Connecting with community through oral history

Through interviews and photographs, Harnett County students learn about their community's agricultural past.

By Jean Sweeney Shawver

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Oral history in the classroom

Oral history lets students learn about history from the people who lived it. This series of articles will show you how to bring oral history into your classroom, whatever grade you teach.

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• Learn more about Harnett County, North Carolina, community history, local history, oral histories, rural students, social studies, and world history.

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"Although I had heard the stories all my life, I guess I never really listened." That was the common comment I heard from the composition and photography students who completed an interview with a local farmer, current or retired, for my photography course last fall. Usually the interview subject was a relative of the student — a grandfather or father — or sometimes a neighbor. With either subject, the interview project gave my students the reason to ask and really listen to the stories of farming in Harnett County in the last 60 or 70 years.

Our first step in the project was to read and discuss the readings prepared for us about North Carolina farm life in the first half of the twentieth century. Because I teach English/Language Arts and photography and have a minor in history, this project let me combine those interests and help my students to relate those areas. In the next step, my students wrote their interview questions, which we reviewed and discussed. Then they taped their interviews on a borrowed school recorder or on their families’ mini-recorders. The longest and most challenging part was the transcription of their interviews. When they visited their interview subject, they photographed their subjects, the farms, equipment and buildings. In the school darkroom, they developed and printed the photographs to complete the project.

The students learned the hardships of life on a farm before World War II, before mechanized farming, with a mule and one’s own labor. One especially poignant story was that of a young man, a teenage high school student whose father had mangled his leg in a mowing accident. The young man found the courage and calm to drive his father on roads that were barely roads in the late 1940’s to Rex Hospital in Raleigh to have the mangled leg cleanly amputated and then to leave school to tend the family farm to support his family. To his credit, he later earned his high school diploma.

One student interviewed her father, a current farmer and agribusinessman, to reminisce about the purebred hogs they raised when she was a little girl ten years ago. Most students learned that while they look for activities today to fill the hours of their day, their predecessors tried to survive the work schedule from daylight to dark, six days a week, sometimes seven, after church.

In the spring of 2001, I was given a brochure about the Summer Teachers’ Institute sponsored by the Southern Oral History Program at UNC-Chapel Hill and the North Carolina Humanities Council. At the Institute, I learned how to combine language arts and history and photography, which was a fresh, intriguing concept for me. In the fall semester, my composition and photography students interviewed their subjects. All the materials will be presented to the Southern Oral History Program.

Since we are a block schedule school, I have just met my new students. After they feel comfortable with the first photography assignments, we will begin the readings and the process anew.