Train Rural Teachers to Teach Oral History

To wrap up this oral history program, as well as to shed light on the future direction, we started an impact assessment project to measure the impact of past oral history projects on the students. The assessment was set out to answer the following questions:

For the students in those representative oral history projects, what were the impact of the oral history process on them? i.e. What were their changes in terms of knowledge and understanding, skills, attitude and feeling, and how did those changes affect their lives since? What factors contributed to this impact, and what factors, unfortunately, prevented the impact from getting bigger?

We hope the answers of these questions can help us understand both the possible impact of oral history learning process on students, and how to improve the process so that the students can benefit more.

As such, during February and March 2019, we’ve interviewed 9 students from 7 projects of 5 schools during year 2014-2018 and collected 679 minutes of interview data, 75 minutes per student on average. As for knowledge and understanding, we probe a student’s understanding on the relationship between individual experience and the historical context, on the subjectivity in the life stories, and how these findings resonated with him/her. If the oral history topic is about a traditional culture, we also probe a student’s understanding on the connotation and value of this culture, in which way it is related to individual experience, and how it will be inherited and further developed. As for skills, we asked the students to reflect on all major steps, and comment on their gains on skills. Each interview ended at the student’s overall reflection on how the experience of doing oral history affected his/her life afterwards, or how the experience helped shape who s/he is today.

The analysis of the interview data is still under way. We are looking forward to sharing the results with you towards the end of April.