Oral history provides students of all ages with meaningful opportunities to engage with the community in which they live as well as to intimately learn about the experiences of people living in different communities. For educators, however, working with oral histories can be difficult. It can take significant time and energy to foster the relationships necessary to set up a community-based oral history project, and it can be equally time intensive to comb through existing interview collections and figure out a meaningful way to utilize those interviews.
The Oral History Association Education Committee recognizes these challenges and seeks to provide educators with sample lesson plans that they can utilize in their classrooms or use as models to craft their own lesson plans. We are always looking for interesting lesson plans used by educators from kindergarten through post-secondary education.
If you have a sample lesson plan you would like to share, please use the template below to create a cover sheet for your lesson. You can then email your lesson to the Education Committee Chair, Erin L. Conlin (elconlin@iup.edu). Please indicate in the subject line that you are submitting a sample lesson plan for the OHA website.
Lesson Plan Template
Lesson plans collecting and using new oral history collections:
Lesson plans using existing oral history collections:
- Exploring South Asian America: A 50-minute Tour Lesson Plan, by Amber Abbas, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Saint Joseph’s University, Philadelphia (2014)
- Democratizing Higher Education, Experiments: Old Westbury Oral History Project Lesson Plan, by Carole Quirke, Ph.D., Professor, American Studies Department–SUNY Old Westbury (2018)
- “I remember when: Life in the 1930s Sts. Johns County,” The History Workshop, St. Johns County, Florida, courtesy of Charlie Philips (2010). Word and PDF versions available.
