or talk about into the historical context that develops.
Getting organized at the beginning will save enormous trouble later. You should start a file folder for each important topic. You will also want a file folder for each person who is interviewed. This will give you a ready place to put transcripts, correspondence with your interviewees, documents or photographs acquired from them, and permission forms. Knowledge that is not organized may not be knowledge at all—at least not for long.
Identify Subjects
A good interview subject is a person who will try honestly to answer the questions that are asked. Some "natural storytellers" that come to mind readily may turn out not to be great subjects, because they keep returning to a repertoire of "set pieces"—stories they have rehearsed over the years— rather than trying to present accurate answers to your questions.
You’ll need to get the word out that you are looking for interview subjects. Students in Townsend invited members of the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars to an Appreciation Program on Veterans Day. The newspapers and television coverage helped to encourage a good turnout. At the event, students gave talks, read poems, and performed music. Each veteran was called to the front of the room and awarded a pin. A guest sign up sheet allowed students to write down the names of all veterans who were willing to be interviewed.
Prepare for the Interview
You will want to have more questions than you have time to ask. The questions you want to ask will depend on the purposes of your project.
Good questions are open-ended, which means they are "essay" questions rather than "yes or no," "true or false" questions. "When did you leave for Vietnam?" will either get a brief answer or will confuse the subject, as he or she tries to remember dates and times. But "Tell me about your first day in Vietnam," will tend to get you a story. You want stories.
During the interview, you might sometimes ask "yes or no" questions to clarify details so the tape is a better record for future researchers. For example, you might ask, "When you say ‘they’ do you mean your military commanders?" But when you are preparing questions, concentrate on those most likely to get the subject talking about the topics you are investigating.
You can practice interviewing friends or other members of your research team. You might use questions such as, "What do you remember about your first day of school? What is your favorite possession, how did you get it, and why is it important to you?" This will allow you to practice with the recording equipment. It also helps you learn how to get good information and how important it is to listen and think carefully during answers. Also, when you play back samples, if your recording is muffled because the microphone is too far from the subject or full of pops and booms because the microphone was laid on the table instead of placed on foam or a stand, those problems will remind you how important it is to be careful during the next interview.
After some practice, your class might participate in "fish bowl" interviews in which a guest comes to the classroom and is interviewed in front of everyone. Such guest speakers can provide basic information on topics that you are going to pursue in other interviews. For an oral history project focused on the Vietnam War, for example, a guest could talk about what life was like at home during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The fish bowl interview is a wonderful technique that should be used more—and not just for practice. Turning on a tape recorder gives people an excuse to tell their stories, and we would be a happier and wiser people if we spent more time learning to tell our stories well and listening to others.
After such interviews, you can make copies of the interview tape to transcribe in small groups, allowing each member to transcribe a portion of the interview. This is a good time to think through the issues that arise during transcriptions: how to punctuate oral speech, the importance of recording nonverbal information in brackets [laughs][sobs], and the need to have the person who did the interview decipher hard-to-understand sections of the recording.
You should use a watch to create an index of the tape, recording when topics started and when significant things were said. You will usually also want to do verbatim (every word) transcripts, preserving the phrasing of the speaker. Dialect and colloquialisms should usually be transcribed with standard spelling, to avoid making the speaker sound ignorant. Important gestures or body language should be described in brackets: [puts head down in hands] [makes boxing motions].
During the Interview
Begin each tape by recording who you are, who you are talking to, where you are, and the date: "This is Mike Umphrey. I’m interviewing Vietnam veteran Rick Jones in the kitchen of his house in Ronan, Montana, on December 13, 2003." Repeat this each time you turn a tape over or start a new one, but adding "part one," "part two," and so on. As soon as possible, label each tape with this same information.
With any luck at all, your subject will surprise you and you will find yourself listening to stories you didn’t expect. Follow the interviewer when they begin interesting or richly detailed stories. The secret to doing a good interview is simply attentive listening. Listening well can be learned and it pays dividends throughout life. Oral interviews provide ideal situations to learn and practice it.
