Oral history in the classroom: Linking historical research and history education

1. Oral history in the classroom: Linking historical research and history education Voices of the past: Historical research, new trends and findings and their value for teaching

2. Background to PhD research • South African Prisoner-of-War Experience during and after World War II: 1939 – c.1950 • Oral history • 12 interviews during 2010 and 2011 (86 – 97) • Diaries • Memoirs • Archival research • Secondary sources

3. POW Experience 1939 – 1945 General experience Individual experience Formed by attitude (pessimist or optimist) Reactions to external events Interpersonal relationships with enemies & allies (extrovert or introvert) Ability to adapt • Decision to volunteering • Battle experiences • Capture • Camp life • Escape / liberation • Homecoming

4. Oral testimony & history education?

5. In the classroom...

6. Historical context (Husbands, C. 2003. What is History Teaching? Language, ideas and meaning in learning about the past. Open University Press.) • Context = Historical understanding • Learners see past as ‘pre-existing present’ • Fail to ‘identify the ways in which people in the past were similar to us.’ • ‘fail to grasp historical actors’ intentions in choosing particular course of action.’ • Fail to see ‘underlying causal connections between different actions and events.’ • ‘lack historical frame of reference [...] unable to locate individual actions and events in the range of possible actions, or beliefs available to historical actors.’

7. Achieving historical understanding... • ‘Hard’ understandings (i.e. Who, what, where, when...) • Context (values, beliefs, ideas...) • Expose learners to wide range of models for causal connection in history • Understand events had multiple causes and • Varying importance • Understand that events had different social, economic, political and religious causes or • Had interconnected causes

8. Learners’ mini-theories • Gut & lay mini-theories • Restructure or create new mini-theories • Learners encounter past through • Events, objects, evidence (Husbands = Museum education) • Abstract ideas (beliefs & ideas of past) • Historical Fact + Context = Historical understanding

9. Historical facts • Historical facts: Fall of Tobruk on 21 June 1942 • British 8th Army • General HBKlopper (2nd South Africa Division) • General Erwin Rommel • Union Defence Force (volunteers) • 30 000 Allied Troops captured • 10 722 South Africans captured

10. Fact & mini-theories ≠ historical understanding • Mini-theory reaction on issue of volunteers: • gut mini-theories: ‘they were stupid’ • Lay mini-theories: media • Fictional & popular – NOT historically accurate

11. Using oral testimony to clarify historical context and achieve historical understanding

12. Context • Extracts from oral testimony • ‘...also why did I volunteer? Because I was 17, there was a war on and I didn’t want to miss it, you know it was sort of a boys’ adventure story.’ • ‘Well at 19 years old we obviously had a pretty fair idea of right and wrong and we’d been recognising over the years that Hitler was a threat to peace and ruining the lives of [a] great many people and so I think we joined up out of principle...’ • ‘when war started I thought I’ll go and do my bit, and I volunteered when I was 17 telling them I was 18 as all kids did in those days ...’

13. Critical analysis of testimony • Why do men go to war? (present) • What does each extract tell you about why each man decided to volunteer? • What does the extract reveal about the man’s personality / sense of responsibility? (values & beliefs, i.e. context) • Why did he say [....]? • Why did these men go to war? (past)

14. Examine individual experience • Restructure understanding of motivation • Recognise multiple causes for events / circumstances • Understand beliefs and abstract ideas of those involved in past events • Opportunity for learners to link their perceptions (mini-theories) to historical framework

15. Oral testimony links the present to the past