History Harvest Interview

Department of History Author

06/03/2019 Added

75 Plays

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This is an interview with Prof. Patrick D. Jones about the spring 2019 History Harvest, which focused on Lincoln's historic Zoo Bar

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[00:00:04.480]Both of us were interested in a variety of questions.
[00:00:07.709]How is history still relevant
[00:00:11.370]in a 21st century university context
[00:00:15.540]and in a context of transformative technology
[00:00:19.860]with digital scholarship emerging at the time.
[00:00:23.670]How do we continue to appeal to a 21st century student,
[00:00:29.150]who is deeply embedded in that kind of digital culture
[00:00:32.930]that we're a part of and a fast moving culture
[00:00:36.930]that's very forward looking as well,
[00:00:38.770]so how do we create new ways of approaching
[00:00:41.560]historical learning that might appeal to students?
[00:00:44.800]So, we were both very interested
[00:00:47.960]in a student led community based approach to learning
[00:00:52.630]and so we crafted the history harvest project in class,
[00:00:56.840]that we've been doing for a number of years now
[00:00:59.420]that brings together a circle of students in the class
[00:01:03.820]and we focus on a theme or community and their history,
[00:01:09.290]and so, I've done that class focused on
[00:01:13.010]the African American community in North Omaha,
[00:01:15.170]where I live, I've done it on the refugee communities
[00:01:18.580]here in Lincoln, we've had other professors
[00:01:21.020]look at other communities Professor Steinocker,
[00:01:23.620]right now is looking at the Italian American community
[00:01:26.360]in Omaha, but the idea is to bring students in.
[00:01:30.710]They gain historical knowledge about these communities
[00:01:34.460]and learn how those specific histories
[00:01:37.470]link to the broader history of the United States
[00:01:40.140]and even globally when it comes to issues
[00:01:41.930]of immigration or enslavement, etc.
[00:01:46.490]They learn core historical skills.
[00:01:49.234]How to analyze resources and artifacts
[00:01:53.360]that they collect based on this.
[00:01:55.740]How to put those together to draw meaning out of the past.
[00:01:58.630]Meaning that might resonate and be useful with today.
[00:02:01.520]We have lots of issues around immigration,
[00:02:03.790]for instance today.
[00:02:05.510]So what does it mean to think about those
[00:02:07.500]contemporary issues and the context of previous waves
[00:02:10.439]of immigration to a state like Nebraska,
[00:02:13.440]where we've had wave after wave of immigration here.
[00:02:17.920]Or what does that immigration and migration mean
[00:02:20.460]to indigenous communities that persist
[00:02:22.910]and remain here as well and we're here preceding
[00:02:26.130]those other communities as well.
[00:02:28.480]So they learn content,
[00:02:30.320]they learn historical analytic skills,
[00:02:34.040]they also learn digital research skills as well.
[00:02:37.280]They learn how to use a camera.
[00:02:38.590]They learn how to outreach to the community,
[00:02:41.070]connect with the media, they also use the Omeka system,
[00:02:45.570]which is an online archiving system,
[00:02:48.410]so they learn how to encode metadata
[00:02:50.890]and things like that, into archives
[00:02:54.100]and to create an archive that again,
[00:02:56.880]like the making invisible histories visible program,
[00:03:00.160]makes those resources available
[00:03:02.580]to anybody that has a digital connection.
[00:03:06.030]So, teachers, other professors, students
[00:03:09.310]and community members and I think one of the
[00:03:13.010]interesting things about the history harvest project
[00:03:15.260]is that it really comes also from a sense
[00:03:18.300]that most history and most artifacts,
[00:03:22.250]most archival materials are not in a library
[00:03:26.370]or a museum or a formal archive,
[00:03:29.100]but they still remain in the hands of everyday people
[00:03:33.080]in the objects that they keep and maintain
[00:03:36.400]from over the course of their and their families lives
[00:03:39.780]and the meanings that they ascribe to those artifacts.
[00:03:42.860]So, in that regard, we really think of this
[00:03:44.540]as a people's history project
[00:03:48.180]and we invite then local people to come out
[00:03:51.500]and to share those materials
[00:03:53.240]and we digitize those materials
[00:03:55.540]and that's the harvesting part of this history,
[00:03:58.060]so we go into a community, the African American community
[00:04:01.290]in North Omaha, the Italian American community,
[00:04:03.970]the refugee communities here and we invite
[00:04:06.891]members of those communities to bring out
[00:04:09.090]the objects and materials or their own stories,
[00:04:11.640]because we collect oral histories as well,
[00:04:13.860]and to share those materials with us.
[00:04:16.648]We don't keep the materials, and so we digitize them,
[00:04:20.560]so we scan or photograph them,
[00:04:22.390]we record with a camera, their interviews,
[00:04:26.980]and then we make that material available
[00:04:29.490]through the website that we have,
[00:04:31.140]that's an ever expanding web resource as well.
[00:04:36.010]This model has been really popular,
[00:04:38.410]not only with our students here at UNL,
[00:04:40.500]but it's been influential and taken up by teachers,
[00:04:45.233]professors at other universities around the country.
[00:04:49.420]Both at the undergrad level, the graduate level,
[00:04:51.849]in education, in public history,
[00:04:54.710]as well as K through 12 levels as well.
[00:04:59.040]That also flows into one of the projects
[00:05:02.720]that I'm doing currently, which is last year,
[00:05:05.780]we got a significant grant from the
[00:05:08.500]Humanities Without Walls consortium
[00:05:11.760]and that grant is gonna allow us
[00:05:15.140]to work with the Lincoln public school system,
[00:05:18.090]we're in the process of doing this right now,
[00:05:20.360]to think about and think through
[00:05:22.610]what would it mean to do the history harvest program
[00:05:26.530]and project at the upper elementary,
[00:05:28.986]the middle school and the high school level.
[00:05:32.540]So, this is a partnership with my colleague,
[00:05:35.034]Aaron Johnson is over in the school of education here,
[00:05:39.167]where we've got some graduate assistants,
[00:05:41.330]we're working with local teachers
[00:05:42.820]and the social studies expert in the Lincoln public school,
[00:05:47.200]to think about what would this mean
[00:05:48.830]to view this at the fifth grade level,
[00:05:50.390]the eighth grade level and the 11th grade level,
[00:05:54.380]and to have a succession, a curricular perspective
[00:05:59.810]that would think about how students could use
[00:06:02.350]the history harvest to grow their understanding of history
[00:06:06.150]and the skills that you can get from doing
[00:06:08.880]historical educational work, so we're really excited
[00:06:13.290]about that and hope that ultimately
[00:06:15.430]after this kind of Lincoln model
[00:06:16.933]gets up and running that this could be a model
[00:06:19.300]that then school systems, K through 12 school systems
[00:06:22.790]across the state of Nebraska could adopt
[00:06:25.680]and buy into, it's really exciting in that regard.

History Harvest Interview

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History Harvest Interview

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