In “Miracle Fair”, Nobel Laureate poet Wislawa Szymborska celebrates the everyday wonders of our seemingly uneventful lives. Oral history reflects this spirit of commonplace miracles. It attempts to capture the lives of persons who most often have gone unnoticed and celebrates seemingly-insignificant experiences. If we bother to look closely and with imagination, we will understand what Leo Tolstoy meant when he said that the life of an ordinary person could be the most complex piece of literature if it were captured properly.

Phil Donovan never depended on technology for his fishery. "I know every mark now just the same as I did 60 or 70 years ago."

Oral history offers literacy educators and their students opportunities to explore, capture, and celebrate their lives and those of others in their communities. It provides a way for unheard or silenced voices to be heard. Moreover, oral history equips us educators with a viable methodology we can use to help our students become more proficient readers and writers.

Recording and Being Recorded
Community-based literacy programs throughout Canada and the United States have often made effective use of oral history. We can find collections of life stories told by people from different backgrounds and various contexts. Whether hunting tales told by Native elders in Nunavut or sea stories told by the fishers of Newfoundland, these oral history texts provide us with valuable resources to use with our students. Likewise, they serve as models which we can emulate in our own programs.

Quite often these oral history collections have been recorded and written by literacy instructors or others involved in literacy work. That is, they have captured their students’ life experiences by using some variation of the Language Experience Approach (LEA) in which the student dictates a story while the instructor writes it. LEA is a fine instructional methodology with a decades-long record of effectiveness. We recommend its continued use where appropriate.

What we want to advocate and briefly describe is how to utilize oral history in the literacy program by having adult students actually do the recording. By providing students with the appropriate structure, support, and practical skills, we can help them become the interviewers, recorders, and oral historians of their own communities. This will greatly enhance their literacy abilities and foster their sense of being literacy producers.

1) Explore a Topic
Helping adult literacy students become oral historians is an exciting project which will be beneficial to your students, you, and the local community. It begins with a discussion of the project and an on-going commitment of all involved to explore, capture in print, and celebrate the uniqueness of particular lives and local history. Depending upon your particular context, certain themes or topics will surface, for example, in Atlantic Canada the changes in the fishery inevitably emerge.

2) Rehearse in Class
Once your students and you agree on a topic (let’s use as an example different kinds of work in the community), then it is important to prepare for the actual interviews. Such preparation will include the following: determination of particular people to interview; investigation through reading and discussion of the particular jobs; generation of possible questions to ask the interviewee; demonstration of brief note-taking strategies; utilization of the tape recorder; and opportunities to role play the interview with peers.

We stress that classroom preparation is vitally important; without it, these efforts will either fail or produce lackluster results. We suggest that your students prepare to interview in teams of two. As partners they will be able to support each other, and a more proficient reader and writer will be able to assist one with lesser abilities. Your modelling of note-taking, asking open-ended questions, and using the tape recorder in an unobtrusive manner will help the students then practice among themselves. It is better to spend too much time in such preparation than too little.

3) Interview in the Community
Once the students feel confident, they will go out into the community equipped with a small tape recorder (this is a must), list of possible questions, and perhaps a camera; as a team they will meet with their interviewee at a pre-arranged time and place. (We recommend a quiet setting on the interviewee’s home ground.) The interview should be an informal conversation but should be structured around the topic at hand. It’s too easy to lose focus and ramble on to many other subjects; this can result in a less-useful and hard-to-work-with interview. One or both of the interviewers will take brief notes (words or phrases) which might help them highlight important parts of the audio tape. If appropriate, and if the interviewee agrees, photographs might be taken, for example, a boat builder from Digby Neck next to his boat or a shopkeeper from Trail among her shelves and counters of goods.

Louise Belbin made fish on the beaches at Grand Bank, Newfoundland. "You had to go on the beach to earn a few dollars...That was in the depression years, and we knowed it was a depression too."

4) Work with the Interview Data
During this phase of the work, students practice and celebrate their own literacies. They start by listening to their interview, absorbing the unique voice and language of the speaker, and the pulse of the story. Students might replay the tape two or three times before they begin to identify content chunks. This can be done by using the counter that is a standard feature of most recording units. Specific sentences and sections can be transcribed at the computer or with pen and paper. Hours of tape produces hundreds of typed pages and that project is more than many professionals can manage. That is why we place emphasis on planning before entering the interview setting, chunking the material, and making selections for transcribing.

Throughout this process, students will be engaged in meaningful reading and writing. They might be exposed to new content, the particular vocabulary of a trade or time, and the importance of voice, a sadly neglected component of some adult literacy programs. Most importantly, oral history provides a context to learn standard written English without diminishing the dialect of the speaker. Students also assume the role of structural editor, something few have ever experienced, as they make decisions about the content to be used, and how oral language can be transposed into print for the reader.

5) Publication and Beyond
As individual stories are finalized, students share the texts. At this stage, the classroom is again provided with more opportunities for reading and writing. Now many publication matters arise. There are many ways to engage students in the final proofread, organization and launch of the publication. We recommend, whenever possible, that each student be given an opportunity to both share a strength and apply new knowledge.

Useful References
There are various sources for practical information on gathering and using oral histories with students of all ages. Two that we like are cited below.

Brown, Cynthia Stokes. (1988). Like it was: A complete guide to writing oral history. New York: Teachers & Writers Collaborative.

Howarth, Ken. (1998). Oral history: A handbook. United Kingdom: Sutton Publishing Ltd.

* About the authors
Frank teaches at the St. Cloud State University in Minnesota. Helen is a consultant with Educational Planning and Design Associates in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Frank and Helen have designed distance education programs for literacy instructors and students.