Reflections

From 1999 to 2004 Ron Stoloff's 11th grade American History classes at Edison/Fareira High School in Philadelphia conducted an oral history project, gathering and assembling family stories on immigration/migration as part of a larger, multidisciplinary project.

Before the students the first year did their own interviews, they did a group interview of Dr. Jose Lebron, our school's former principal, the students prepared questions with the help of an expert in oral history.  Dr. Lebron proved to be a powerful storyteller; the students sat enraptured for the hour and a half they spent in the question and answer session.  

A 15 minute videotape made by Edison's video cinema class was shown many times in class and at presentations. Our students now see it as preparation for their own interviews.  This tape is now in the Edison/Fareira library.

Part of the process of oral history is transcribing audiotapes of the interviews.  In this experience, our first venture in transcribing, we were very surprised that it took 12 hours to transcribe a 90 minute interview.  When we realized how time consuming this process is, we reduced the requirement to the "best" 5 or 10 minutes.  Many students became very engaged in the project, though, and produced longer pages.

I eagerly anticipated reading the students' interviews. Their work proved insightful and very rewarding. This project was been a time of discovery for all of us.

Some examples of learning about other people's lives:

• Enid Pagan's interview uncovered the abuse that some immigrants/migrants face.
  
  
• May Ngo had never known what her brother had gone through as he escaped from Vietnam in a boat and spent two months fleeing to freedom.
  
  
• Evalize Rosado interviewed a neighbor who responded to the last question, "Is there anything you would like to add?" by relating her experiences in the Holocaust.

Though the class was required only to transcribe the best five minutes of the interview, Evalize asked if she could do more than that - amounting to almost 1,900 words.  How often do teachers hear a request to do additional work? Moments like these make all the time and effort of a complicated project worth it.

By listening to people of various ethnic groups, the students were able to see that the similarities in their stories far outnumbered the differences in the lives they reported. They began to look at each other as "us" rather than "we/them." 

The project enlightened all of us. The students’ work proved insightful and demonstrated that a great deal of learning had taken place: 

• communicating with their families
• practicing English and technology skills
• creating a sense of story
• locating themselves in their community

Many of the students who worked on the project reported that their view of other people, their definition of humanity changed. Realizing the benefit of the project made all the time and effort that went into creating and running the project well worth it.