These are learning activities suitable for high school or even tertiary level students. It would could be used classes in language, media. film, communication, social students or liberal studies or with student media production teams or campus television stations.
The Fifty People, One Question Approach
The Fifty People, One Question activity would involve having students work in groups to create a video a based on the Fifty People, One Question series of videos. In these videos, people are interviewed in the street and are asked one question. The original video was shot in New Orleans in 2008 by the creative partnership of Crush and Lovely & Deltree; their question was: “By the end of today, what would you wish to happen?”
The team also asked the same question in New York and Brooklyn and in London asked the question “Where do you you wish to wake up tomorrow?” The videos are quite popular and have inspired a series of similar videos such as PostSecret’s: What’s your Secret? (The video set in Ottawa, however, isn’t suitable for secondary school classwork, however, as the interviewees are asked what their favourite curse word is.)
The Fifty People One Question Team is quite happy for others to use their approach and even the same title as long as credit is given with a link back to their website:
The Oral History Approach
The oral history approach was made famous by Studs Terkel, an American historian who interviewed thousands of ordinary people in-depth; he broadcast these interviews over the radio and published them in a collection of books. Often his interviews would have a specific (e.g., Work, Life during the war, etc.). Oral histories help give a voice to people who are often overlooked in textbooks and in media. A lot of work on oral histories in the US, for example, has focused on Mexicans and Mexican-Americans who participated in the the Braceros Program, in which temporary labourers were imported into America between 1947 and 1964.
A student group producing an oral history video would interview one person or a small group of persons get them to talk as much as possible about their experiences. The focus is usually on the interviewee’s personal experiences and their thoughts and feelings on these experiences rather than their thoughts in more general issues or things they were not directly involved with. This kind of project is great in helping young people understand what life was really like during a specific period of time and understand how the world has changed.
Youth oral history projects can also help bring different generations together. Your average teen would rarely if ever have a conversation with an elderly person they weren’t related to. In many of the oral histories I’ve viewed, the interviewees seemed to appreciate the chance to tell their stories to the young interviewers. In the following video, Carey Giudici discusses some of the benefits of cross-generational oral history projects:
Here is an interview that is part of the African American Museum of Iowa’s oral history project, Adult Voices, Children’s Eyes. In the first part of the interview, two woman recount their bitter experiences with discrimination and segregation and then, in the second part, explain how society has changed for the better, why they think it’s changed and how this change makes them feel.
The video activities have several benefits:
- They encourage students to reach out to the community and come into contact with people from all walks of life and/or from different generations.
- They help students develop their confidence and communication skills as they approach potential interviewees.
- They let students listen to different views and challange students to review preconceptions.
- They give students the chance to develop their interpersonal skills as they work in groups to plan, prepare, shoot, edit and publicize the video.
- They can give students inspiration for the further development of their own ideas (The activity could be followed up by written work like writing their own answers to their question and posting it o