High Impact Pedagogies and Sustainable Archives: Supporting Oral History Curricula at Undergraduate Liberal Arts Institutions

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

Oral history methodology has broad applications across disciplines, especially in higher education which increasingly values undergraduate engagement with primary sources and positions digital technologies as critical learning mediums. Oral history projects also provide students opportunities for experiential and community-based learning -- high impact educational pedagogies. However, at Liberal Arts Colleges there remain few institutional or financial supports for instructors who seek to integrate oral history technologies and methodologies into their undergraduate classrooms in a sustainable and enriching way. Many instructors are left reinventing the wheel each semester with trial and error, and student oral history products are often lost in the semesterly shuffle.

This roundtable discussion will focus on two grant-funded initiatives that aim at filling this historical gap in support for faculty and student oral history work at Liberal Arts Colleges -- The Oral History in the Liberal Arts (http://ohla.info/) initiative and the [True] Stories (www.truestories2016.com) project. [A description of each project is available in the CVs below.] Both projects provide instructors critical expertise, resources, and technologies for oral history-based undergraduate curricula. And with the goal of sustainability, these programs endeavor to curate, archive, and provide online access to the products of undergraduate oral histories, to the benefit of current and future researchers.

Some critical questions have already emerged as a result of these initiatives and we would like to bring these to the fore of our roundtable discussion:
How to prepare students and faculty for permissions, rights, and access issues?
What type of digital humanities trainings can help faculty leading oral history projects?
Where to invest resources in support of project logistics? Transcription software, recording tools, training modules, curatorial work, online user interfaces, other efforts?
Can we ensure the collection and proper description of student-crafted works at project completion?
Who is our intended user community?

Sub Unit

• OHA Annual Meeting

Panelists

• Brooke Bryan, Antioch College

• Caitlin Christian-Lamb, University of Maryland

• Rachel Walton, Rollins College

Chair

• Rachel Walton, Rollins College