Don’t be afraid of silence. Give people enough "wait time" to form their thoughts. Your job is listening—not correcting or arguing or competing. If something seems questionable to you, try to get the teller to clarify it: "Why do you think that happened? Can you say more about that?" If what your interviewee’s information contradicts the written historical record, you may want to point this out, by way of getting a fuller story: "According to the local newspaper accounts, that’s not what happened. Why is that?"
But the interview is not the place for you to argue. It’s also not the place for you to tell your stories or develop your points of view. At the end of the interview, you may want to "give back" something by sharing a story or two of your own that relates to what your subject has been talking about, but in general the less you talk the better the interview will go.
You will want to give silent reassurance as the speaker talks by nodding and using eye contact. You will also want to ask followup questions. If an interview subject tells you about an emotional episode, and then you just move on to the next question on your list, you are demonstrating to the speaker that you’re not really interested in what he or she is saying. You are also losing your chance to explore interesting issues that come up that you couldn’t have anticipated when you made your list of questions. Followup questions such as "Could you tell me more about that?" can trigger wonderful reflections.
Stay alert. What questions naturally arise as you listen? Ask those questions. The questions on your list are a guide not a script. Don’t move through them mechanically in the order they are written. Keep them as reminders of areas you want to explore.
Stop the interview before you or your subject becomes too tired. An hour is usually long enough, though some ninety minute interviews have turned out very well.
After the Interview
Students in Chester found a box of audio cassettes in the courthouse that had been recorded a couple of decades earlier. They were unlabeled. When students began listening to them, making indexes of who was on the tapes and what topics were discussed, one of the students was startled. "That’s my grandpa!" he finally called out. His grandfather had died before he was born, and he had never before heard his voice.
Lucky accidents happens all the time for people who begin community history projects. But don’t count on luck. Tapes that are not labeled and indexed probably won’t fall into the hands of the right researchers. They will probably disappear. At some point, someone wonders what the dusty old things are and why they’re in the way, and the tapes get tossed.
Senate historian Donald Ritchie said, "An interview becomes an oral history only when it has been recorded, processed in some way, made available in an archives, library, or other repository, or reproduced in relatively verbatim form as a publication."
First, make a duplicate of the tape (or several if you may need them) then put the original away until it is placed in an archives. Except for making a copy, you should avoid playing the tape once it’s recorded, since every playing wears the tape some. Never loan the original. Wait until you or an archives has made a duplicate and loan the duplicate. Avoid hot or humid storage.
Whenever possible, make full transcripts. This is the most time-consuming of the tasks involved with oral histories. Plan on four hours of transcribing work for each hour of tape. The transcript should be reviewed and approved by the interview subject, and this transcript, like the tape itself, should be preserved and treated as an important historic document.
Sometimes, we don’t have enough time to make full transcripts. In these cases, make an index to the tape, recording key topics and either the counter number on the tape recorder or the number of minutes and seconds from the start of the tape. This helps researchers find information about the topics they are pursuing. Audio recordings that lack any indication of what they contain are not very useful, because it takes so much time to find out whether they include helpful information.
Before transcripts are published or made available to the public, have the interview subject review them and make any needed corrections. Especially if you did not secure permissions before you began interviewing, this is a good time to get signed permissions which cover both the tape and the transcript.
Sometimes, this stage will raise interesting issues. A subject might want to change or delete information on the tape. Sometimes people want to fix bad grammar or awkward phrases. Sometimes they’ve had second thoughts and want things removed. Remember, as a basic premise, that the tape holds the subject’s story and he or she has all the rights to it.
Some grammar corrections are probably okay. But if the person wants so many changes that the transcript begins to sound like written prose rather than the spoken word, try to get him or her to understand that the character of spoken language is different from written language and that the document is more useful if it preserves that character.
You may ask a subject who wants information removed to consider writing a time limit restriction on the permission form so that the information can’t be used for ten years—or twenty or fifty—but making it ultimately available.
