About This Case Study

This case study asks you to make a primary source. The unit's premise is that when documents are missing, biased, or written by the powerful, people tell — and that the great collections were built exactly this way: interview by interview in the Bronx, testimony by testimony from former braceros, a record assembled where institutions had filed silence. The practicum puts you in that tradition at the smallest workable scale: one narrator of your choosing — a family elder, a coworker, a neighbor — one focused theme, fifteen to thirty minutes of recording. The result will be an archive of one: a record that, until you make it, does not exist anywhere.

Three of the unit's ideas discipline the work. Narrator authority — the interview is co-authored, and the teller keeps control of the telling: consent is given on tape, any question can be declined, and the recording belongs to the narrator and you; it goes to no archive, class, or platform without the narrator's separate, explicit consent. Subjectivity as evidence — the unit's foundational claim: what memory reorders, compresses, or embellishes in the telling is not error to correct but evidence of what the past means to the person who lived it. And the curation critique — stories, once solicited, get shaped by whoever asks; your questions are already a curation, and knowing that is part of the method. The analytical move is to treat your own interview as an instrument at every stage: what your questions solicit, what memory does in the telling, and who might want the result. You will plan, record, listen, and write — and end by turning the unit's critical edge on yourself.

Before You Begin

Have ready:

• Oral History Association, "Principles and Best Practices" (2018 revision) — the ethics anchor; your consent language adapts from it. Read the principles.
• A recording device you have tested — a phone is enough — and a quiet place to meet your narrator.
• A note-taking surface for your question plan and, later, your listening log.

If you want more step-by-step technique, the do-it-yourself guides published by StoryCorps and by many library and museum oral history programs cover equipment and question craft; your library can point you to them.

A note on care: An interview can surface hard memories — migration, loss, discrimination. The narrator may pause, decline any question, or stop entirely, and that is method, not failure: narrator authority means the teller keeps control of the telling. Take the same care with yourself when you listen back.

Before you begin, write down, in a sentence or two each:

• Whose story in your life do you most wish someone had recorded? What made it worth keeping — and why did no one keep it?
• What is the difference between a conversation and an interview? What does adding a recorder change — for the teller, and for you?

The Exercise

Phase 1: The Plan (20–30 minutes)

Before the interview, three decisions:

• Choose your narrator and theme: someone you can sit with, and one focused theme the unit suggests — a migration (between countries, to the Bronx, between boroughs), a school experience, a movement moment. One theme; depth over coverage.
• Read the OHA principles and draft your consent ask in plain words: what you are doing, why, what happens to the recording (it stays with the two of you), and that they can decline anything. Plan to repeat the consent on tape at the start.
• Draft five to eight open questions — "Tell me about…," "What was it like when…" — plus one closer: "What should someone hearing this remember?" Order them, then hold the order loosely; the plan serves the telling, not the reverse.

For groups: Workshop each member's question list in pairs — cut any question that can be answered with yes or no.

Phase 2: The Recording (15–30 minutes)

With your narrator:

• Begin on tape: the date, the place, both names — with the narrator named as they wish to be — and the narrator's consent in their own voice.
• Then mostly listen. Follow the narrator's lead; let silences sit — they are where the next memory forms. Ask "what was that like?" more often than "when was that?"
• Close by asking whether there is anything they want to add or have removed, thank them, and confirm once more what will happen with the recording.

For groups: Interviews are conducted individually; the group reconvenes for the phases that follow.

Phase 3: The First Listen (20–25 minutes)

After the interview, two passes:

• Listen to the whole recording once without pausing. Then listen again with your log open, marking timestamps where memory did something — reordered, compressed, dwelled, embellished, refused. For each mark, note what the reshaping might mean, not whether it is accurate.
• Mark your own presence: where did a question of yours shape the answer? Where did you interrupt, redirect, or lead — and where did the best material come from: your plan, or your silence?
• Write down one thing the recording holds that no document about your narrator would contain.

For groups: Each member brings one short excerpt (with the narrator's permission) or a described moment; the group practices the unit's method on it — what is the reshaping evidence of?

Phase 4: The Reflection (25–30 minutes)

Write the 300-word reflection in two movements, then test it:

• What memory did. Using your best-logged moment: what did the telling reorder, dwell on, or leave out — and what is that evidence of? Treat the reshaping as the finding.
• Who would want this. Name two or three parties who might want your narrator's story — a campaign, an application, a news piece, the family itself — and what shape each would press it into: what each version would keep, and what it would cut.
• The strain test. Where did you feel the interviewer's power — in the questions, the silences, the editing you are doing right now by choosing what to quote? In writing this reflection you are curating your narrator: what does your curation owe them, and did you meet it?

For groups: Exchange reflections; mark one place in your neighbor's where the writer's curation shows.

Closing Reflection

In two or three sentences, complete this thought:

My narrator's telling held __________ that no document would. In the interview, my own power showed up as __________. The hardest thing to hold steady, after this practicum, is __________.

Write the most specific version you can; the value is in naming exactly what the recording preserves, exactly where you shaped it, and exactly what you owe the person who gave it.

A Note on Modes

Solo mode. The phases span at least two sittings — plan, then record, then listen and write. The two artifacts to keep are the recording itself, held on the terms your narrator consented to, and your 300-word reflection: together, a primary source and its first interpretation.

Group mode (3–6 people). Designate a timekeeper for the group sessions. Phases 1, 3, and 4 gain from group work — workshopping questions, practicing the method on excerpts, marking curation; Phase 2 is always individual, one interviewer and one narrator.

For adopting instructors. An optional extension: hold a class-agreement discussion about whether any recordings — with each narrator's separate and explicit consent — are contributed to a community archive. The unit's ethics discussion becomes a live decision, with narrator authority as the deciding rule.

After the Case Study

• The method's foundation: Portelli, Alessandro. "What Makes Oral History Different." In The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History, 45–58. Albany: SUNY Press, 1991. Read the chapter (JSTOR). The misdated death and why the "error" is the finding — the claim your listening log tests; it appears in the unit's Key Scholarship.
• The critique to keep beside it: Fernandes, Sujatha. Curated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Publisher page. Who solicits stories, who curates them, and who benefits — the questions your reflection turned on yourself; it appears in the unit's Key Scholarship.
• The keyword's source: Frisch, Michael. A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History. Albany: SUNY Press, 1990. Publisher page. The interview as co-authored — the ethic this practicum practices; it appears in the unit's Further Readings.