Combined Activity

A major component of this unit is a combined activity with our pre-service English counterparts. For this activity we decided to combine oral history, narratives, dialect, biography, autobiography, and interviewing. This activity includes four portions: Formulating Interview Questions, Interviewing, Transcribing, and Writing.
The ultimate goal is to create a biography of someone with a background in slave narratives from the perspective of that person. The final paper will read as an autobiography.

FORMULATION OF INTERVIEW QUESTIONS:

In both English and History course, students will spend a day learning about the interview process and formulating questions that are both insightful and complete.

Interviewing: Students will learn..
- Courtesy to the interviewee
- Appropriate questioning techniques
- Relationship with interview
- Recording techniques
- Note-taking
- Posture and eye-contact
- Any additional protocol

Questioning:
Students will be directed as to what types of questions to ask the interviewee when seeking biographical answers in order to get certain information. The questions will vary among students, but they will focus on the old standards of:
- Who: Who were the important people in that persons life? Who is this person?
- What: What events happened during your life? What are some stories you can tell me?
- Where: Where did you grow up? Describe that place to me? Where have you been throughout your life?
- When: When did these things happen to you? When did you make that decision?
- Why: Why did you decide on this career choice? Why did you marry this person?
- How: How did you get to this location? How did you come to that conclusion?

The goal of this day is to learn how to respectfully interview a person, and to develop questions to ask the interviewee.

INTERVIEWING:

For the interview, the English teachers will produce five individuals with knowledge of slave narratives and oral history. The students will be broken up into groups of five and assigned an interviewee.  Students will already know their groups prior to coming into class. Upon arrival, they will find five groups of  five desks arranged in a semi-circle opposite a chair. Each groups' location will be marked and they will be instructed to sit in the appropriate  section. The teacher will then introduce the five guests, and everyone will thank the guest speakers for participating.   

Following a brainstorming session at the beginning of the unit, the teacher will have contacted prospective speakers, asking if they would like to come in for one fifty-minute period to tell an interesting story from their life. They would be informed that the students would be coming up with follow-up questions to ask after they have told their story, that the encounters would be recorded in audio (into Mp3 digital format), and that their picture would be taken alongside the students. If they agreed, the teacher might help to get them started by providing some preparatory questions.

Students will spend the entire period listening to the stories of the speakers and asking their follow-up questions. The teacher will make sure that the interviews are recorded effectively and might also step into some of the groups to help ask questions if there is a noticeable lull in the conversation. Finally, the guests will pose for a picture either alone or with any consenting students. The class will then thank the guests once again at the close of the class.  Students will then fill out a self-assessment pertaining to the quality of their interviewing skills and identifying things they need to improve on.

TRANSCRIPTION:

The third component of activity will be transcribing the interview taken on the previous day. Transcribing will occur in the English classroom.

Following an earlier discussion in the week focusing on the use of dialect in the slave narratives that were read in class, the students will listen to the recordings of their interviews, pick out the most interesting parts, and transcribe these sections in the dialect that most appropriately captures the speaker's style of vocalization.

The teacher will model this activity by playing a section of their own voice from the previous day's activity and writing it on the board using the punctuation and phonetic constructions that best reflect the audio. For example, the statement made by the teacher:

"I really want to know what that part of your life must have been like."

Might look like:

"I really wanna know what that part of yer life musta be'n like."

(This is perhaps an exaggeration the teacher's own regional diction, but it serves only to illustrate a possible transcription of the dialectic.)

Students will work for the remainder of the hour to pinpoint the most interesting moments from the interviews and transcribe them.

Each student will be given a copy of the complete interview on CD and (assuming that there is a class website) the audio files will be uploaded directly in mp3 format so that students can interact with the audio in their own way.

BIOGRAPHICAL WRITING:

The last portion of the combined activity will be writing the biography of the interviewee. This will occur in the History classroom over the last two days of the unit. Students will use all of the resources they have obtained and created throughout the unit to accomplish this task. Students will need to include information listed on the document below and we'll be graded accordingly.

The lesson plan and handout below are to be used with the writing portion of the activity:

Delinski - Interview Lab Lesson Plan (Combined Activity)

Delinski - Interview Lab Handout (Combined Activity)