But Sometimes You're Not Part of the Story: Oral Histories and Ways of Remembering and Telling

Abstract

Social science inquiry has increasingly focused on the intricate relations between biography and history. In educational inquiry, this focus has led to an explosion of interest in the personal narrative as an articulation of individual and collective experience with the social, political, and cultural worlds of education. This interest in the personal narrative has in turn given prominence to work in oral history as a research strategy. The growing intuitive appeal of personal narratives, however, has led to a certain methodological complacency. What does it mean to collect and analyze personal narratives? How do narrators voice their narratives and narrate their voice? What role do interviewers play in the unfolding of these narratives ? What do these questions mean in the context of oral histories, which are narratives where the interviewer-narrator dynamic is also mediated by the nature of memory? This paper examines what the author learned about oral histories from the narratives the author could–and could not–collect.