The teacher engages students with the above questions individually, in small groups, and then as a class. In the class discussion the teacher can explain how traditional academic knowledge gets produced (empirical studies, peer review, etc) and how this is helpful for understanding the world (give examples). The teacher can ensure students understand that Ethnic Studies is a scholarly field of study in universities, but that their approaches for producing knowledge challenge traditional methods. The teacher can discuss some of the historic and present-day problems with the traditional academic production of knowledge, including what goes unstudied and the ways in which things are studied. Quickly, the teacher can talk about how Ethnic Studies has sought to respond to these challenges. The teacher should ensure students understand that there are lots of ways to know the world (by experience, through ancestral knowledge passed down through generations, etc.). Schools often fail to acknowledge these ways or to help students see how these ways might connect (or not) with academic knowledge (and the strengths and challenges of each). One big issue students can understand relates to the choices that are made about what gets put in a textbook and what gets taught in schools. Discuss challenges with textbooks (the way knowledge is transformed from an academic discipline to a school textbook). What gets selected for the textbook is an issue, but so are the ways that events/histories/geographies are explained. Rarely do school textbooks address structures and systems at the core of historical and modern-day challenges.

1. Name all the different ways you learn things. Underline what you wrote that relates to how you learn in school.

2. Can you think of a time when you learned something that wasn’t true or led to only partial understanding of something?

3. How do we know what we learn is accurate? Or even that it will be helpful to us in our own lives?

4. How does school help us learn things and what are some challenges or issues with how we learn in school?

In table groups, students will read the excerpt and work on answering these questions. The teacher will then discuss responses as a class and define oral history, utilizing the definition from UCSD’s ROHP.

1. In your own words, describe all the ways Smith says we can come to learn history.

2. Which way of knowing/understanding history is the most commonly taught way in school? Why do you think this is?

3. How might learning through stories and conversations be different from how we usually learn about historic happenings?

4. What are the challenges and opportunities of coming to know/learn about something through stories?

The teacher will use the above definition to create a common understanding of oral history.

Help students see oral histories as both a method to learn the stories and experiences of people and as theory within Ethnic Studies. Finally, have students reflect on what might distinguish an ethnic studies oral history based on what they have learned about ethnic studies thus far in the class.

1. Public Historian: someone who uses their historical training to benefit a community.

2. Descendant: someone who comes from an ancestor.

3. Mythology: subjective ways of telling stories (that may not be the full truth).

4. Holistic: the whole, which includes all the intersecting parts.