Preserving Local History: How Do You Do Oral History Research?

1. Choosing a topic
You need to have some sort of framework for the research in order get the project going. It can either be very general (the history of your town) or very specific (the 1927 flood). It doesn’t really matter what you choose as long as it’s relevant to your town and a lot of people are likely to know something about it. Raising hops would be a difficult topic to research because it’s beyond most people’s memory; home butter production would work well because many people remember doing it. The granite industry is a good topic for Barre or Bethel but the woolen mills would be a better topic for Winooski or Fair Haven.

Whatever you choose, the focus of the project is likely to change as you move along. You may set out to find out about local water-powered industries and find that you’re getting lots of interesting information about local ethnic groups as well. In that case, you may want to expand your topic or refocus it. Remember to be open and flexible; ultimately, the project will be shaped by the people your students interview.

Life histories are always a fine place to begin; everyday life in the remembered past is another good focus. Industrial history and occupational culture—from factory to quarry to farm—are potentially rich topics to explore. In towns like Barre or West Rutland, which have culturally diverse populations, ethnic traditions, can be a rewarding research topic. Special features, whether natural or man-made—Lake Champlain in Addison and the border in Derby Line—are usually a wonderful source of interesting stories. And families themselves, their history, heritage, and traditions, are a microcosm of Vermont and American experience. These are a few general suggestions, but as you can see, the list is potentially endless.

2. Finding people to interview.
Finding the right people (referred to as informants by folklorists and other researchers) is of, course, key to the success of your project. Who they are depends on how you focus the project. If you decide to collect life histories, you may want to contact the activity director at your local senior center or nursing home. If you decide to explore ethnic traditions, you may want to contact the leader of a cultural or religious organization in your community.

Whatever your project, be sure to take advantage of local resources. Through the senior center, your historical society, the county agent, or a church group you may be able to enlist the help of an interested person who knows all the right people to talk to. If you’re lucky, he or she may even be willing to help set up contacts and introduce the project to other members of their organization.

Don’t hesitate to involve parents. The project will be enriched by their suggestions, and their enthusiasm and support will make it easier for children to follow through with the interviews. Parents may have good suggestions for people to interview, and you may also need their help getting children to and from the interviews.

Don’t overlook people near at hand. Other members of the teaching staff, the custodian, cook, bus drivers, nurse, librarian—any and all may be just the people you’re looking for or may be able to suggest a friend or family member.

3. Helping students get acquainted with recording equipment
Although it’s possible to do an oral history project without using a tape recorder, I highly recommend recording interviews in order to make a permanent record of students’ research. Notetaking is a sophisticated skill that’s hard to do well and taking notes usually interferes with the flow of conversation. A tape recorder may seem daunting at first, but once you’ve learned the basics and logged some experience, recording quickly becomes second nature.

Most schools have several cassette players in their media center or in individual classrooms. Do a quick inventory and inquire about their availability. The number of recording machines you have will shape how your project develops. If you’re in a position to buy equipment, be aware that you get what you pay for—machines that make high quality recordings are expensive. Make sure each tape recorder is equipped with an external microphone that can be placed near the person who’s being recorded. If possible use machines that run on house current and gather a stock of long, light-weight extension cords; if your machines run only on batteries make sure you have plenty of replacements. Use only 60 or 90 minute cassettes—longer tapes tangle easily. You can buy voice quality tapes through the Folklife Center at cost in any quantity.

There are many kinds of recording equipment available and the only way to really understand how each works is to experiment with it. Have children work with a tape recorder in small groups. After it’s set up and recording, they should take turns moving around the microphone describing where they are. When they play back the recording they’ll be able to tell how their machine records at various distances and angles. If it has a dial for adjusting the recording level, this will be a good opportunity to experiment with those settings as well—normal conversation should come up to (but not into) the red area on the tape recorder’s VU meter. Have children also practice turning over and changing tapes. Emphasize that it’s important, check each time to make sure that the record button is down. If you need more specific information about equipment and recording procedure, consult the books by Edward Ives and Bruce Jackson listed in the bibliography.

