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Palestinian Oral History as Pedagogy: A Reciprocal Approach to Teaching and Learning
Abstract
This paper explores oral history as an alternative pedagogical approach within the academy and beyond. Oral history has long been theorized as a feminist and anti-colonial research methodology, as it centers those who are marginalized and voiceless in the canons and archives of official ‘History’. The feminist practice of oral history highlights the details and contradictions of lived histories, challenging what constitutes institutionalized knowledge, and narratives deemed to be ‘expert’ or ‘objective’. It legitimizes subjective experiences of ordinary people who are not approached as historical ‘sources’, but rather as participants in knowledge production. Soliciting and centering oral histories in scholarship may thus be viewed as an activist praxis. In relation to academic discourse, storytelling also opens possibilities for the disenfranchised to claim and organize around their rights. This discussion is further underpinned by the theoretical and practical paradigm of Palestinian oral history (F. Abdulhadi; N. Abdo; D. Allan; R. Davis; N. Masalha; R. Sayigh; A. Yahya; among others) that responds to ongoing erasures of Palestinian refugee narratives. My paper connects these frameworks to the level of pedagogy, by asking: how can oral history methods be implemented by educators to construct a fuller picture of history for their students? Can oral history projects create inclusive possibilities for students undertaking research? What sorts of social and political relationships does oral history forge, within the classroom and to society at large? How does oral history respond to or move beyond the ongoing debate within academia concerning decolonizing knowledge? What can educators/students do with questions around audiences (who is this for?) that orality raises? From a pedagogical perspective, how can oral history methods allow students to shape their own learning? I argue that oral history, as a dynamic approach to teaching, inspires more democratic forms of knowledge production. This paper brings in the questions, tensions, and outcomes that will emerge from my course on Palestinian oral history that I will co-facilitate in Spring 2023. My argument is further informed by my oral history work with Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, specifically around a project on intergenerational memory and the Right of Return, that emerged from my experience of teaching youth in Aida refugee camp. I argue that oral history introduces a dialectical relationship between listener and teller, and by extension, between teacher and student, creating a more reciprocal structure of learning that moves both to respond to the stakes of the present.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
None