Exploring the Red River: Gathering Stories
Local history and natural history are exciting topics in classrooms because of their potential for involving families in school life. Many family members will have firsthand knowledge of these topics and can be "experts" at home and in the classroom.
Encourage parents and grandparents to tell stories at home about life along the Red River in the past. Invite them to write their stories and send them to school. Duplicate these first-person stories for students to read and discuss.
Incorporate artwork by asking students to draw pictures of how they believe places in the Red River basin appeared in the past, using the information they have gathered. Discuss the drawings. Do they make sense with what the class knows? Can they be used in books, displays, or other projects?
Use Oral History
Oral history is an important research technique for studying local history. Oral history involves interviewing persons with firsthand knowledge of historical events, asking questions that relate directly to specific research topics, and recording and transcribing the interviews. After your class chooses its specific research questions, discuss whether oral history interviews would provide valuable information. Brainstorm possible questions: What do local residents remember about floods of the Red River? Are there good fishing stories to be told? Can anyone remember crossing the Red on a ferry? List the questions and work during a whole-class discussion to put them in order for interviews. Then type and reproduce the list for use with multiple interviews.
Discuss how your class will use the oral history interviews. Will you use the interviews as primary sources for other research projects? Will you place the tapes or complete transcripts of the interviews in the school or local library? Will you publish excerpts of interviews in a magzine or on an Internet site?
You will need one or more good tape recorders and a supply of high-quality cassette tapes and batteries. Contact local merchants to ask for donations, or look for families that can lend or donate the equipment.
Next, put out a call for oral history subjects. Advertise your project in flyers to parents, the school newsletter, and with a news release to the local newspaper. Schedule times for interview subjects to come to the classroom or perhaps a quiet corner of the school library.
Give students time to practice conducting oral history interviews in the classroom before bringing in interview subjects. Allow all of the students to experiment with the tape recorders. Decide who will conduct the interviews, who will write back-up notes, and whether anyone will photograph the subjects during interviews.
Test recorders to make sure they are working properly. Buy a supply of long cassette tapes (90 or 120 minutes) so that interviewers will not have to interrupt interviews to turn over the tapes. Buy extra batteries in case the recorder runs down.
Oral History Tips
These tips will help you and the students conduct your oral history interviews:
Ask each interview subject for the following information:
Full name (ask for the spelling)
Birth date and birth place
When the person first lived in your community
Education (attended high school? college?)
Occupation
Full names of parents and grandparents
Many oral history subjects will "wander" from the topic, which can give you extra information that you did not expect. Keep an eye on your watch so that you manage to get answers to all of your basic research questions during the time that is available. You can schedule a second interview to get more information on other topics.
Don't hesitate to ask the subject to repeat information that you do not understand, or to spell unusual names or words.
Ask "what year was that?" often.
If the subject refers to photographs, maps, or other persons or items during the interview, interrupt politely to fully
identify those. (This will help future researchers who listen to the interview or read a transcript.)
Glance at the recorder often to be sure the tape is winding.
Label tapes immediately after each interview with the subject's name and the date of the interview.
Someone will have to type each recorded interview. Parents or other community members may volunteer to help with this task, or you may be able to involve students in a keyboarding class.
© Red River Rural Schools Partnership 1998
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