This interactive course will explore oral history as a way of sharing and documenting life stories in creative ways through audio recordings, videos, photography, writing, and other forms of media.

We will learn what oral history is and why it is important as both an object of study and a way of “telling” the past. We will practice recording our own oral histories and those of others. We will also have workshops for individual projects, with the goal of creating a finished piece by the end of the course.

Instructor Moniek van Rheenen is a linguistic anthropology Ph.D. student at the UM who conducts oral histories for her research in Indonesia. This study group for those 50 and over will be held on Mondays from March 5 to April 9.