Tape recordings take more care than paper documents, such as periodic rewindings to keep the tapes from sticking together. From the beginning your project should have had selected a final repository, preferably a place with staff and equipment to provide long-term care for the important primary documents you’ve created, such as the Montana Historical Society or the Library of Congress.
Legal and Ethical Considerations
Keep in mind that people automatically have copyrights to their interviews: the words, the tapes, the transcripts, any photographs that were taken. You cannot do anything with these materials without the subject’s permission. Also keep in mind that if you publish something untrue about another person, both you and the interview subject could be sued.
Be sure to give the interviewer credit, both verbally on the recording and written on the cassette.
A Note About Families
Some of the best student research is family history research. When teenagers spend time interviewing parents or grandparents, all sorts of wonderful things happen: family relationships are strengthened, key historical understandings are passed along, young people’s historical consciousness is developed, older people are prompted to reflect on their own lives, and valuable voices are added to the record.
Nonetheless, it is your family’s decision whether to share its history in a public forum. Some things are sacred and are better not discussed in public. Older people in your family will be your best guide as to what can or should be shared.
All sorts of other issues also come into play: divorce, immigration status, adoption, unpleasant or illegal activities, concerns about unconventional lifestyles, and varying cultural norms. We all have skeletons in our closets.
As we get more mature, we tend to see each other’s foibles and weaknesses and mistakes in a different light that leads not to judgment but to understanding. But we’re not all there yet, and people have good reasons for wanting to keep some things private. We need to respect their desire to do so.
You should always have the option of interviewing someone other than family members if you have personal reasons for wanting to keep family matters private.
How Reliable is the Information?
Whenever oral histories are mentioned, someone questions their reliability. After all, memory is unreliable and people have many motives for "improving upon" the past.
But the truth is that oral histories are probably as reliable or unreliable as other sources. Every source needs to be evaluated and compared with other sources. Anyone who has been involved in a public controversy and then read about it in a newspaper knows that newspaper stories are full of inaccurate statements. People who have been to controversial board meetings and then read officially prepared minutes know how far the documentary record sometimes strays from what was "really" going on.
It’s true that people giving oral histories often "doctor" the past or portray themselves in the most favorable light, but this is not unique to oral histories. A knowledgeable and skilled interviewer can probe areas that seem questionable, politely, with such questions as "What leads you to believe that? Are you aware of any evidence that supports that?"
But in the end, the person will report his or her own version of events, and the rest of us will be left thinking about what to make of it. Why should oral histories be that much different from the rest of our relationships?
A Gift of Scholarship
Doing oral histories gives you a chance to get to know other people and to explore other lives. Nothing is more interesting than that. Creating an oral history record allows you to make real contributions to your community. The students in Ronan published a book about local veterans experiences entitled A Nation and Community Divided: Reflections on the Vietnam War. Students in Bigfork collected historic photos of their veterans, took contemporary pictures at the time of the interview, and combined these with quotations from the interviews to create multimedia presentations. A standing-room-only audience, including the veterans and family members and friends, filled a local theater to see this program.
Every town can benefit from having more of its history gathered and written. Giving the gift of scholarship is an important way you can serve others while you learn important things about the past and present.
A Guide for interview subjects that you can provide before the interview to answer questions and help the subject prepare
Here are more tools for doing oral history
Publishing a classroom book with on-demand printers
Making something wonderful
On-demand printers are a cost-effective way for school groups to publish a few dozen or a few hundred professionally printed books. Ronan high school English teacher Christa Umphrey shares her experiences in publishing two books--profiles of Vietnam and World War II veterans--as part of the Montana Heritage Project’s participation in the Veterans History Project of the Library of Congress.
by Christa Umphrey
Growing up surrounded by words and stories, I have always thought there was something magical about books. Friends and family members who know me well never let me run into a bookstore to pick something up while they wait. Trips into bookstores are never quick, and I’m always collecting books faster than I can actually read them.
