Sarah

OCSS Conference 2016

Digital History Interviews

Sarah from Garfield Heights – Participant

Russ Crawford – Recorder

Russ Crawford – Transcriber

Recorder: So what’s your name and school?

Sarah: My name is Sarah Routh, and I teach at Garfield Heights Middle School, in Garfield Heights, Ohio.

Recorder: And how many years have you attended OCSS?

Sarah: This is my first year.

Recorder: Other than this session, which has been your favorite session from OCSS?

Sarah: We went to the one on race, was pretty good.  Trying to think what else yesterday was good.  There was one on formative assessment that had some good ideas.  They’re kind of all blurring together.  It’s a lot in two days.

Recorder: What is the benefit of attending OCSS?

Sarah: Other than being out of the classroom for two days (chuckle) , which I am not supposed to say.   Just all the different exposure to different ideas.  Just hear what everyone else is doing.  Kind of the collaboration, the beginning of collaboration.  So you don’t have to execute the collaboration, you could just use each other.  You do get to take a step back, and think “how would this work?”

Recorder: What are your ideas for using digital history in your classroom?

Sarah: I was thinking more the oral history aspect of it.  I teach in an urban, underprivileged school, and its very hard to get kids to think and talk about themselves, in reflective ways, like the traditionally – it takes more than the prompting questions.  I think its very hard for them to want to talk about themselves.  So at the beginning of the year I had wanted to do kind of an oral history project where they paired off and interviewed each other – I teach 8^th grade – and we haven’t gotten to it yet.  Kind of modeled on the Story Corps podcast – to have them listen to a few of those and to be able to explore something like that.  With their Chrome Books, or whatever, for recording, they could record each other.  It’s just figuring out how to get them to talk.  So that would be how I would use it in my classroom.  They could definitely do a history of the school project.  It would have to be super-structured though – a lot of structure, a lot of direction, a lot less of an inquiry approach than you would imagine, at first.  That’s how I would see it in my classroom.  For middle schoolers, you need so much modeling to start with.  For kids that just aren’t used to thinking in these ways, then you need even more prompting and structure.  So that’s what I was thinking for my room.  I think the payoff would be big, once we got there.  They also don’t think about stuff like this as – we go over a lot of what counts as history – and this is a newer format for them to consider as history.  That would be good too.