Authentic Encounters: Oral history in the classroom

This piece was first published on the Oral History Society blog last month here.

Since September 2023, alongside teaching A-level History, I have been working as a Learning Facilitator in the British Library’s Learning Team, running workshops as part of its schools programme. This role has given me the opportunity to introduce learners to oral history through listening to clips of recorded interviews sourced from the Library’s vast sound archive. 

My own experiences using oral history as a learning tool go back around fifteen years. In the decade before the pandemic, I brought my history students to the British Library for a bespoke workshop on Indian independence and partition organised by the Library’s Learning team, Mary Stewart (Oral History) and Curators Antonia Moon and John O’Brien (India Office Records). In addition to handling documents from the India Office Records, one of the most memorable parts of the workshop was the oral history element. 

I have fond memories of collectively listening to the voices of Louis Mountbatten, Tigger Ramsay Brown talking about her childhood in India as a daughter of a British civil servant and Gilli Salvat, an Anglo-Indian woman who moved to England as a child in 1947. The workshop offered a rare opportunity to engage learners in a unique and intimate way through listening to individual testimonies. 

Between 2021 and 2023, my teaching colleague John Siblon and I worked with members of the British Library’s Learning Team to co-develop a student and teacher guide for the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage: Voices of Partition project. This differed from the workshop in that we were able to focus on a plurality of voices from those directly affected by the violence of partition. As a way to support students and teachers navigating these challenging and turbulent testimonies, I developed a specific approach to listening to oral histories. Working with my British Library colleague Chandan Mahal, we ran Continuing Professional Development (CPD) sessions modelling our approach at the British Library in December 2022, at the Schools History Project Conference in July 2023 and, most recently, at the Oral History Festival in July 2024. 

In her video for the Historical Association, oral historian Julia Letts provides the following helpful guidance on using oral history in the classroom:  

•  emphasise the importance of hearing audio rather than just reading transcripts 
•  use relevant, clear, short clips (maximum 90 seconds) that provide different viewpoints 
•  explain the relevant context and use other sources to support learning 
•  play each clip at least twice to allow for deep listening ‘so that students can really listen to what’s said and what’s meant and understand that those are not always the same thing.’ (Letts, 2022) 
•  With younger children, deliver a short quiz afterwards to pick out words and phrases used, and encourage learners to come up with follow-up questions as a way of helping them prepare for their interview situations 
•  With older students, discuss the role of the interviewer and whether the question asked affected the response; lead to a discussion around memory and reliability, and consider with them issues of potential bias, both from the interviewer and the interviewee. 

My work has integrated an additional step to this process, described here as ‘interactive listening,’ in that it seeks to prepare learners for an authentic encounter with an interviewee. Before listening to the extract, learners are given time and space to clear their minds and jot down some thoughts around the following questions: 

• Given what you already know, what are you expecting to hear in the interview? 
• What questions might the interviewer ask, and how might the interviewee respond? 

In relation to the first question, learners are encouraged to draw on their own contextual knowledge, and how this might inform what is going to be said. Beyond content, learners are encouraged to consider other factors, including tone, pace, accent, emphasis, and emotion, as well as hesitations, pauses and silences.  

This finely tuned listening is designed to cultivate an empathetic meeting of minds between listener and testimony. There is also a motivational aspect, as learners all have ‘skin in the game’ (thanks to Mary Stewart for this observation!) as learners are keen to find out what was actually said, thereby becoming actively engaged in the listening process. 

The second question is designed to remind listeners that the testimony is not a monologue but a dynamic interaction between two people. Far from being an invisible presence, the interviewer has a crucial part to play in what unfolds and how the questions might affect the interviewer’s recollections. The clip is then played twice, with learners making notes or doodles as they listen. Following the clip, learners are asked to consider the following: 

• What did you find out, and was it line with what you were expecting? 
• Were there any surprises and/or omissions? 
• What follow-up questions would you like to have asked? 

Learners are given time to reflect on what they have heard and how it compares to what they were expecting. The follow-up question continues the theme of interactive listening, as the learners are part of the exchange, mentally contributing to the dynamic between interviewer and interviewee. It also presents learners with the idea that there is a ‘live’ element to oral history: unlike other primary sources, the interaction between interviewer and interviewee is a contributory factor in the co-construction of knowledge production. Though high-level, this kind of thinking can become modelled and accessible to younger learners. 

In terms of next steps, there are plenty of opportunities to develop this strategy, with both the Voices of Partition and Windrush Voices workshops, the latter offered to primary and secondary students as part of the schools programme. Teachers who have brought learners to the Windrush Voices workshop have commented on how they intend to use the approach.

“You have inspired me to use oral history in a very creative way. I loved the questions and the simplicity of it. So much came out of a 2 minute clip!”

This is encouraging and suggests that the strategy can empower teachers to use oral history in their own classrooms. Through incorporating clips from recorded interviews, teachers can provide their learners with a range of alternative viewpoints, cultivating greater empathy through encountering individual life stories. The strategy could also encourage learners to become more aware of the dynamics in contemporaneous interviews that they encounter online and in the news media. In this way, engagement with oral history can play an important role in helping to cultivate critical thinking skills, both within and beyond the classroom.  

Thank you to all those involved in developing this work: members of the Learning Team at the British Library, Mary Stewart, all those who participated in the CPD sessions, Hafiza Ali and her students at Hungerford School, and, crucially, to the interviewees themselves: Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay (interviewed by Charles Allen, 1975 – 76), Iftkahar Ahmed and Poonam Joshi (interviewed by Kavita Puri, 2017) for Voices of Partition and Linton Kwesi Johnson (interviewed by Sarah O’Reilly, 2014 – 15) for Windrush Voices.

Debbie teaches history and politics at City and Islington Sixth Form College in London and leads on professional development and practitioner research; she is also a learning facilitator at the British Library and on the education team at UK Jewish Film.