The use of oral sources in the teaching of Social Sciences Prof. Laura Benadiba

1. The use of oral sources in the teaching of Social Sciences
Prof. Laura Benadiba
When we say a community “remembers”, what we are really saying is that
in the first place, a past was actively transmitted to contemporary
generations (…) and then that transmitted past was received charged with
a sense of its own. In consequence, a community “forgets” when the
generation that owns that past does not transmit it to the next, or when
the latter rejects what it received or stops transmitting it too (…). But the
principle remains the same: a community can never “forget” what it has
not been transmitted before.
Yosef Yerushalmi, Reflexiones sobre el olvido

2. Object of knowledge of Social Sciences:
Social reality, meaning the set of relations man
establishes with his geographical surroundings, with
the past and with technological and scientific
improvements.

3. Teaching Social Sciences:
Geography, in
particular, must focus
on society’s role as a
constructive, active and
modifying force
regarding current
Must contribute to territorial concerns.
the development of Must help students develop an
a sense of historical awareness of plurality that will
awareness that will reinforce democratic values and
result in the making enable all individuals to participate
of conscious, aware actively in society, encouraging
and active citizens. respect for what is different.

4. The teaching of Social Sciences should
allow students develop a sense of reality
that will strengthen them as protagonists,
not responsible for the past
but for the future

5. Understanding that To integrate curricular projects of local emphasis with the need to
learning Social Sciences understand more general social processes, in a national and world
is an active process, in scale.
constant construction and
development.
To come up with a work project that captures the complexity and richness
of social reality.
To elaborate strategies that will allow students overcome their
difficulties to understand historical and social concepts
To teach history with protagonists, but also avoiding:
•The traditional outlook, that reduces the subject of study to the performance of prominent political and
military characters.
•An impersonalized vision of history, in which social actors are mere abstractions, withdrawn from life
and, therefore, form the student’s possibilities to understand.
•Allow students overcome their difficulty to handle time spans.
• Introduce students into the methodology of social analysis, making them aware that in
order to get to know about a specific period in time, it is necessary to question/analyze
the sources we possess from it.
Make students reflect upon the main characteristics of social and historical knowledge.
•Awaken their curiosity and make them value the acknowledgement of issues and the quest for answers
of their own.

6. In the teaching of history we usually find that traditional teaching methods (that
encourage the use of memory but do not produce or construct knowledge) are
still used.
It is necessary to make teaching participative, where the activities of both
teachers and students are related to the school’s internal and external links and
surroundings, using methodological resources that will enable students grasp
and create historical knowledge.
The teaching of history must allow students develop critical consciousness of
their social surroundings, without feeling historical knowledge as something alien
to them.

7. Oral Making and using oral sources for historical
History reconstruction
Creating
them Helps students
understand the
Working with oral
characteristics of
sources Using historical knowledge
them and the work of a
historian.

8. “Oral history at school is useful to shorten the gap between academia
and the community: taking history home, relating the world of
classrooms, classes and school books, to the daily life and world of the
community the student lives in.”
He who narrates his past, can make it his own.
Oral History promotes: research, which will no longer
seem unfamiliar
His family
His
neighborhood
Research will be carried out in
the world closest to him His town

9. • Helps grasp concrete historical experience
• Puts children in contact with elderly people, confronting different temporalities
• Encourages the collective construction of a near past
• Revalues intergenerational bonds
• Recreates history with the voices of protagonists that traditional sources have
ignored or left aside
• Offers students the chance to abandon a passive attitude towards the construction of
knowledge
• Interviews help students learn how to tolerate others and their ideas

10. Oral sources: their main characteristics
They are oral
They are narrative
They provide more information on the meaning of events than on
events themselves
Their reliability is different from that of other historical sources
As all historical sources, they are not objective
They are incomplete

11. How to use oral sources
Why do we select a person to be interviewed?
What are we looking for in an interview?
What and how do we ask?
What and how do we listen?
How do we interpret what we have been told?

12. Oral sources allow us to know about:
Popular sectors
(common people)
The majorities that have been
marginalized from power
Women
The world of labor
Migrating movements
Through an oral interview light can be shed on certain aspects of recent history that, in
some cases, “official history” has attempted to suppress and forget

13. This methodology allows the school and the community to be
engaged in a bond of commitment
to learn about a region, to be integrated and
feel identified with it
to rediscover local history To construct the region’s
history as well

14. The school community and society are involved as a whole
A line of communication between them will be established and the
school will no longer be considered isolated from society.
All of the above will contribute to the creation of a regional
memory.