Workshops and Courses
Intro to Oral History
Length: 10 classes. Audience: High School Students
This seminar-style course is an introduction to the academic and professional field of oral history. Each lesson engages students with activities to build the skills necessary to design and complete an oral history project in three main stages—pre-interview, interview, and post-interview. Students will try digital audio editing and digital archiving as this project-based approach includes a culminating task similar to products produced by professional oral historians (ie. a website with text, audio and visual representations of interviews).
What is Oral History
Length: 1-hour workshop. Audience: Middle School Students
This short workshop is designed to fit into a typical school day period and introduces young students to the important concepts and practices that make up oral history interviewing. Providing a brief overview of oral history as an academic pursuit and professional practice, the workshop includes vocabulary, listening exercises, life history questions, and a game that develops their practice of creating follow up questions. At the end of the workshop young students should be equipped to conduct mini interviews for class projects.
Considering Identity in Oral History: Interviewing Across Difference
Length: 3-hour workshop. Audience: College Students/Professionals
This workshop explores useful concepts in oral history that help to bring us closer to our narrators, and to define, where appropriate the differences that exist between us and how to work with those differences in the interview. Participants will attempt to define the relationship between core concepts in oral history: intersectionality and intersubjectivity (the dialogue between the interviewer and the narrator). Models of intersectional interviewing where identities either create intersectional distance or open dialogues of shared experience are demonstrated and participants are encouraged to submit examples of how these issues come up in their own work.
“Talking White”: An anti-oppression view towards transcribing Black narrators
Length: 3 or 6 hour workshop. Audience: College Students/Professionals
This workshop explores useful concepts in the transcription of oral history to help us more accurately portray the voice of our narrators. The English language is inextricably linked to a history of colonialism and has been used in the history of America to delegitimize the voices and agency of Black people (from forced illiteracy during slavery, to voter suppression during the Civil Rights Era, to even the halls of academia today). This workshop aims to change the way we think of the transcript as a record and the way we consider dialect and the importance of AAVE (African American Vernacular English) to recording American history and culture.
Testimonials
“We had the distinct pleasure of having Alissa Rae come to our graduate class to discuss methods and ethics in the field of oral history, literature in the field of oral history germane to our course on craft education, as well as the practicalities of working as an oral historian with different audiences and outcome goals. She was incredibly well-prepared and engendered a thought-provoking and valuable discussion during our class — it was such a great addition to our semester!”
—Michelle Fisher, Warren Wilson College
“Alissa Rae's workshop, "Talking White," brought rigor and provocation to the room, challenging participants to think about transcription, race and much more: language justice, literature and authorship/authority. Alissa Rae is an engaging educator and was able to organize the material with sensitivity to the participants' level of experience and the overall program. Alissa Rae brings much needed questions and proposals to the field of oral history.”
—Suzanne Snider, Founder/Director of Oral History Summer School
“Alissa Rae's "Talking White" workshop used engaging examples and group discussions to expand our understanding of how we might misrepresent Black interviewees in our oral history transcriptions. The workshop introduced practices we could immediately put into action to confront bias and was an impetus for cross-departmental discussions on how to balance accessibility needs with accurate representations of our narrators. In addition to the workshop, Alissa Rae was extremely helpful in advising us on our workflow planning and decision-making.”
—Erica Titkemeyer, UNC-Chapel Hill Libraries
“Alissa Rae joined the Seattle Black Spatial Histories Institute this summer, as guest faculty, and we are so grateful for the time she spent with the cohort. The institute trains community members in the ethics, best practices, and techniques of oral history and Black memory work. Alissa’s time with the cohort was so engaging and informative. She was able to address the cohort’s questions about preparing for interviews, research, conducting interviews, and ethical considerations. By the end of Alissa Rae’s session, the cohort was really fired up about getting started on their first interviews. The next time we host the institute, we will definitely reach out to Alissa Rae again.”
—Jill Freidberg, Wa Na Wari, Seattle, WA
“Alissa Rae Funderburk is an experienced and knowledgeable oral historian, an incredible educator, and a great professional to work with on research and educational projects alike. In Fall 2021 we co-taught an oral history course on housing insecurity to architecture students at the Mississippi State University. Both primary instructors have used oral history methods in their research, but have never formally trained students for such projects. Therefore, we invited Ms. Funderburk to share her vast experience of oral history best practices, methods, and creative approaches with our undergraduate students. Despite most of Funderburk's interactions with our students being online, she was able to completely capture their attention and explain nuanced oral history approaches the way they understood them and actively used them in their fieldwork. Students referred to the principles Funderburk explained to them throughout the interview collection part of the course, were polite and respectful with our interviewees, navigated difficult situations incredibly well, and overall outperformed our best expectations for a first-time oral history project. Ms. Funderburk had to start from zero: architecture students are not typically trained in any oral history methods, so the fact they were able to accomplish this project and collect valuable high-quality material is simply amazing and definitely Ms. Funderburk's achievement. We look forward to working with her again in the future.”