Teaching Oral History in a College-Level “New Wave Immigrant Literature” Course

This article documents a pilot project teaching college students enrolled in a literature class on post-1965 (or “new wave”) immigration to do an oral history, a curricular alteration I made because the canonical texts tend to emphasize the experiences of a very small subset of immigrants. While keeping the focus on literature, my goal was to introduce students to the skills and ethical values required of an oral historian and to enrich and nuance students’ sense of the recent American immigration narrative, one that is disproportionately filled with texts written by well-educated immigrants or objectified accounts of poor or undocumented immigrants. Student feedback indicated the experience was gratifying, leaving them with a deepened sense of the friends or classmates from immigrant families whom they had chosen to interview and a more immediate understanding of the range of contemporary immigrant experiences.