After years of providing in-classroom support for oral history-based podcast projects, the VOW education team has developed a comprehensive guide for teachers interested in launching podcast projects.
An oral history podcast is a project-based learning experience where students get to take on the role of oral historian, interviewing family and community members and presenting their stories in an audio format.
Our new guide offers best practices, a proposed project timeline, sample student work, and other essential resources for a robust academic experience. The resource also integrates concepts from VOW’s ethical storytelling principles.
It is flexible and can be adapted to many grade levels, courses, themes, and learning objectives. Educators looking for more ideas and individual lesson plans can use our grab-and-go oral history resources in tandem with this guide to build out a full unit.
Using this guide, teachers will be able to support their students in creating safe and brave spaces for narrators to share their most important stories. There are sample interview questions, as well as helpful interview tips to prepare students for the experience. Students can also use the included sentence frames to help them write an introduction and conclusion for their podcast.
Oral history-based projects help foster vital student skills, including social-emotional learning, critical thinking, communication, and literacy. Conducting interviews and editing narratives can also cultivate empathy, challenge stereotyping and bias, and foster curiosity, belonging, and community engagement.
“Through this project I have learned the value of oral history and how it has the power to show us more about different stories and perspectives. Using oral history allows us to connect with different narratives because we look deeper into people’s lives. We see the complexity of every individual and their stories.”
-M.L., a 12th grade student, reflects on their oral history podcast project in an Ethnic Studies class
