Mexico

V: COMMUNITY CONNECTIONS

Part 3: The Heritage Project and Oral History

Overview:
As students explore issues of culture, it is beneficial for them to draw parallels between the cultures of the world and the cultures that inform their own heritage. This assignment offers a number of methods for students to investigate their own ethnic, religious, and cultural backgrounds.

Procedure:

1. Explain to students that they will be presenting some aspect of their heritage to the class. They will need to speak to family or community members as part of their research. Their presentation will be supplemented with a visual aid. Some topic suggestions follow.
   
   • Teach students in the class an ethnic song or dance.
   • Share an ethnic recipe.
   • Explain an ethnic or religious custom or tradition.
   • Retell an ethnic myth or folk tale—perhaps one that was told to their parents or grandparents as children.
   • Retell a student or family member's story of coming to the United States
   • Explain an ethnic art form.
   • Make a fact sheet on a country or ethnic group.
   • Review a movie or restaurant from one's culture.
   • Explain an ethnic holiday or festival.
   • Allow students to suggest their own topics.
2. Encourage students to bring in or create a visual aid such as a poster, cultural object, handout, menu, illustration, etc.
3. Schedule a day for presentations and consider inviting parents,community members, or teachers to share their backgrounds as well.

Extensions:
Students could...

• write a reflection on the process of exploring their personal histories
• pick a topic that was presented and research more about it
• pick an ethnic group or culture that was not presented and research information about it
• turn their presentation into a museum exhibit (see next lesson) or a power point presentation
• interview classmates and compile oral histories of the lives of class members themselves.
• compile a list of languages spoken by parents, grandparents, neighbors, teachers and classmates. This could even lead to a "dictionary" of words and phrases.
• compare the issues that surround immigration to the U.S. today (from Mexico or elsewhere) to the issues that affected their own elders' immigration

Oral history projects can involve neighbors, senior citizens, retirement homes, or even teachers' parents and grandparents.

At the bottom of this page you will find a number of ideas for using oral history to research the heritage of the larger community.

Resources:
(Links will open in new windows.)

Circle of Stories Lesson Plan. PBS provides an excellent, clear unit plan for teaching students about oral history and family heritage. The description states, "In this activity, students will learn the basics for and the importance of recording their own family history. Students will be the interviewers that seek to learn more about the past. Students will learn about the right questions that will provide insight to their family stories. Students will research, collect, and share stories that will bring them closer to their heritage."

Using Oral History from the Library of Congress. This fantastic lesson on using oral history provides lesson plans and downloadable materials, including quite a few examples of oral histories collected during the Great Depression. There are also many links to excellent resources and extensions.

RootsWeb's Guide To Tracing Family Trees is intended to teach basic genealogy research skills to beginners. It explains the many types of research tools and sources available.

This country facts research project could be adapted and used as a starting point for a heritage project or oral history project. The students would gather this background information in order to ask more informed questions.

Lesson Plan: What Is Your Heritage? This lesson uses a worksheet to help students work out what they know about their heritage. The chart could be expanded to include more relatives and more information, such as languages, jobs, dates, etc. Students could also use a separate copy for each relative.

A Layman's Introduction to Field Techniques is a guide to conducting oral history interviews. It may be more complicated than students need, but it is an excellent resource for teachers and ambitious students.

Searching Google, or some other search engine, for oral history lesson (or similar phrases) will turn up numerous excellent plans, and more are appearing all the time. Teachers are strongly encouraged to read a few of these.

Further Extensions:
Over the course of your community's Arts Midwest World Fest residency, students will have many opportunities to learn about the world's cultures and the role of culture in their own lives. These projects invite them to compile family histories or histories of their local or school communities.

The scope of these projects is entirely variable. An entire school, an entire grade, or a group of classes could go as far as setting out to compile a community history, or individual teachers could ask students to compile the histories of their own families.

At its most ambitious, an oral history project could be a one or two year program involving large numbers of students in compiling oral histories of a town (not literally everyone, of course, but as large and representative a sample as is possible). This could be structured such that students seek out older residents from many backgrounds, and talk to recent immigrants and those who arrived long ago. They could study how a town changes constantly as people move in and out (immigrants from other countries, as well as people from other states or even the next county). They could look at languages spoken in homes. Some students will find that their parents and grandparents spoke languages other than English at home.

Such a project could focus not on the town as a whole, but on the school community. In this case, students could interview teachers, teachers' families, staff members and their families, fellow students, and students' families. It would be excellent if teachers also participated by conducting interviews and producing the same records of these interviews as students produce.

To gain an appreciation of how memory changes, and of how the information passed from one generation to another differs, it might be interesting for students to begin by interviewing siblings about what they know about the family's history, then parents (and, perhaps, aunts and uncles), then grandparents. They will see how different generations see things differently, know and remember different information, and consider different details to be important.

Oral histories can—and should—contain more than just the factual details of a person's life. Remembered bits of culture such as songs, games, skills, and stories are at least as interesting and valuable. Many people will be surprised at what they remember from their childhoods, and will often take great pleasure in discovering and sharing these memories. Students will enjoy learning such things.

The final form taken by oral histories such as these is wide open. Some possibilities include books, Web sites, museum exhibits, theater presentations, public television or radio broadcasts, or newspaper features. The possibilities for preserving this vital and endangered information, and for sharing it with the wider community, are endless. Local organizations, such as museums, historical societies, colleges, senior centers, and various community groups, may be interested in partnering with schools in these endeavors, and may be able to help find people willing to be interviewed by students.