Many of my students are particularly baffled by this strange obsession with books. They can’t see why people are so taken with these bound stacks of paper. But they see others like me and the way we look at books, the way we handle and speak of them. They don’t get it, but they know the obsession is real.
This is why it works to have students publish a book. Even those who have never valued books themselves know that other people are impressed with writers, and they wouldn’t mind people talking about them the way they talk about other authors.
For many reasons, publishing a book is one of the most rewarding projects my students and I have undertaken. When students know they have a real audience, it improves the quality of their work. Taking a project to a published final product makes students think a little more about the words they’re putting down, and keeping the best student work around and visible helps raise the standards of quality from year to year. This helps students learn to think and write more clearly, which is one of the most important things I’m trying to accomplish in the classroom.
At the beginning, most students are only mildly interested in what I think of their work, and even then it’s less what I think than what grade I’ll give them. I’m not a very important audience.
But when they see newspaper clippings on the walls of work other students have done, they become curious and ask, “How do we get our stuff in the paper?” When they see magazines or brochures from past years around my classroom, they get a little competitive and think they may do something better. With a bigger project, like a book, students are even more likely to buy in.
A while ago, as students looked through last year’s book—a collection of essays based on oral interviews with World War II veterans—I asked them to critique it and then to decide our direction for this year.
Their reaction came in two stages. First they were impressed: “Someone from Ronan published a book?” “Freshmen did this?” “Why didn’t we get to do this when we were freshmen?” But they quickly turned competitive and critical. These students, with whom I hadn’t yet had much of any discussion about writing, created a list of things their book would do better. It would be more focused and detailed, it would use stronger verbs, it would have more variety in sentence length, it would include more of the veterans’ thoughts about events, it would give clearer descriptions of the settings. I was pleasantly surprised.
Though the book project required more work than anything else I had students do, it was the work that they found most worth doing. As the project progressed, students went from apathy, to annoyance, to excitement.
I think choosing a rich topic is vital. Students got to know the veterans whose stories they were telling, and the topic was important enough that they wanted to get it right for them. If you are going to spend a lot of time on something, it needs to be something worth your time. After spending hours with veterans and listening to their stories, students believed their time was well spent.
The publication process was simpler than I’d expected. We decided to use an on-demand publisher because this new technology makes short-run books much more affordable than it would have been a few years ago. Most of the on-demand publishing companies I looked into will take manuscripts at any point, from a Word or WordPerfect document to finished PageMaker or QuarkXpress files. We decided to use Trafford (http://www.Trafford.com), which offered the best combination of service and costs. We retained full control of the copyright, and we can order as many books at a special author’s rate as we want. (The author’s price is based on the number of pages. For a 100-page book with a glossy, laminated cover, this is about $5 per copy.)
The printer can assist with editing or layout or cover design. Of course, the more assistance you need, the more it will cost. And their time is expensive.
We were able to send them finished PageMaker files for the text and a graphic we did in Photoshop for the cover, so we only had to pay the base rate for setting up the print file. Through Trafford this varies from around $500 to a little under $1,000, depending on how much help you want with publicity and distribution. They will do order fulfillment and take credit card orders on the internet. Visit their web site for details: www.trafford.com.
All options include assigning an ISBN number and creating the print file, so the book will never go out of print. Because books are printed as they are ordered, there is no extensive inventory. Twenty years from now, a descendent of one of our veterans should be able to order a fresh new copy of the book.
Trafford also sent out press releases, which led to a story in the Missoulian.
After we’d done all the research and writing and revising, we really did have the most difficult work behind us. Once we had the book assembled and the layout complete, it was just a matter of waiting, phone tag, and some e-mail exchanges over a few weeks to clear up small details as the publisher worked on the production of the book.
I didn’t involve students to a great extent in the technical processes of publishing our first classroom book. This was mainly because I didn’t know what it involved, and I didn’t feel I could give up any of my already limited classroom time to have them figure it out with me. For our next project though, I think students can do much of the work dealing with the publisher as well. Doing real work in the real world is powerfully educative.
