Instructional Designer
CurrentWhile retired from career development, my imagination remains active. Much of my career has been about listening to clients or students tell stories about problems, challenges and aspirations they faced. During counseling sessions, I often wanted an interesting story to continue rather than turning our attention to the learning agreement or career plan that was the purpose for our meeting. Becoming an oral historian seemed a way to engage in more in-depth, focused interviews, allowing the full story to be told. In 2008, I led a team that recorded 45 interviews at a reunion of students, teachers and administrators who, during the 1970s, attended or served at a child- centered elementary school in Claremont CA. The reunion was initiated by a former student who was considering a career as a teacher and did an informational interview with his former teacher. The Sycamore-in-the-70s video clips describe the impact that progressive innovations employed by an inspired group of educators had on students who reflect on their experiences 35 years later. I am currently editing and indexing the interviews using the Oral History Metadata Synthesizer (OHMS) application to be hosted on Youtube by Claremont Heritage, the oral history repository for the Sycamore-in-the-70s collection. I think that oral histories digitally archived with OHMS could fill part of the void that is left when a local newspaper disappears from a community. In January 2020 I bought a 20 foot travel trailer and a 2003 SUV, to take Story Lab West on the road, to extend the mission that was inspired by David Isay, who started storycorps.net over 30 years ago to record “a grass roots oral history of America”. (I recorded an interview in a StoryCorps Airstream in 2005). I hope to record interviews with family members living on the west coast who can tell stories about our Finnish immigrant origins and my grandparents who emigrated from Finland in 1900. The pandemic has forced me to postpone that plan.
