Oral History Instructional Strategy List

The best prevention is an engaging, authentic lesson that applies to the real world and connects to students’ lives and their communities.

Students

• Inquire into topics that are deeply relevant to them, can become powerfully engaged in projects that force them to question their worlds and their conceptions of what is fair.
• Work collaboratively
• Exercise choice
• Write about topics that are relevant to them, and engage in inquiry around genuinely complex social questions.
• Real writing, in a real-world genre, and for an authentic audience helped the students’ writing improve—they wrote something that the whole world might see.

Teachers

• Ask essential questions at the right times
• Create a classroom environments in which students are encouraged to tackle difficult subject matter
• Allow students to work as a community to construct their own ideas about the ways in which our society is unjust and their own alternative visions of the future.
• Engage students in authentic writing about culturally and socially relevant subject matter through the use of the internet.
• Collaboration must be encouraged strategically and specifically.
• Community building is necessary before students will work productively and noncompetitively with each other (at say, the end of the school year).
• With collective authorship and collaboration, teachers need to watch for students’ deeply rooted assumptions of individualism and competition.
• Establish the type of community in which students can act as both co-teachers and co-learners.
• Anticipatory set, the teacher had the students use sticky notes (then chart paper) to record questions and connections (often to their families and life experiences) with a text/story/image/primary source.
• As a whole group discussion, the teacher centered on three essential questions.
• Preview and walk through the technology (wiki/website)
• Choose pseudonyms
• Group brainstorm about what they would like to learn about the topic
• Rubric provides the guidelines and expectations
• Central question
• 40-minute pre- and post- writing assessments
• Individual writing (drafts), revisions, expansions, and edits (done by all four members of the groups) to final version.
• Conferences with teacher a
• Use outlines for research
• Read and discuss each other’s contributions to the wikis
• Think, pair, share into not only a deeper understanding of the English language, but also of the world in which they live.

Tech

• Wikis are a particularly promising technology because of the ways in which they facilitate collaboration while allowing teachers to monitor individual students. Collaborate space: website, wiki wikispaces.com or pbwiki.com

Examples
oralhistoriesdelafrontera.wikispaces.com, oral history, bilingual site. Lists of people to interview, drafted questions, interviews, interviews into vivid narratives and difficult experiences.