This project worked well, despite wide variances in students’ writing abilities. Though a small honors class helped, most of the work was done by a typical cross-section of the ninth grade students at Ronan High School. This included quite a few whose skill levels were below ninth grade. Many of these students claimed to hate writing. They hadn’t often produced school work they were pleased with, and most of their writing assignments got returned with a poor grade and were quickly forgotten. Instead of learning to write, they had learned they weren’t writers.
So it was important to allow enough time for revision and editing.
On the other end of the spectrum were students who wrote fairly well. Because of this, they were accustomed to getting good grades and moving on. They weren’t used to getting suggestions, revising, or having to work on their writing.
Both groups were very resistant to spending so much time on one piece of work in the beginning, but as they spent more time on it, most began to develop something that pleased them.
And other people were pleased as well. Community response has been wonderful. People who haven’t been involved with the school for years gave students positive feedback. We received thank you notes from veterans, a typewritten letter from the local librarian asking to be kept on a mailing list for new publications (along with suggestions for new topics), and inquiries from other communities about how to get copies. I took requested copies to the senior center every day for a week and a half.
But of course, the most important benefit of this project was that some of my students find books a little more interesting. Not only are they starting to glimpse the magic behind books, they understand that it’s a magic they can create.
To-do list for public heritage programs
Planning and executing a successful heritage event
Set a date
Book a space
Form your committee
Create a set of deadlines
Establish assignments
Keep excellent track of all those who help you through the year
Decide on all the event components: sequence, content, presenters, introducers, food, music, greeters, decorating crew, clean-up crew
Prepare a “script” for the event indicating where everyone should be at what time, from greeters to emcees
Invite any outside presenters
Create invitations, press releases, announcements
Write newspaper stories
Participate in radio shows
Do follow-up invitations
Remember your teachers
Make programs and name tags and signs
Make a list of all the supplies you’ll need
Know exactly who is bringing food and how much there should be
Rehearse
Time the rehearsal
Designate a photographer
Create a set-up and clean-up crew
Ideas for public programs
Inviting the community to school
A list of public events schools can use to bring the community together to celebrate their shared cultural heritage.
Round-table discussions
Guided walks
Historic building tours
Dedication ceremonies
Recognition dinners
Historic-menu meals
Fashion shows
Dances
Re-created historic events and games
Exhibits and fairs
Fish-bowl interviews for the community to see
PowerPoint presentations of student work
Book signings for your essays of place
Readers’ theaters
Book discussions
Individual programs for civic groups and senior centers
Plays and musicals
Community quizzes/history bees/history game shows
How-to workshops on doing oral history, researching local newspapers, documenting historic buildings
A guide to planning and executing public heritage programs
Stage presents
A student guide to planning public programs, divided into 8 sections:
Why give a program?
What do you want to accomplish?
Plan early and often.
Take responsibility but get everyone involved.
Getting the word out. Give your program life, lights, and action.
Presents from your stage. Some event possibilities.
Event to-do list.
by Marcella Sherfy
An illustrated version of this article.
Why give a program? | What do you want to accomplish? | Plan early and often | Take responsibility but get everyone involved
Getting the word out | Give your program life, lights, and action | Presents from your stage
Some event possibilities | Event to-do-list
Heritage Project students are invited to return gifts of scholarship to their communities. One way of doing that is by hosting a public program.
Knowledge is a gift—the world’s most enchanting, enduring, and useable. Long after the digital camera you got this Christmas grows obsolete, you’ll remember what you learned from the gentleman you interviewed for your heritage project. You’ll recollect the kind wisdom of the older woman who shared her family’s quilt history, and after the tape recorder had been turned off, shared her homemade cookies too. In some way, you will recall the insight and perspective that all your mentors took time to offer you—the gifts of their experience and memory.
