Oral History and understanding a troubled past
The use of oral history in British schools first became popular in the 1960s. This corresponded to the time when its pursuit was beginning to gain credibility at an academic level. Innovative teachers were attracted to it for a number of reasons. It offered an alternative to the grand narratives of political history and provided opportunities to explore aspects of heritage under the wider framework of local studies. Teaching particularly focused on topics associated with social and economic change through the eyes of ordinary people at a time when the old industries which had shaped the landscape since the Industrial Revolution were in decline. This, and the re-generation and re-location of housing were perceived to threaten community cohesion. It was felt that oral history had benefits in fostering inter-generational communication. Further, the investigative nature of oral history was in keeping with the philosophy of the enquiry based process associated with the ‘new’ history movement promoted by the Schools’ Council History Project. It allowed students to engage directly in the collection and analysis of primary evidence by examining different accounts to evaluate the reliability and validity of different perspectives and through synthesis come to reasoned interpretations of past events.
The era 1964-90 was one of considerable curriculum freedom for teachers. Prescribed national curricula in the United Kingdom were not introduced until the early 1990s by the Thatcher administration. Prior to that schools had flexibility to shape their teaching to what they saw as the particular needs of the young people in their charge. Oral history was common in the context of cross curricular local studies in primary schools but it also had traction in secondary education where the challenge of raising the school leaving age and “democratising” education for all young people presented both pedagogic challenges and issues of relevance. As in the rest of the UK social and economic change was impacting on Northern Ireland. However, here the 1970s saw the deep cultural, political and religious divisions between Protestant and Catholics erupt into communal and paramilitary violence. This persisted until a peace agreement in 1998 and continues to manifest itself in confrontations around cultural symbolism, exacerbated by a failure to find common ground as to how events of the recent troubled past might be mediated in civil society.
The outbreak of violence in the late 1960s caused more reflective educators to examine if education might be a contributor to societal division. Many identified a largely segregated school system (state schools for Protestants and separate schools for Catholics), allied to strong residential segregation, as significant factors. The partisan teaching of history was also singled out for attention. Subsequently, over the last forty years, history teaching has responded in a variety ways to the conflict and its legacies. For some it has become an imperative that history teaching should directly address the sensitive past, including the recent Troubles, make connections with the contested present and help contribute to conflict transformation. Amongst others, there is more reticence to tackle the contentious past overtly and instead to keep it at an historical distance, even when Irish history is the focus. Thus, when oral history has been used it has usually been targeted at investigating non contentious aspects of local heritage. In my own teaching, for instance, in a rural village known for whiskey making, my class interviewed older people as to the impact of the distillery on every day life in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. In mixed environments an oral history project might have a cross community aspect in that schools from both communities might work together but with the emphasis on demonstrating the common lived social and economic experiences of people from which ever background. For example, this might examine the involvement of past generations working in the linen mills of North and West Belfast. Such work was commendable in bridging the community divide but it was less likely to address cultural difference. The years of the Troubles, from a practical perspective, were not conducive to allowing young people to engage easily outside school in the community and, in any case, the introduction of a more prescriptive curriculum in the 1990s meant that schools had less time to spend on local and oral history. Consequently, oral history, always a minority activity, lost its foothold in classroom practice.
If the role of history in addressing community division was debated before then that conversation has become more mainstream and intense as Northern Ireland society has wrestled to emerge from conflict, especially when considering whether the recent troubled past should be a focus of attention. Research indicates that the current generation of young people, the first to have grown up to maturity after the Good Friday Agreement, do not have a clear understanding of the nature of the violence and its historical roots and expect schooling to provide answers. At the same time wider society since 1998 has failed to find a consensual way of dealing with the legacy of the past. As a consequence revelations about past events tend to emerge piecemeal exacerbating hurt and a sense of grievance on both sides.
