Listening-for Living Voices: Archival Songs as Historical Inquiry in Dialogue with an Oral History Archive.

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Wednesday 7:45 am - Gold 2
  In Roundtable Session: Arts based educational reesarch and critical narrative(s)

Abstract

This paper presents findings from my doctoral dissertation, where I explored how songwriting can function as a historical and pedagogical tool to recover and reimagine historical memory within educational contexts. Drawing from oral history interviews with women of the Italian Resistance, this study repositions marginalized voices as agents of historical knowledge by sound collaging the original oral history audio files into archival songs, which served not only as testimonies but as pedagogical texts that foster empathetic re-engagement with public memory and reframe (forgotten) resistance narratives. This paper urges consideration of the methodologies available for historical education research. Arts-based research can interrogate what counts as a source, how histories are remembered and retold, and whose stories are preserved.

Author

• Laura Montanari, Montclair State University