About Education Narratives Project
Launched in June 2020 by Oral History Summer School, Education Narratives Project (ENP) aims to document the experiences of educators in the age of COVID-19 and beyond. The project strives to curate a multivocal narrative that preserves knowledge, witnesses individual and collective trauma, and supports educators who were forced to radically shift their practices over the last year.
In addition to creating space for educators to author this history, we hoped the project might provide a source of connection. In this spirit, we have hosted listening parties, which serve as support and brainstorming sessions for our educator cohort. Our collection and the conversations that have emerged cover a range of topics, including care in learning spaces, uncertainty, loss, isolation, and hope.
As of Spring 2021, our growing collection features over 50 interviews with 24 narrators, including teachers, school leaders, urban planners, and community-based educators. Interviews fall into four broad phases: initial closure (March-June 2020), planning for the new school year (July-August 2020), the launch of the new school year (September-December 2020), and the initial availability of vaccines (March-May 2021). In Fall, ENP launched an Educators Storyline, a voicemail system to record and share stories.
About Oral History Summer School
Oral History Summer School was established in Hudson, New York in 2012 as an immersive training program to help students from varied fields––writers, social workers, radio producers, artists, teachers, human rights workers––make use of oral history as an ethical interview practice in their lives and work. Spanning the realms of scholarship, advocacy, media-making, and art, OHSS is a hands-on program, which means that students conduct interviews, design projects, produce radio documentary, and archive their recordings while learning the theoretical underpinnings of the field. OHSS also offers advanced training through focused workshops including those on memory loss, mixed ability interviewing, oral history-based documentary film, ethnomusicology, family history, and trauma.
Oral History Summer School will soon launch its archive, Community Library of Voice and Sound (CLOVS). To date, the archive is comprised of nearly 500 audio life histories, a robust song collection and an ambient sound collection (field recordings), along with two emergent COVID-related sub-collections. You can soon visit CLOVS to see the full Education Narratives Project Collection.
Ready to hear the collection? Start at the Listen page.
