Recollect, Reflect, and Reshape: Discoveries on Oral History Documentary Teaching

Abstract

In university education, oral history always hopes to have students involved in a more attractive way, while teaching documentary production one also looks for good stories. Therefore, the combination of oral history and documentary production in university education seems to be a necessity. This is especially meaningful for the Chinese young generation since they have a great interest and curiosity about China’s modern history and stories about their own family and communities. However, often these stories remained a taboo or untold.

In 2011 the Department of Media and Communication at the City University of Hong Kong launched oral history documentary programs and produced 11 episodes of “Our Fathers’ Revolution” and around 100 episodes of “Family Album” short films. This 6-year practice on oral history documentary education turned out oral history and documentary films that combine and accomplish the goals of oral history education. The process of documentary production has been an interesting experience for the students themselves and for their family and friends.

Oral history documentary projects help students foster an intergenerational appreciation and an awareness of the intersection between personal lives and larger historical currents. It could help fulfil the educational target of a liberal arts education – to develop students’ critical and creative thinking and inspire the active participation in history and civic life in the future. We can regard the whole process of oral history documentary teaching as a way for students to recollect, reflect, and reshape.

However, there are still many problems to be solved during the production of an oral history documentary. Questions such as: Are the interviewees’ subjective feelings consistent with the historical reality? How to carry out trade-offs during the postproduction (video editing) in order to complete a wonderful story? How to complete script writing?

The characters for a documentary require relatively dramatic stories, and it kind of contradicts the relatively boring oral history. How to respect the reality of the history and at the same time satisfy the urge for watching a documentary? How to nurture the students’ historical perspective and objective attitudes? All these difficulties have been encountered in the class during the production of oral history documentaries.

A case study of oral history documentary series “Our Fathers’ Revolution” & “Family Album”