The gifts that matter most to us are the ones we should share with others. From the beginning, the Montana Heritage Project founders understood that. Liz Claiborne, Art Ortenberg, and the staffs of the Library of Congress and the Montana Historical Society felt that Heritage Project students should complete their work by giving gifts of scholarship back to their communities.
Sharing what you have learned is the right thing to do for many reasons. First, we all draw upon what others know. It is how understanding grows in the world. Second, it is the best way to deepen our understanding of what we have researched. Organizing our information and observations so we can share it with others requires us to do the harder thinking we need to do if we are to “master” content and refine our understanding. Teaching is a powerful way of learning because we have to clarify our own thoughts in order to explain them to someone else. And finally, passing on our insights sets an example for others in the community. It strengthens the spirit of sharing which every community needs to stay alive.
Your class and your teacher will want to discuss what gifts of scholarship may be most fitting at the end of your project. You can create a book that you give away or sell. You can catalog a photograph collection or compile a newspaper index for your community library and historical society. You can write newspaper columns and design interpretive markers. All of these methods of transforming your knowledge into gifts for the community are very valuable.
Public programs have been especially popular ways for students to share their findings with parents, elders, local historical societies, and classmates. In this article, we’ll focus primarily on why and how to host a live public event, to give presents from a stage.
Why choose to give a program?
Since you can give your gifts of scholarship to your community in many ways, why choose to give a public program, especially since it’s likely to be hard work and scary? The fact that it’s hard work and scary is part of the answer. Giving a program in front of other people requires us to put our skills and talents on the line. It demands the best of us. Like a sports event, a public program lets the world see just how much we’ve learned, how much time and energy we’ve invested in developing our insight and understanding, and the depth of our community research. We demonstrate how skilled we are and how invested we are in thanking others by sharing our knowledge with them. When we put our hearts and minds on the line, it commands other people’s attention. They admire us and are grateful for our work.
Other gifts—such as indexes, catalog lists, and articles—may also be valuable and certain to be used. But even these are enhanced when they are introduced through public programs, which may be the best way to call your community’s attention to them.
Finally, public programs are themselves gifts to communities that often hunger for interesting reasons to gather and celebrate. In the past, communities often enjoyed a rich array of community-wide concerts and Christmas programs, chautauqua events, all-town baseball games, and lecture series brought in by the Kiwanis or Lions clubs. Some of those events survive, but many do not. The reasons that once caused us to gather no longer seem compelling, but we haven’t yet invented new cultural reasons for getting together. The program or event that you offer can add variety and richness to your community life, especially if you’ve really tried to create unusual program content. The very process of drawing people together to watch you—their young people—demonstrate that you have learned about your town and that you care about it. It may be hard for you to realize the power you have to bring people together and to give them reasons for feeling glad they live in that community.
What do you want to accomplish?
Once you decide to offer a public program, spend some time thinking about what you hope the program will accomplish. You’ll be able to design your event more easily when you have a clear goal. You have many options. Your primary goal may be to thank the people you interviewed and those who provided you with other research materials. You may want to organize a “how to” workshop, using what you’ve learned to show others in the community how to use historic newspapers or courthouse records. You may want to offer a more general program for your families and others in the community to introduce them to the highlights of your class’s work. Check out the accompanying sidebar to see just how many options there are for you to consider. And the list is just to get you started thinking. There are many others you may come up with on your own.
The odds are good that you will want to accomplish more than one of these goals. That’s logical and okay. But you are more likely to create a program that pleases you if you outline your primary purposes and then choose activities and presentations most likely to serve those intentions. For instance, if you want to demonstrate to
community members how they can better use local records, you might want to schedule a day-long “open house” in your library so you can spend individual time with them at a microfilm reader. If your main goal is to thank those who have helped you, you’ll want to develop a specific guest list and invitations. If you want to share your work primarily with your parents, individual exhibits or short multimedia programs on several machines will let each of you show your work to your families. If you want many people in your community to understand your project, a more traditional program with a comprehensive presentation, or a play, or several readings may fit.
