Oral History and Storytelling: reflection on an alternative aproach of teaching History

Abstract

In the paper, I will share and review a method I have been experimenting for teaching the history of Hong Kong. Hong Kong was a fishing village before it was ceded as a British Colony. However this part of Hong Kong’s history is missed in our textbook, and water life is not part of the city’s everyday knowledge. Oral history is the starting point of the process. The teacher and university students conducted oral history together to build up the primary pool of historical materials (audio records and transcripts), which however were not friendly to general learners. Next, another group of students studied the transcripts and picked out interesting transcript segments and slightly edited them into understandable fishermen’s stories. Then, a larger group of students studied the transcript segments and organized the fragmented stories into a storyline to give shape for the fishermen’s accounts. They visited local secondary schools and told the stories to the students in the classroom aided by visual images. The teacher, an experienced oral history researcher, facilitates the whole process by giving context, background information and basic knowledge to the student narrators. The students had many misunderstanding about the fishermen’s oral history due to a lack of knowledge and experience of lives on the water. The method of storytelling requires the students to serve as a medium of knowledge transfer. When they try this unconventional method of teaching history, they have to make sense of the unfamiliar lived experiences as told in the oral history, by comparing different lifestyles between land and water, by raising land people’s curiosity of the dangers on the rough sea, by inserting useful knowledge in order to appreciate the lifestyle of fishing on the water. To understand how this medium of storytelling (the student narrators) is important to make this method an effective means of teaching history.