Family Oral History Project
Family Oral History Project You will be asked to interview a family member that you keep in contact with in this oral history project for English 101. Before you begin the interview steps, please consider the following: 1. Who in you family will you be interviewing and why? 2. The amount of time you will be spending with them. 3. Who in your family will be someone willing to be your oral history project interviewee. In your oral history project, I will ask that you spend a minimum of 2-3 hours with them in total for the total interview hours. I strongly recommend you have a minimum of 3 separate sessions for interviewing them, which comes to about 40 or more minutes per session. You will be asked to share the following things BEFORE the due date of your oral history project write-up: ? A list of questions you asked during any of the sessions you had with your family member; ? A list of notes that you recorded during this interview session; ? And a list of personal things you jotted down for things you potentially want to include in your project. Your Family Oral History Project should be a minimum of 3 full pages in length that includes: A. MLA Style, including format and setup (as weve been doing with all other work). B. 100 or more words of transcription – includes word-for-word answers that your interviewee said; C. 5 or more revealing or helpful questions, in quotation marks, that you asked during the interview which helped you learn specific things about your family member; D. Related to B, a minimum of 5 significant things you learned about your family member; E. A discussion of a specific place, time, and/or social, political, or cultural movement the family member has experienced and/or participated in. F. A (brief) note about what you are interested in looking more into for research as it relates to D, above. This will be serve as the prologue, or preview for your Oral History Research Project. Helpful Resources: 1. Conducting Oral Histories with Family Members by UCLA Library (click) 2. NYPL Community Oral History Project (click) 3. Step-by-Step Guide to Oral History (click) 4. How to Conduct Your Own Oral History Project by The American Association of University Women (AAUW) (click) 5. Designing an Oral History Project by Doug Boyd (click)? Work Cited Last name, First name. Personal Interview. Day Month Year. Yi, John. Personal Interview. 12 October 2020. ? Your Name John Yi English 101 B13CZ 25 March 2019 Suggested Template for Family Oral History Project Suggestions for first para: Start with introducing your interviewee – Who? What? Where? When? A brief preview or overview of what you will discuss in this project as a way to set up the readers. Suggestions for body paragraphs: Focus on one area, idea, discussion, experience, and so forth, of your interviewees life that you find significant and/or compelling to discuss. Get into the details of this aspect of their life. You want to capture and share a word-for-word soundbyte of what they said during the interview – it can be roughly 3 sentences. This is where your transcription and field notes come in handy! You can share more, but try not to share more than 6 sentences. I would break them up into little 1-2 line quotes throughout body paragraphs. You should also share specific questions you asked by quoting them as you share out things you learned about your interviewee. Towards the end of your project, you should discuss briefly what interest you have about research topic or interest that connects and/or relates, loosely or closely, a social, cultural, or socio-historical element that emerged in the interview. That is, let readers know what you hope to do for research in terms of something that sparked your intellectual curiosity on a relevant social, or cultural area that you may not know the answer to. Suggestions for your closing: You are invited to think about what you gained, or learned from completing this project, as well as any other relevant and/or person things you wish to share related to a takeaway, a AHA moment, a resolution, a major lesson, a teaching moment, etc. A good way to think about the closing would be address the So what? question. That is, what is the purpose of showing your unique family or history project? Did this draw you and your interviewee closer? If so, in what way(s)? What is something to be learned from this significant work which potentially will never be shared, or spoken about, with anyone ever again? ? Work Cited Last Name, First Name of interviewee. Personal Interview. Day January 2019.
