New Home

Advanced workshop

Are you an experienced oral historian in Australia, New Zealand or Southeast Asia who would like to learn how to teach oral history in community, academic or professional contexts? This OHV online Advanced Workshop by two of Australia’s most experienced oral history trainers will consider: issues in interactive teaching and learning; approaches to teaching online and face to face; the aims and varieties of oral history; teaching interviewing; teaching the documentation of interviews; and teaching oral history relationships and ethics (the course will not focus on teaching interpretation of interviews).

Participants in this advanced workshop must have extensive oral history experience. Victorian participants who successfully complete this course, and who then shadow the teaching of at least one other OHV training course, will be eligible to teach OHV training courses. Participants from other states and countries will be equipped to teach oral history beginner courses.

PARTICIPANT FEEDBACK ON THIS COURSE IN 2019 AND 2023:

“Incredibly useful workshop. Enjoyed the day immensely! Terrific facilitators, wonderful cohort.”

“Great session – really made it seem very possible to run a training session with oral history beginners. Got some great tips on group management and facilitation which will be really helpful.”

“Truly honest, open, constructive, value-adding workshop.”

“Appreciated how watchful Al and Sarah were of timing and content. A great range of activities that facilitated learning and understanding.”

TRAINER PROFILES

Sarah Rood is a professional consulting historian who has been working in the field for more than 20 years. She has seen the uses and applications of oral history change drastically. Motivated by a desire to help communicate the past and to help connect individuals and communities with history and identity Sarah has recorded countless oral history interviews. Firmly believing that everyone has a story to tell, Sarah aims to work with people to record their stories in a way that both documents their experiences and ensures that (with permission) it can be accessed by others in the future. The interplay between the tangible and the intangible and how this plays out in oral history is a constant source of intrigue for Sarah. In recent years Sarah’s focus has also turned to the way story gathering and storytelling can be applied to drive change. Contact: sjrood@waybackwhen.com.au

Alistair Thomson, Emeritus Professor of History and national award-winning teacher, taught his first oral history workshop in 1985 at the Wangaratta Centre for Continuing Education and has been teaching oral history in both community and academic settings ever since. Al is immediate past President of Oral History Australia. His oral history books include: Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend (1994), The Oral History Reader (2016), Ten Pound Poms: Australia’s Invisible Migrants (2005), Moving Stories: an intimate history of four women across two countries(2011), Oral History and Photography (2011), Australian Lives: An Intimate History (2017) and Fathering: An Australian History (2025). Al is currently co-editing The Bloomsbury Oral History Handbook. Contact: Alistair.Thomson@monash.edu

NOTE: Tickets are made first available to Oral History Victoria members, before being made available to non-members from the 5th of February. To become an OHV member visit https://oralhistoryvictoria.org.au/membership/

BOOKINGS: https://events.humanitix.com/ohv-advanced-workshop-teaching-oral-history-training-the-trainers

The Oral History Society, United Kingdom, in partnership with the Scottish Oral History Centre, will hold its 2025 annual conference at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow on 6-7 June 2025.

The theme is ‘Whose Voices?‘.

The conference will feature a keynote address by Prof Lynn Abrams and plenary discussions on:

• Whose Voices – views from across the generations in oral history
• Whose Voices are we collecting now? Challenges, opportunities and silences.

To access the Call for Papers (deadline extended to 23 January 2025) and further information about the conference go to: https://www.ohs.org.uk/conferences/.

The 23rd International Oral History Association (IOHA) Conference is scheduled for Kraków, Poland from 16-19 September 2025.

The theme of the conference is Re-Thinking Oral History.

Biennial conferences of the International Oral History Association (IOHA) allow for reviewing the global conditions and problems of oral history, regardless of the actual conference theme. This time, however, the organizers of the 23^rd IOHA Conference call on oral historians worldwide to consciously rethink the idea and practice of their discipline.

Oral history today faces both old and new challenges with long-lasting and unpredictable consequences: the crisis of liberal democracy, growing tensions in international politics, climate change with its devastating outcomes on human life, increasing inequalities, wars, and mass migrations. All of the foregoing not only affect the conditions in which oral history is made, but also compels us to rethink its very aim. For Central and Eastern Europe, the full-scale Russian aggression in Ukraine beginning in February 2022 and its consequences are an especially painful reminder of that. Though oral history was, and still is a part of history, it has always been conscious of the responsibility (oral) history has for the current society. Aware of that mission, we encourage the global oral history community to return to the core questions of our practice: what kind of histories should we tell and pass on to the current and future generation

Find out more about the conference at: https://ioha2025.conference.pl/.

See the Call for Papers – https://ioha2025.conference.pl/en/call-for-papers. The deadline for proposal submissions was 31 August 2024.