Learning History by Talking

Tara Smith at A Teaching Life has begun a new meme, Social Studies Wednesdays, which can connect to all teachers. Please join her by posting your blog with ideas of work with students.  

Wouldn't it be great to have interviewed this woman?

             Sometimes people ask me what are my favorite assignments and I'd like to tell you briefly about one.  As the years pass, older people leave us, and I believe we educators are missing opportunities for students to meet elders to discover their lives when they were young.  Beginning experiences in interviewing help students' confidence, so the very first day, an assignment is to interview a classmate for the class scrapbook.  This scrapbook is a record, a history of this year's class.  There is a group that is in charge of creating the actual book's design, but everyone has a chance to add to it.  By pairing up students for interviews on the first day, they have the opportunity to meet a classmate they might not know so well, a good first step in talking with someone 'almost' new.



      There are other opportunities for interviewing that help students feel comfortable:  they interview parents to discover the origin of their names, interview other teachers to discover something interesting to tell about those teachers, interview classmates about favorite books, and so on.
       The small assignments lead to the culminating assignment, a history research project to find an area of history where there is a possibility of finding a living person to talk with, to find out their own experience during that time.  Parent and staff help was asked to find the people who might be interviewees.  Parent help was enlisted to drive students to the interview.  The interview was conducted, written as if the person was telling his or her story, photos were taken.  Then, before the final draft was accepted, a follow-up visit to the person interviewed was needed to get permission to publish.  After all that, all the research checked, the revisions approved, a final copy was made for the person interviewed and a class celebration and sharing occurred with the interviewees attending.  It was a celebration of those life experiences, of the learning involved, and of the very hard work accomplished to put it all together.  
            It is a powerful culmination of learning about history from one who lived it.  To young students, it is way better than reading in a history book.  That is why it is my favorite assignment.