Authentic Doing in Education

10:18 am

I met the students in Vickie Malone’s Local Cultures class this morning, a small mixed group of seniors including, Becca, Sarah, Byron, Kee, Felicia, Tai and Ricky. Vickie has shared with them prior to my visit the nature of the work they will be doing, i.e., interviewing local elders for this joint McComb High School and Urban School civil rights oral history project. They viewed Telling Their Stories earlier last week in their computer lab and have conducted background history on local civil rights history. I talked to them about the world-wide nature of the project, emphasizing that their work will be viewed across the world. We did a live Google search using projection, typing in “high school oral history” and sure enough, www.tellingstories.org came up FIRST. Their eyes widened as the reality began to set in. Also searched “oral history holocaust” and got a 2nd place hit. “My goal for you is that in the months ahead, someone searching ‘civil rights oral history’ will see McComb High School’s project appear on the first page.” More widened eyes.

We then brainstormed via Inspiration “purposes” of oral history including:

• capture stories before they pass
• Need to capture the perspectives of the victims
• Capture stories of perpetrators
• capture stories of bystanders
• Stories have importance to ????????? (did not complete this)
• flushing out these stories may help further understand racism of the past and LINGERING racism of today 
• flush history of those NOT in power
• raw data for historians as they continually write the history of the topic
• emotional impact of primary sources (oral history)
• capture images, documents, maps – with description

Vickie led a short discussion when responses were not naturally flowing about the importance and significance of these stories impacting the present and future – diving briefly into continued racism today, even within the school.

I shared my experience of that disconnect with adults when I “tell” them about Telling Their Stories versus when I “show” them the website. Adults generally nod in sort of a “this is cute” sense of this “high school” project, their eyes glaze over when I express my excitement because there is a built-in perception that high school students are NOT capable of serious productive work. But, I told them, when they SEE the site, the reaction invariably shifts to utter amazement. “How many of you have done anything in school that was viewed by a world-wide audience? National audience? Mississippi audience? Local McComb audience? McComb High School audience?” All looked at me with a big “never” on their faces. Part of our mission here is to help whittle away the stereotypes of BOTH adults and high school students about the nature of what a 16-18 year old is capable of. 

We then brainstormed via Inspiration the potential audiences of the project they are embarking on:

• other teachers and their students around the country
• accidental visitors
• future “subjects” of oral histories – demonstration to help encourage more to tell their stories
• information for others with similar stories
• researchers – historians
• racists – be prepared that opponents of this work will also view it

I concluded with a brief intro into the various roles of interviewers (camera person as a follow-up questioner, primary interviewer who follows the chronology and the all-important follow-up interviewee who focuses on listening and probing). We will practice these roles tomorrow. 

General Reactions: I am even more excited but concerned about how fast we are trying to pull this off. Tomorrow will be much more revealing as they now have some familiarity with me. I need to put them on the spot and force them to interact and ask questions. They have a lot of resistance thus far to jumping in, with a couple exceptions. I polled them at the end to gauge their anxiety. “Who is feeling pretty nervous about what you are about to do?” All immediately raised hands without taking prompts from each other. This is encouraging. The silent voices make it hard to gauge whether this is disinterest, shyness, lack of any clue how to react, or other. Their expressed anxiety is a good sign that they understand the bigger picture of all this.