Distance Learning with VOW

A student in a 100cameras program Photo: K. Johnson via 100cameras

Keeping Students Engaged through Oral History

Text: Erin Vong, Education Specialist & Program Coordinator at Voice of Witness When most schools closed in March 2020, the Voice of Witness team and the teachers in our network assumed it would only be a short time before we would see our students in person again. As the weeks went on, we quickly realized the need to pivot to distance learning and adapted our materials, methodology, and support for the virtual classroom. We created a summer packet for students to independently engage in oral history and photography at different levels, and we hosted a variety of free webinars accessible to the public. We continued our ongoing work with school districts, teachers, communities, and other organizations, and we transitioned our projects to online platforms.

At James Lick Middle School in San Francisco, we worked with Veronica Galante (one of our 2019–2020 Germanacos Fellows) and her AVID Excel students, who created an oral history cookbook with VOW’s support in 2019. This year, we wanted to meet students where they were and created a class website that they populated with their own experiences about life during the pandemic. The students worked in pairs, asking each other questions, reading and editing each other’s responses, and sharing their narratives together.

“This project is a record of how the students have experienced the past year,” said Galante. “My greatest joy is seeing, reading, and hearing their responses, which has built and strengthened my relationship with the students. We got to know each other more, we felt more comfortable confiding in each other, and that’s important to me.”

Across the country in New York City, we continued our partnership with 100cameras, a nonprofit organization that uses photography to help students process and tell stories. We collaborated to develop a course that teachers and students at two different sites could teach on their own schedule, using pre-recorded lessons and external materials to support their learning. The students were provided cameras and photography lessons through 100cameras, and oral history storytelling activities through Voice of Witness.

Photo: Elle Wildhagen via 100cameras

“Throughout various lessons I have noticed that students seem eager to share their past, in some cases particularly eager to share experiences that I wouldn’t normally ask about during class time,” said Brittany Kaiser, a teacher at M.S. 50. “It seemed almost as though they had been waiting for someone to ask them to share these experiences, and I’m grateful that they were able to through this program.”

While the virtual classroom has only further highlighted the inequities in schools and access to education, Voice of Witness continues to center the voices and experiences of students directly impacted by these issues. Both Galante’s and Kaiser’s classrooms are primarily made up of immigrant students, coming from Central America and the Dominican Republic—communities that have faced significant challenges during this pandemic.

As Galante said, “It was really helpful to have Voice of Witness in the classroom, because being one adult and managing all of the distance learning is virtually impossible alone. My (English language learner) students need that face-to-face support, that one-on-one help. The students are trying their best, and they keep blaming themselves for mishaps, but I keep reassuring them that it’s just this year. It’s just the situation. We all need more time to take care of ourselves right now.”

In addition to our oral history trainings and customized education consultancies, VOW offers free common-core aligned lesson plans for each book in the VOW series. Lessons tie into themes of activism, civil rights, migration and displacement, criminal justice, identity, environmental issues, gender inequality, racial inequality, labor issues and economic justice, and more. Learn more at: https:// voiceofwitness.org/education

Reflections from Teachers and Students in VOW’s 2020–2021 Education Programs:

“My students are mostly 6th graders at our Brooklyn public school. All of them have been fully remote all year, which means most of them haven’t met any of their teachers or classmates in person. They are all working to build relationships and maintain social connection in this virtual space. In addition to that, our school’s population is mostly Dominican with many first or second-generation immigrant families, and our community was hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic and the existing inequities it exacerbated. It is very meaningful for them to begin to share parts of their lives and their stories through photography and oral history.”

—Brittany Kaiser, Teacher, M.S. 50

”It was really interesting to see all these different ways of life and all these experiences all together. It’s interesting because we all kind of know each other, but we’re learning more about people that we wouldn’t normally get to. I learned more about my family’s history and their struggle. This project gave me the opportunity to see a wide variety of ways of life, culture, and experiences that I wouldn’t be able to learn from any textbook.”

—S.MK.,11th Grader at Ruth Asawa School of the Arts in VOW’s Humanizing Oral Histories - Student Podcasts program “I very much enjoyed doing this project because it made me feel very accomplished and it’s been hard to motivate myself doing anything during quarantine. I learned about how much I am capable of when it comes to large projects, and all this hard work truly did pay off.”

—P.F., 11th Grader at Ruth Asawa School of the Arts in VOW’s Humanizing Oral Histories Student Podcasts program

”[We made] a time capsule. I know it’s just one specific middle school class in San Francisco, but it still shows trends and experiences and we can keep that for the future. The students talked about things like Black Lives Matter, the election, protests, but a lot of my students are from Central America and they also talked about hurricanes and things happening around the world. A lot was on their mind this year! There were a lot of things that they were bringing to the table and discussing.”

—Veronica Galante, Teacher, James Lick Middle School in San Francisco