As good Big6ers, the students at my school — Neveh Channah High School in Etzion Bloc, Israel – know to employ Big6 #2 (Information Seeking Strategies) when they look for information for a research project. In this stage, they brainstorm to determine the range of possible sources that might help them and then evaluate the sources in order to determine which are the most useful and reliable to use for their research. The list of chosen resources produced by this process will usually contain books, articles from periodicals and journals and Web sites – not necessarily because these are the only resources that will help students, but because they often forget about one of the best information resources – other people.

Interviews with knowledgeable people can be an excellent source of information, particularly for history assignments. But for students who may be inexperienced with this type of research, planning for interviews raises a number of questions:

• How can I find an individual who knows something about my topic?
• How can what they know be accessed and used?
• How should the interview be conducted?
• What questions should be asked?
• How can the information be recorded so it can be easily accessed and presented?
• How can it be preserved for use in the future for other research projects?

These were the questions that faced the students of team GVC-34 in the GSBI Foundation’s 2003 Global Virtual Classroom Competition, who chose to examine how technological change has influenced the lives of people in the 20th century and beyond. The team members from three schools in three different countries — Neveh Channah High School, Waterford Mott High School in Waterford, Michigan, and Emmanuel Christian School in Dollard-des-Ormeaux, Quebec — realized that they could learn much about the topic by speaking with experts in various fields as well as with ordinary people who had lived through and experienced tremendous technological change over the last decades.

Beginning the Process
While interviews seemed to be a perfect solution to access both anecdotal information and expert opinion, the question was how to interview the right people and capture the relevant information. To tackle this issue, the students used Big6 #3, Location and Access. The students knew they had to obtain the relevant information from the people who possessed it in a format that could be readily accessed.

As a first step, the members of the Neveh Channah team visited the Oral History Division of the Hebrew University’s Institute of Contemporary Jewry, an archive that specializes in the collection and preservation of interviews. Since its founding in 1959, the archive has recorded interviews with more than 8,000 individuals as part of 250 projects on various aspects of contemporary Jewish life and history. There, the students participated in a workshop on oral history technique, where they learned the ins and outs of interviewing, recording, transcribing and using the interviews.

The workshop prepared the students to be expert interviewers. They learned how to prepare for the interview, including how to research the interview topic, draft questions, prepare recording equipment, find subjects and schedule the interview with the subject. They also learned interview techniques, which involves explaining the purpose for the project, speaking clearly and politely, having the subject sign a release for publication of interview, proper questioning technique, recording unobtrusively, being a good listener, and adding questions that might provide additional information. Finally, the students learned how to collect and preserve their interview data, by transcribing the recording to a written document, having the interview subject correct the transcript, filling out an interview summary form {link to interviewsummary.pdf], cataloging and storing the recording, and preparing the interview text for publication.

Practice makes perfect, so during the workshop, the students roleplayed interviews, each being an interviewer and a subject at least once. A few did the roleplaying with the other students observing the interview. As a group, they discussed and evaluated the role playing, learning from their experience through peer assessment. At the end of the session, a summary of oral history interview techniques was created.

The students soon realized the power of interviews as an information resource, and so after the workshop, they shared what they had learned with their teammates in other parts of the world. All of the students then got started interviewing subjects, collecting and synthesizing information (Big6 #3-5).

Conducting the Interviews

The Neveh Channah students found great success with their interviews. A few of the outstanding projects, with links to the final products, include:

• Adina interviewed Dr. Tzvi Dwolatzky, a gerontologist, who told her much about the advances in medical technology over the last decades and how new technologies have changed peoples’ way of life.
• Naama interviewed her grandmother, Mrs. Esther Sapiria, who emigrated to Israel from Casablanca, the largest city in Morocco in 1953 with the mass emigration to Israel of the 1950’s. She described how she had come from a relatively modern city, with modern electric and communication appliances to an immigrant camp with no electricity or running water. Her descriptions and feelings added a tremendous touch to the project.
• Miriam and Naama interviewed Tzaynesh Adell, a 23 year old girl who had escaped from Ethiopia to Israel in 1991 in a clandestine operation, the Solomon Operation. Tzaaynesh had been born and raised in a small tribal village with very few modern appliances and conveniences. She described her feelings as well as those of her friends and family about coming from a tribal village, with very few modern technological tools, to modern 20th century urban Israel. Her insights were fascinating, especially in comparison with those of Mrs. Sapiria.
• The Neveh Channah “radio team” — Talya, Rina and Yael — visited one of the studios of the Israel Broadcasting Authority and the home of Mr. Izi Man, a senior radio announcer and editor. They conducted a fascinating two and a half hour interview with Mr. Man, who shared with them his experiences of nearly two decades of work in the field of radio communications. The team decided to present what they had learned from him not as a simple interview transcript. Instead, they integrated the interview into the Web Story Line, which they constructed about the radio, adding information, links to various related sites and even a five minute recorded segment of the interview with Mr. Man. Of course, they received his approval to display the interview in this format before uploading it to the team website.

Bringing it All Together

After the students conducted the interviews and transcribed them, they moved on to Big6 #4 – Use of Information – as they reviewed the transcripts and noted key information. Big6 #4 can be a particular challenge when using interviews as an information source, since interviews are extremely rich resources and it can be difficult to choose the most important information. If students are struggling, this is an excellent time to review note-taking strategies such as highlighting, use of notecards, cutting and pasting with a word processing program, and so forth.

Students also engaged in some self-assessment after the interview. Each student filled out an interview assessment form, which gave them a structure to thoughtfully analyze their technique and find areas of improvement for the next interview.

As the students moved into Big6 #5, Synthesis, they integrated the information gleaned from the interviews with the other information they had gathered from articles, books and websites. The final product created in this stage is the website created collaboratively with their teammates in the U.S.A. and Canada. The students worked very hard to present their findings in an attractive, interesting and easily navigable resource.

Since the resource being created – the project website – was entered in a competition, students had an opportunity to receive Evaluation (Big6 #6) from an outside source. While the students were pleased with the result of their work, they knew that the judges might have their own opinion! They were very pleased to receive the news that the Progression Through Time: The Digital Age of Technology website was awarded the Grand Prize of the Secondary School Section by the judges of the 2003 Global Virtual Classroom Competition.

Online Oral History Resources
Using Oral History Lesson Plans – Library of Congress
The Vietnam Archive Oral History Workshop
Oral History Association Evaluation Guidelines
Oral History Workshop Resources
The Smithsonian Folklife and Oral History Interviewing Guide (pdf)

Online Oral History Projects
Oral History Technology Projects
Centropa – Modern Jewish History of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union
Oral History Division of the Hebrew University’s Institute of Contemporary Jewry – Archives and Databases
Oral History Association Links Page