Far Travelers Project Reflections on Teaching Oral History Washburn University , Spring 2006 (Rich Text Version) Patricia Michaelis, Ph.D. Director, Kansas State Historical Society Library & Archives In the spring of 2006, I was asked to teach a Washburn class in oral history with the students interviewing Chinese Americans. As I planned the activities for the class, I realized that I could only teach the procedures and best practices of oral history. I could share with students what was necessary to be prepared conduct an oral history interview. However, I could not make them good oral history interviewers as the qualities of good oral history interviewing are almost impossible to teach. These include being a good questioner and a good listener. By this I mean that the interviewer needs to know enough about the background of the interviewee to ask relevant questions. The interviewer also needs to be a good listener and a quick thinker to follow up with additional questions when an interview takes an unexpected turn or to probe deeper on topics of historical interest. Traditionally, oral histories have been done with groups of people who were not likely to record their own stories in written documents such as reminiscences and/or diaries and personal journals. Oral histories can also document emotions and feeling that may be difficult to document in other ways. Projects often have a specific focus so information on a related topic is gathered from a number of people. Once a significant number of interviews have been collected, a researcher can study the interviews and compare and/or contrast the experiences of the interviewees to identify trends or make generalizations. As recording equipment has become much more accessible, many people are recording the experiences of family and friends. But these more casual interviews, while they might serve the needs of the person doing the interviewing, usually are not done in a way that would make them useful to historians researching broader topics. Just because someone is old does not mean that a good interview will magically be created. I don't mean to imply that the average person's life experiences aren't worth recording. They are but the interviewer needs to understand the purpose of the interview. The purpose of the interview could be to record the highlights of someone's life for family history purposes. In this case, questions would be focused on family members and family experiences. Questions could what events had an impact on the person's life and how he/she was effected by them. Other questions could focus on how technological advancements changed their daily life. For family histories, the interviewer would want to ask questions about family traditions and how they had been adapted over time. Conducting a good oral interview, particularly one that is meant to provide information that can be used to document a particular event or experience is time consuming. The purpose of the project needs to be defined. Potential interview subjects need to be identified. Questions need to be developed. This is one of the most difficult parts because the questions serve only as a starting point. The interviewer needs to be flexible. Questions may be too general or need to be reworded because they are unclear. I mentioned earlier that being a good questioner is once of the keys to obtaining a good oral history. It is also the hardest skill to try to develop in a one semester class. During this class, the students did some limited interviewing of each other to elicit basic demographic information. The students also critiqued transcripts from a previous Kansas State Historical Society oral history project. However, it wasn't until they were in their own interviews that the students really understood how the quality of the questions, their knowledge of the context of their interviewee's experiences, and the ability to follow up on good information provided by the interviewee really became apparent. The following quote from one student's reaction paper illustrates this: “Being prepared for the interview will make it go much smoother than not being prepared. Be flexible in your questions. Use them as a guide but the interviewee's answers also steer you. How they answer might lead into a different direction that you had not thought about.” Another student wrote: “Perhaps it was the phrasing of the questions that deterred the interviewee from opening up more in the response. For example, when I asked about cultural differences, my statement was too general, where it might have been more specific.” Another student was very perceptive about the need for patience in waiting for the interviewee to respond. The student wrote “While watching the tape, I noticed that I suggested a lot of words. It sounded natural if we were only talking, but in an interview, i should let the interviewee speak. Also, I should have let the interviewee talk and not said 'yeas, exactly, etc.'” Doing oral history in the context of a class with a specific focus allows a single interview to be compared with other interviews. This makes the “whole” (a group of interviews on a related topic) more valuable to potential researchers. For this class, the focus of the interviews were Chinese and Taiwan-born immigrants in the Topeka area. We developed the questions as a class to include demographic information, reasons for coming to the United States , their experiences here, and comparisons of life in Topeka compared to their life in China . While the class was not large enough to create a true sampling of Chinese immigrants/Americans in Topeka , the interviews conducted by the class will be preserved at the Kansas State Historical Society and can serve as a starting point for any future projects. The interviews by the students document the experiences of a small number of Chinese Americans who came to the United States for various reasons, at various ages, and what has been different about life in the U.S. from that in China . I believe the students that enrolled in this class gained two unexpected benefits. The first was their inevitable comparisons of their own lives in the United States to that of their interviewees and what they learned about life in 20 th century China . Many of the interviewees came to the United States for educational opportunities and a better life. The second unexpected benefit was expressed by one student as follows: I cam away with a sense of fulfillment for making a contribution to the gathering of life histories. I felt privileged to have taken part in history of this sort.” The students in this class helped document an aspect of Topeka history that has not been documented previously. The information gathered will be available to researchers that want to study Topeka , Kansas or U.S. History because Chinese American immigration fits into trends in U. S. and Chinese history. They learned the best practices for conducting oral history. The students learned about their interviewees but also about themselves. I appreciate the opportunity to be part of this class. It was an opportunity to help the students put theory into practice and to provide a perspective on history outside of the standard textbook.