(Download) "Collecting Stories About Strip-Mining: Using Oral History in the Classroom." by Teaching History: A Journal of Methods * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Collecting Stories About Strip-Mining: Using Oral History in the Classroom.
- Author : Teaching History: A Journal of Methods
- Release Date : January 22, 2003
- Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 189 KB
Description
The study of history has always been an interdisciplinary exercise that borrows generously from the methods and insights provided by other disciplines, but the narrative method continues to remain central to the discipline of history. Telling stories as a method of explaining how things have changed or why things are the way they are is at the heart of most historical endeavors. Despite the centrality of story-telling to the discipline of history, until relatively recently, historians have given little critical consideration to the narrative as a method of explanation, and non-historians, our students among them, even less so. Most of the students in my classroom enter with the understanding that history is merely a series of stories, and that stories are merely a collection of facts. It is important, however, to make students of history aware that the narrative is a method of explanation, that story-telling is not merely the process of ordering a series of facts. One of the most valuable lessons students of history can learn, I believe, is that narratives can be constructed in ways that will lead different storytellers (and their audiences) to quite different conclusions. The use of oral history in the classroom can be an effective method to help students understand the power of the narrative. Inviting students to examine how we tell stories about transformations in the natural world can be a valuable learning tool in the environmental history course as well. In "A Place for Stories: Nature, History and Narrative," William Cronon tells us that "When we choose a plot to order our environmental histories, we give them a unity that neither nature nor the past possesses so clearly." (1) Cronon's observation can be demonstrated successfully in the environmental history classroom through the use of oral history to explore local or regional stories about environmental change. What follows is a description of one peculiarly local example, unique to the time and place where I teach. Nonetheless, it might inspire others teaching environmental history, local history, or even more broadly defined American history courses to consider employing oral history to examine their own local or regional stories.
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