Oral history in the classroom: Linking historical research and history education

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Oral history in the classroom Linking historical
research and history education

• Voices of the past Historical research, new
  trends and findings and their value for teaching

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Background to PhD research

• South African Prisoner-of-War Experience during
  and after World War II 1939 c.1950
• Oral history
• 12 interviews during 2010 and 2011 (86 97)
• Diaries
• Memoirs
• Archival research
• Secondary sources

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POW Experience 1939 1945

• General experience

• Individual experience

• Decision to volunteering
• Battle experiences
• Capture
• Camp life
• Escape / liberation
• Homecoming

• Formed by attitude (pessimist or optimist)
• Reactions to external events
• Interpersonal relationships with enemies allies
  (extrovert or introvert)
• Ability to adapt

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Oral testimony history education?
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• In the classroom...

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Historical context (Husbands, C. 2003. What is
History Teaching? Language, ideas and meaning in
learning about the past. Open University Press.)

• Context Historical understanding
• Learners see past as pre-existing present
• Fail to identify the ways in which people in the
  past were similar to us.
• fail to grasp historical actors intentions in
  choosing particular course of action.
• Fail to see underlying causal connections
  between different actions and events.
• lack historical frame of reference ... unable
  to locate individual actions and events in the
  range of possible actions, or beliefs available
  to historical actors.

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Achieving historical understanding...

• Hard understandings (i.e. Who, what, where,
  when...)
• Context (values, beliefs, ideas...)
• Expose learners to wide range of models for
  causal connection in history
• Understand events had multiple causes and
• Varying importance
• Understand that events had different social,
  economic, political and religious causes or
• Had interconnected causes

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• Learners mini-theories
• Gut lay mini-theories
• Restructure or create new mini-theories
• Learners encounter past through
• Events, objects, evidence (Husbands Museum
  education)
• Abstract ideas (beliefs ideas of past)
• Historical Fact Context Historical
  understanding

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Historical facts

• Historical facts Fall of Tobruk on 21 June 1942
• British 8th Army
• General HB Klopper (2nd South Africa Division)
• General Erwin Rommel
• Union Defence Force (volunteers)
• 30 000 Allied Troops captured
• 10 722 South Africans captured

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Fact mini-theories ? historical understanding

• Mini-theory reaction on issue of volunteers
• gut mini-theories they were stupid
• Lay mini-theories media
• Fictional popular NOT historically accurate

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Using oral testimony to clarify historical
context and achieve historical understanding
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Context

• Extracts from oral testimony
• ...also why did I volunteer? Because I was 17,
  there was a war on and I didnt want to miss it,
  you know it was sort of a boys adventure story.
• Well at 19 years old we obviously had a pretty
  fair idea of right and wrong and wed been
  recognising over the years that Hitler was a
  threat to peace and ruining the lives of a
  great many people and so I think we joined up out
  of principle...
• when war started I thought Ill go and do my
  bit, and I volunteered when I was 17 telling them
  I was 18 as all kids did in those days ...

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Critical analysis of testimony

• Why do men go to war? (present)
• What does each extract tell you about why each
  man decided to volunteer?
• What does the extract reveal about the mans
  personality / sense of responsibility? (values
  beliefs, i.e. context)
• Why did he say ....?
• Why did these men go to war? (past)

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• Examine individual experience
• Restructure understanding of motivation
• Recognise multiple causes for events /
  circumstances
• Understand beliefs and abstract ideas of those
  involved in past events
• Opportunity for learners to link their
  perceptions (mini-theories) to historical
  framework

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Oral testimony links the present to the past