Any of these events will let you improve your public presentation skills: speaking, multimedia development, exhibit design, or drama. So, no matter what you do, prepare as well as you possibly can—go all out! Practicing the effort needed to go beyond the ordinary is an important goal in its own right.
Plan early and often
For a community program, there’s no such thing as too much preparation. You know how full your school’s calendar gets, so pick a date well in advance and get it on the school and community calendar. Tell the newspaper and any other organizations in town that keep a “master schedule” of town events. If you wait to set a date, you’ll be quickly frustrated by previously scheduled games, meetings, music programs, church nights, and book clubs.
Next, book a space that fits your event. It might be an auditorium or a meeting room at the bank. Don’t underestimate turnout. Heritage programs tend to attract many community members—even when teachers and students have feared low attendance. Because so many older people in the community are likely to have helped you or be interested in your program, think about a place and a time of day that will make it easy for them to attend. Somewhere in here, you’ll want to pull out a flip-chart and start listing all the tasks that need to be done. See the sidebar entitled “Event to-do list” for a start at that kind of list.
Anticipate mid-course corrections. Along the way, especially as you work with others, you’ll get new ideas. Your research and the contacts that you make will suggest different options. Not only is it okay to rethink your event and change your plans with those in mind, you wouldn’t want to do anything else.
Take responsibility for your program but get everyone involved
Every student involved in heritage project work should have a role in planning and presenting. You can learn a lot by being responsible for most parts of this program: organizing, working together, figuring out what will work in your town. Everyone should have jobs to do. Though your teacher is a good resource and a good place to go for advice or perspective, don’t count on him or her to be in charge. Students need to be in charge of the program.
An important key to spreading the word widely and ensuring a good turnout is to involve lots of people. You can ask for help from your parents, other classes in your school, your principal and superintendent, your local historical society, and other community groups. Some people will be short of time, but if you ask lots of people you’ll be amazed at how much others are willing to do. Almost everyone is honored to be invited to make a successful event even more successful. Some organizations like the opportunity to be more visible or raise a little money for their own needs. For instance, if you choose to offer a light supper before an evening program while people browse through your exhibits, a local group can fix the food and turn it into a modest fund raiser.
Early in the planning process, organize a meeting with a representative from each group that you believe might be willing to help: the band teacher, if you’d like to involve the school band; a few parents of Heritage Project students; and delegates from the community museum or historical society or other organizations. Try to have a written list of all the tasks that need to be done and the supplies you’ll need. Tell them what you would like to accomplish with your program and what tasks need to be done ahead of time or on the day of the event. See if they like what you have proposed to do. Ask for their ideas. Ask for volunteers. It’s fine, also, to ask for donations of supplies, especially if you will give enthusiastic credit to the donors.
However, keep in mind that this event is yours. You can tackle most of the work needed to put on a good program, from creating invitations and programs to developing PowerPoint presentations, to making refreshments, to doing dishes and sweeping up. So, ask for help when it will be an honor or of benefit to others—not just because you don’t want to do what is needed. Finally, remember that you want this to be a gift to your community. You want everyone to enjoy the occasion and to come back next year. You can use that goal to help you decide how to involve others in the event.
Getting the word out
You’ll be very disappointed if you go to a lot of effort to host a program and no one comes. While there are no guarantees, you can do a lot to make sure that doesn’t happen. First, create a list of who you want to be there, based on your goals. If you want just your parents, that will help you decide how to market the event. If you want just your interviewees, that will help you shape your publicity plan. If you want the whole town to come, plus your parents and your mentors, you can tailor your advertising accordingly. Whoever your intended audience, you will probably use a combination of invitation strategies.
For small groups of people (parents and mentors), written and mailed invitations will work. Your class can design and print those or you can work with computer and graphic arts students. I recommend that you handwrite addresses, so that folks receiving them don’t assume that they’ve gotten another piece of pre-printed junk mail. Be sure that you correctly spell everyone’s name and address.