In the absence of an official mechanism for a consensual approach to addressing the past civil society has attempted to fill the vacuum. Significantly, storytelling and oral testimony have played a central part in several initiatives. This has taken its cue from the models of truth and reconciliation processes employed in other conflict situations, including South Africa and Guatemala. Here the emphasis has been on truth recovery, the term often given to the process of publicly acknowledging ‘abused power, complicit actors and the harms to individuals’. In summary, in the aftermath of the trauma associated with violent conflict the need to deal with the legacy of the past is an important stage in the reconciliatory process. Those who have suffered have a need to have their voices heard. However, this is a cathartic experience with testimonies representing,
Each person’s grasp of the past – perceptions that must be confronted in building new relationships between citizens and the state. They are important fragments of the historical record but they are not, at this stage, subject to the critical scrutiny of the historical process
This conforms to Minow’s definition of psychological truth. Historical truth, which may need to be delayed, demands that such personal stories be put through the lens of evidential criticality, and synthesised with other, possibly contradictory accounts, leading to a more complex understanding of the conflict. An important example of taking the role of oral history in conflicted societies forward in practice is the work of the Association for Historical Dialogue and Research in Cyprus. Remembering in the context of an oral history accounts of living in formerly mixed villages on the island has been part of an identity project aimed at helping individuals better understand how their views have been socially constructed by external influences. Drawing on social Representation theory the project argues that oral history rests in a privileged position to do this ‘owing to its particular stance at the interface of the individual and society in the nexus of past, present and future’.
As in Cyprus peace-builders in the community in Northern Ireland, conscious of the absence of an official mechanism for dealing with the legacy of the recent past, have acknowledged the potential power of oral testimony both to give voice to those who feel victimised and to activate empathetic understanding in others. In recent years there have been a number of significant initiatives that have drawn on individual experiences of the troubles, particularly from “victims” and “perpetrators” and these have been captured in a variety of forms from audio tape to print to moving image. So much so that currently there is the proposal that the disparate collections be gathered together in a central repository based in a university and added to as time progresses. Yet much of the work done, arguably, has been aimed at therapeutic objectives of “healing”, “reparation” and “reconciliation” rather than the pursuit of historical truth. It has also concentrated on adult rather than youth audiences.
However, there have been few notable experiments in recent months using oral approaches in schools. For example, schools have participated in Civic Voices, an internationally based Democracy Memory Bank Programme that involves teachers and students from around the world preserving the stories of how their democracy and society was built or changed. Participating teachers work with their students to conduct interviews with change makers within their communities, and these interviews are then uploaded to a central memory bank. Interviews in Northern Ireland have frequently been conducted by mixed groups of Protestant and Catholic young people. One of the project’s organisers has declared that ‘Civic Voices helps young people to realise that they are part of that historical narrative [of democratic advancement] and to celebrate those stories’. Another initiative, From Prison to Peace has engaged young people in less comfortable dialogue with ex paramilitary combatants to explore the reasons why people became involved in the conflict, the impact of prison and the contribution former prisoners are now making in the community. The full evaluation report is expected shortly but there is again evidence that From Prison to Peace, like Civic Voices, has been effective in engaging young people in constructive debate around contentious issues. Importantly, both projects are optimistic in outlook, focus on civic engagement and particularly target the Northern Ireland Curriculum area of Local and global Citizenship. While both inevitably draw on historical material they do not rely on the discipline of history to provide a critical edge.
The authors of this chapter are anxious to explore the application of an oral history approach to dealing with the legacy of the past. In the remaining section their ideas and practice have been brought together to form the genesis of such an approach. Previously, one of the authors framed a role for history education in helping young people overcome emotional blockages created by family and community influences by hearing the authentic voices of both their own people and “others”, while still maintaining the critical faculties of the historical process. Here he was drawing on the “caring” dimension of history which Barton and Levstik argue is essential to making historical learning relevant to young lives.
The article then went on to outline a possible use for oral history in the transitional justice process in Northern Ireland. It proposed that two schools in the same town, from different cultural backgrounds, might co-operate together on a project to investigate Life During the Troubles. Pupils would first develop oral history data collecting skills then engage in interviewing those who had lived during the violence, thus gaining insight into ordinary people’s experiences. No special effort would be made to locate combatants or victims, but they would be interviewed as and when they were encountered. Schools would then share their material and, as trust developed, there might be the opportunity for students to interview those from the other community. Focus would be placed on critical enquiry and in helping them to bring together and evaluate complex and, sometimes, divergent accounts of the past. The expectation was that the authenticity of what they hear, and the commonality of experiences might promote sensitivity and mutual empathy. The culmination of the work would be some form of public presentation in a “shared space”, accessible to both communities which was both reflective and critical. The schools might then continue to work together to accumulate accounts which could become a resource for wider community understanding.
Subsequently, the other three authors have experimented with a similarly constructed initiative, albeit with more limited objectives, as one small component of a larger project, Facing our History, Shaping the Future. The following account is based on a synthesis of inputs from the project director and two participating teachers. The teachers were working with students aged 14 to 15, in two schools selected on academic ability one identified largely with the Protestant community and the other from a Catholic ethos.