Embracing the Mess: Reflections on Untidy Oral History Pedagogy

At the end of a recent undergraduate qualitative methods class, in which we had discussed several readings on oral history ethics, students looked a little overwhelmed. I asked them how they were feeling. As always, there was a moment of silence before someone raised her hand and spoke. She shared that she had assumed that a course on research would involve more straightforward instructions and answers about how you do things, but what she was learning was that there are few answers; everything involves shades of grey. This was really intellectually stimulating and exciting but also confusing for her. I empathized and agreed with her on all counts. Like in oral history, education scholars struggle with the balance between the more conventional view of the classroom as a space where knowledge is transmitted and a more radical approach in which the classroom is a creative, contingent space in line with what education scholar Henry Giroux, drawing on Derrida, calls a "pedagogy of uncertainty."¹ In his call for a postmodern approach to pedagogy, that is, for what we term critical pedagogy,² Giroux argued:

Indeterminacy rather than order should become the guiding principle of a pedagogy in which multiple views, possibilities, and differences are opened up as part of an attempt to read the future contingently rather than from the perspective of a master narrative that assumes rather than problematizes specific notions of work, progress, and agency.³

For Giroux, this focus on indeterminacy is in stark contrast to modernist notions of public education as a means to an end for job training and social mobility. Such a call should be familiar to oral historians, as our field also seeks to dislodge "master narratives" and make space for differences and subjectivities. Like oral historians, critical pedagogy scholars like Giroux have positioned their field as something that must be at once democratized and a means of democratization.⁴ This strain of educational scholarship focuses on exactly this; scholars like Giroux ask how pedagogy can be a means of countering domination and inequality both within the classroom and outside of it. Oral history is about making space for subaltern narratives and using ordinary people's voices to create solidarity and change, while critical pedagogy asks how the classroom can create space for critical engagement with different kinds of knowledge, questioning authority, and fighting for the promise of democracy.⁵ Both are about unsettling dominant ways of knowing. As evidenced above, my students and I certainly found ourselves unsettled.

Challenging dominant ways of knowing, democratizing our classrooms and our research, and embracing uncertainty are not straightforward processes to navigate. In writing about postmodern ethics, Zigmunt Bauman proclaimed that "human reality is messy and ambiguous," something which oral historians have always known to be true.⁶ While in recent years there has been much methodological reflection on the challenges of more postmodern approaches to oral history—which embrace contingency, uncertainty, and the "messiness" of working with other human beings—there has been little reflection on how this translates into our pedagogy.⁷ A notable exception is the recent volume on Oral History and Education, in which through examples and critical reflection, editors Kristina R. Llewellynn and Nicholas Ng-A-Fook argue that "oral history is a radical pedagogy" because of how it makes space for subaltern voices, engages people in the relevance of stories, and democratizes history.⁸ Nevertheless, when we talk about teaching oral history, we still generally treat it as a mode of data collection and focus on how you construct a question, record and transcribe an interview, etc., rather than engaging with the "messy and ambiguous" moments that inevitably come up in our interviews, whether they are conducted by novices or seasoned experts. We rarely "train," or talk about training, students for the difficulties of navigating the interpersonal dynamics of the interview, to manage our doubts about how we engage with our interviewees, how power and politics can complicate our interview spaces, or how to engage with the intersubjective nature of this pursuit. We have written much about this as a field, but...