If you want to invite the whole community, it’s a good idea to take this into account at the beginning of your research project. Some research topics appeal to a much broader audience than others, and if your aim is a large audience, you’re better off studying something that affects or interests many people. Also, the community members whom you interview or enlist to help you as experts or advisers are likely to attend, so the more people you include along the way the easier it will be to get a crowd to attend your program.
You should also plan on writing a story for your local newspaper. Include pictures of people in the community who have helped you or photos of class members conducting interviews or researching. Student “by-lines” may be even more compelling than a teacher’s. Deliver your material in person to the paper in both printed and digital form. Ask whether you need to make changes in the format so that they can use your story easily. Ask when they are going to run your story, and see if they’ll also do a short reminder the day of the event. The editor may be more likely to run your copy if you also buy advertising space. Talk with your teacher about whether the Project budget could help with those costs.
No matter what forms of advertisement that you use, include specific information and plan on making personal follow-ups. People want to know how to dress, what to expect, whether there will be refreshments, and how long to plan on staying. Give them as much of that detail as you can. As you get close to your program, call and remind the folks that you most want to come about the event—especially if you are honoring them. Nothing else even comes close to the power of a personal phone call or visit when it comes to getting people to come to public events.
Don’t be shy. If your town or bank has an outdoor message board, use it. Send notices to local access television or public service announcements and talk shows on radio stations that air in your vicinity.
Give your program life, lights, and action
In all the bustle of promoting your program, don’t neglect putting together a program that you’d want to attend. You probably wouldn’t want to listen to two hours of talking. You’d want, instead, to be informed, entertained, recognized, fed, kept busy, and respected. You can create an event with this kind of power and energy by thinking about events that you and people on your planning committee like to attend.
To get to specifics, you can mentally move through your event picturing what will work, what your audience will like, and what will keep them entertained. What follows is merely the beginning of possibilities.
Consider greeters, someone to say hello to everyone who comes in. You might assign students who did interviews to meet their subjects and escort them to reserved chairs. Think about name tags for anyone you’re recognizing. Try a guest book that lets everyone who attends sign in. You can also modify a guest book for other specific purposes. For instance, you can use it to gather subjects for upcoming research projects. If you do this, be sure to leave a place for contact information.
Try printed programs. They reassure people about what’s going to happen. You can include a specific list of people that you want to thank. Programs make great souvenirs for grandparents or a mom who likes to scrapbook.
Few things are more powerful than music. Just as the pep band comes to games and parades to whip up your spirits, a band, a choir, or recorded historic music may have the same effect on your event, especially when you link it to the time period and the themes you’ve been studying. Audiences like to sing-along to music that they know and love. This also enlivens an audience after a session of listening passively. Don’t underestimate our need for recognition. Most people enjoy hearing their names announced from a podium or being called to the front for a certificate or standing up in the audience to be thanked. A handshake and a hug in front of the community is something that many older folks will remember as a highlight of their year.
Food is important. Even when many of us are limiting carbs and calories, we rely on food to make folks feel welcome and at home. Whether you offer a relish tray or cookies or dinner served by your local 4-H club, food helps us socialize. Put the coffee pot on ahead of time. Some seniors like to arrive early and enjoy some coffee while they wait and visit.
Think carefully about how long the event will end up being. It should be long enough that people are glad to have come, but not so long that they grow weary. Intermissions may help if you have a lot that you want to accomplish.
Don’t be afraid to add new twists. Some schools include dances and raffles and quizzes that involve the audience. Some display exhibits that they’ve created over the years. You’ll have good ideas on how to keep your townsfolk engaged.
Presents from your stage
You can choose many ways to give what you have learned back to your community, but don’t underestimate how valuable a community program may be. Hosting an event will summon skills that you and your classmates may have overlooked or not recognized. Even more important, a great community party—a gathering that celebrates the understanding forged between young people and older people—may be treasured and remembered by your town more than you will know. You will be giving your town the best present of all.