Sound Recordings as Primary Sources:
Local Learning and Vermont Folklife
A FREE, one-day professional learning workshop for educators about teaching with audio recordings from folklife collections and using oral history interviewing in the classroom.
Late Folklorist Greg Sharrow interviewing Burmese weaver True Tender Htun
When you think about primary sources, what are some of the first things that come to mind? Historical documents? Old photographs? Diaries? How about…sound recordings? Join Vermont Folklife and Local Learning: The National Network for Folk Arts in Education for a one-day professional learning workshop in St. Johnsbury, VT to learn about the value of understanding sound recordings as primary sources.
For decades Vermont Folklife has engaged with communities around the state to document people’s experiences in their own words, on their own terms, using the tools of ethnography and oral history. Our Archive holds over 6,000 audio-recorded interviews created from the late 1940s through the present day that explore the unfolding culture of Vermont across the 20th and 21st centuries.
We are now in the third year of a project funded by the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Program focused on making ethnographic and oral history archives accessible to classroom teachers. Co-presented with our partners at Local Learning, the National Network for Folk Arts in Education:
At this one-day, FREE workshop we will:
Learn how to access, engage with, and teach from oral histories from local archival collections as well as the Library of Congress.
Provide a brief overview of ethnographic and oral history methodologies to better understand the unique nature of these primary sources.
Explore examples of student interview projects designed by Vermont teachers; learn best practices to design your own.
Offer strategies to introduce students to the value and function of archives and archival research.
Introduce learning resources and curriculum developed with Local Learning and other project partners.
Invite participants to become involved in Vermont Folklife’s efforts to make our archival collections more accessible and useful to educators.
More about sound as primary source:
Student interviewer
Ethnographic sound recordings–including oral history interviews, musical performances and soundscapes–are distinct kinds of primary sources: they are first-hand accounts created with the intention of documenting human experience. Contemporary ethnographic and oral history work is highly collaborative, and the new knowledge that emerges through them can be seen as co-created by the researcher and the interviewee.
Engaging with these unique primary sources and first-hand accounts complements inquiry-based pedagogy, encourages curiosity, teaches critical thinking, and connects students with their own agency as question-askers, researchers, and documentarians.
This program is designed for middle and high school social studies and humanities teachers, librarians and media specialists, educators who engage with project-based, community-based, or place-based learning, or anyone interested in teaching with primary sources!
Workshop leaders:
Mary Wesley - Director of Education and Media, Vermont Folklife
Lisa Rathje - Executive Director of Local Learning: The National Network for Folk Arts in Education
Andy Kolovos - Associate Director and Archivist, Vermont Folklife
This workshop is co-presented by the Vermont Rural Education Collaborative.