I was really excited to hear about the application of oral history in communities and schools. I feel alternately thrilled and offput by traditional academic life, and I had generally looked to oral history as a way to ensure healthy movement between the outside world and the (sometimes cloistered) institution, so these presentations with Shirley Taylor and Amy Starecheski were such helpful reminders of what I believe is a really important use of oral history. Part of my interest in oral history is to foster a way for people to listen to one another (rather than just research-based listening), and these projects were really great examples of how that can work.
Both of these programs also addressed my interest in place and community. The Apollo project’s focus on the community elders was not only an opportunity for the sort of intergenerational communication I think is so vital, but it also provided a shared space—the Harlem neighborhood—and extended its history far back into the past. I think this helps people understand not just that their neighborhood is important, but also that the way they function in that neighborhood is important too. If they walk to school and play the tuba, in 70 years that might be really important to someone! If they spend a lot of time reading, they might grow up to be a writer. It provides some other way to think of adults and adulthood, and thus the future, which, for schoolchildren, is often a very short span of time. It also historicizes places in the neighborhood in a way that I think is really helpful to the imagination; it’s simply a good exercise to imagine the way people lived in the past and the way they will live in the future. Furthermore, this also emphasizes the present, and the Apollo and Me project really picks up on this impact of learning about history, which is that it also highlights choices and events in the present. For kids to be able to explain their lives is really gratifying, and it’s especially so when they’re able to recognize that the thoughts and feelings they have are shared amongst each other, or especially shared across generations. I’m really interested in the personal fable, the format of adolescents’ personal narratives, and how the communal, or multi-generational, sharing of stories impacts this tendency to imagine oneself alone in the world, rather than connected to it.
Amy Starecheski’s project, Ground One, was directed also towards intercultural understanding, and she explained the ways in which it succeeded and failed. She also spoke to the project’s ability to help schoolchildren begin to contextualize their own lives in history and start to formulate a narrative of their lives. She wasn’t entirely sure that the project had united the community, though it did made a movement towards fostering interethnic relationships, and humanizing each group from the other’s perspective.
These discussions made me really excited about the prospect of arranging this kind of project in my hometown, where a lot of older farmers are struggling to pass their traditional occupation and their traditional homesteads on to younger generations. There are so many church-based communities in the area where I grew up that I think sometimes people take this to mean that community is “strong,” even while communication among the community members may be weak. And this is not to mention the fact that families who don’t belong to churches end up having to form their own isolated islands outside of these other communities—I’m thinking of my own family when I say this.
Talking about the other sorts of activities and lifestyle attributes amongst a diversity of residents would, I imagine, clarify the sorts of diverse communities that exist, thus complicating the often-simplified dichotomies of Lancaster. Building community in this way—through shared location, and through all occupational or creative or social experiences that occur there—can really show the diversity of experience in a place, and can bring groups that had been isolated onto an equal level with one another. And most importantly, I think, it helps build new frameworks for discussion; communication can move beyond the insider/outsider structure to something more dialogical.
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