Voices of Experience: Oral History in the ClassroomRoundtable

Marjorie McLellan: Tell us about your community, how you came to adopt oral history as a teaching strategy, and the project that you've developed with your students. Rich Nixon: We are a rural district, and it's a fairly large high school, about 1,300 students, four grades. The county is adjacent to the county that has the capital city of Raleigh, and yet there's quite a difference in the two counties. Our county is very agricultural. Tobacco is still the most important crop. As a result, it doesn't have anything like the type of population that you have in Wake County, where Raleigh is. However, the interstate has come through, and now people can live in the western part of our district and get to Raleigh and the Research Triangle just about as quick as they could if they lived in the northern parts of the city. So we're getting into part of our district a pretty good influx of people who are not natives of the county, and they're bringing in new experiences, new frames of reference. They look outside the county for their jobs, which is changing our makeup. I teach United States history courses to 11 th graders, and over the past four or five years I've become interested in oral history as a way of taking advantage of resources in the community. I frequently do a lot of small types of projects, sometimes nothing more than an assignment to go home and talk to Momma and Daddy about something. Usually I'll have the students write it down and come in and talk about it. Every once in a while I get ambitious, and we go into some major project. I had one we started, and my ambition was more than my capabilities. We got into it, did the interviews, wrote it up, and kind of stalled. The next year I got better organized and found a bit of funding and was able to put together a book on the oral history of the fifties in the local community. Audience: How did you pick that topic? Nixon: When I first started teaching, I said to my students, "Go talk to your grandparents about the Great Depression." And along the line you realize that your students' grandparents weren't alive during the Depression. They weren't that old. I realized that we're losing resources, people are passing away, and their stories are going with them. So a year before we did this project, I worked with the class on talking to their grandparents about the World War II experience at home. I sent the kids forth, and they came back with all this great stuff. Then I said, "I'm going to start looking for other people's advice on how to do it," and came across things like Foxfire says that everything comes from student in volvement, and theyfre responsible for all of that