Now in its eighth year, Telling Their Stories (www.tellingstories.org) is an award-winning website that houses professional-style interviews with elders who have witnessed key events of the 20th century.
After doing the necessary background research and learning interview techniques, high school students at the Urban School of San Francisco (California) conduct videotape interviews at the homes of San Francisco Bay-area residents. Afterwards, they transcribe each two-plus-hour interview to produce full-text and full-motion video content available to teachers and students around the world. Current topics include interviews with survivors of the Holocaust, liberators and witnesses of the Nazi concentration camps, Japanese Americans interned during World War II, and residents of the San Francisco's traditionally black Fillmore district displaced by re-development.
To date, the website contains over 50 interviews, each available in full text and video. The site is designed for users to “read, watch, and listen” to the interviews, thus strengthening the accessibility and impact of each story. Most interviews are conducted at the home of each elder, although some have been filmed at the school or at a nearby community center. A small mobile studio containing professional digital video equipment is quickly set-up at each location. After the interview, students produce hundreds of short movie clips and lengthy transcriptions using their laptop computers. A team of volunteer parents then proofs each interview, assuring accurate transcriptions.
Once complete, the interviews, are published on Urban School’s oral history website — http://www.tellingstories.org/. Afterwards, DVDs are created and distributed free of charge to the families of the elders.
An important secondary goal of the project is to encourage other schools across the nation to implement similar programs. To that end, the Urban School holds annual workshops to train teachers in how to start and run similar programs at their schools. The first formal collaboration has taken root in the McComb School District in McComb, Mississippi. As the school’s director of technology, I traveled to McComb to train teachers and students and participate in student-conducted interviews of local witnesses and participants of the civil rights struggles in the 1950s and ’60s.
I hope you find the site interesting, and consider adapting the program in your own school community. It’s an incredible learning experience for the students involved, and a great way to learn firsthand perspectives on key events in history.
For more information, visit Telling Their Stories at www.tellingstories.org.