4. Working with students to develop interviewing skills
An interview is a special kind of conversation; it’s easy once you get the hang of it but it takes some practice to master the basic skills. Before you turn your class loose interviewing, take some time to present basic information and give them a chance to experiment and see what’s involved. Eliot Wigginton of Foxfire has novice interviewers work first with a student or staff member who’s had some experience. That’s an ideal arrangement but doesn’t apply in most school settings. I used to have my students start out by interviewing each other or children from another grade. Interviewing a peer, however, is very different from interviewing an adult. So to thoroughly prepare your students, arrange to have parents come to school to be interviewed or involve other adults who work at your school. Have children interview in teams—smaller groups offer a greater opportunity for participation but, depending on the size of your class, require more recording equipment and more adults.
However you structure these interviews, spend some time brainstorming interview topics as a class and select a focus for everyone to follow. Work together to develop a list of possible questions. Talk about the art of asking good questions: for example, model questions that can be answered with a yes or a no and contrast them with open ended questions like “Tell me how you...” Write a single question on the board and discuss what different directions could result from that starting point. Discuss and model multiple questions on a single topic. I always think of Eliot Wigginton’s comment on this activity:

What you want an informant to do is get onto a topic and then begin to expand, and inside that expansion all kinds of things begin to happen. You try to get the kids to ask the same question a hundred different ways. You know, How did you do such and such? Well, did anybody else in your family do it differently? You keep them beating around inside that topic as much as possible— Have you ever heard of it being done another way? Then, if possible, you give the kids some information before they go out on a topic that they can carry with them, like other alternative means of doing something... You’ve got to make the kid realize that the people that he’s talking to know an awful lot more than they’re going to give up just through his short questions. They have to keep beating around in there.

In The Tape Recorded Interview, Edward Ives describes a questioning strategy that he terms a “probe”—a question asked to elicit more and better information—and gives several
examples:

Did that ever happen to you?
Did you ever do that yourself?
Can you give me an example of that?
I don’t quite see how that worked.
Can you explain?

Ives also talks about using silence as a probe. Interviewers often feel compelled to keep talking and cut people off before they are really finished. Experiment with keeping quiet. After he’s had a chance to pause and think, a speaker may continue with more detailed information or remember something he meant to mention earlier.
Obviously, experience is the best teacher, so when your students have completed a practice interview, have them listen to their tape and take notes on what went well and what didn’t. When everyone in the class has done one interview, talk together about what they’ve learned and what to keep in mind for future interviews. If feasible, use the practice interview as the basis for a project. When they listen to the tape to critique it, they can also transcribe any sections they find particularly interesting and use those transcripts as a basis for writing (or drawing, etc.) about the person they interviewed.

5. Helping students gather background information
Folklorists usually advocate carefully focused library and archival research to prepare for a fieldwork project because, as Eliot Wigginton notes above, the more you know, the more you’ll be able to find out. An anecdote of Edward Ives’ illustrates this point well:

1 remember one young girl, interviewing an old woodsman, who asked what they cut down trees with. “Well, girlie,” he said with a kind of amused contempt, “we used an ax, that’s what we used!” Girlie looked him right in the eye: “Poll or double-bit?” she said. You could feel his attitude change. “Well, mostly poll axes, but later on....” It comes down to this: The more you know about your informant’s life, work, and times, the better equipped you will be to carry on the interviews...

Depending on the age of your students, you may not be able to expect them to do much background research on their own. There are, however, lots of things you can do together as a class to get them thinking about the topic and to provide them with basic information. If, for example, your project explores the logging and lumbering industry in your town, you can read aloud from Robert Pike’s Tall Trees and Tough Men and watch the video “From Stump to Ship: A 1930 Logging Film.” The resources you draw on will obviously depend on the topic you’ve chosen to explore. Background information can sometimes be used in an interview to “prime the pump.” By bringing up suggestive topics—kitchen junkets, changing work, and chivarees are topics that work well in rural Vermont—the interviewer can jog a person’s memory and elicit a rich narrative of remembered experience.

Many oral history guides offer long and detailed lists of questions ready-made for people to use. I have purposely not included any in this handbook because I think it’s important for students to generate their own questions (as described in topic 4 above) and I’m concerned that interviewers too often become “question bound.” The most effective interviews are the most informal ones; reading from a questionnaire destroys the life and spontaneity of the interaction. People who are new to interviewing, however—whether children or adults—usually need the support and structure of a list of questions. So by all means develop an outline of subjects or a list of questions appropriate to your topic. But encourage children to use them as a back up—something they can refer to when necessary or perhaps even memorize—rather than using them as a script for the interview.