Rethinking historical practice and community engagement: researching together with ‘youth historians’

ABSTRACT

This essay describes a yearlong public history collaboration between graduate students, a faculty member, and local public high school students collectively producing original scholarship on a topic in the history of education. This collaboration occurred in three parts, described chronologically: a planning phase, where the group devised research questions; a research phase, where graduate students, faculty, and high school students co-conducted oral histories; and a dissemination phase, where the group created Omeka exhibits based on oral histories and other secondary research. By focusing on the methodological implications of this type of novel scholar-youth collaboration, this essay argues that there are untapped opportunities and scholarly benefits to researching topics in the history discipline (particularly the history of education) with historically trained, local high school youth. This experimental collaboration is meant to spark dialogue about how to combine the traditions of the history field with important hands-on youth/community work for the purposes of rethinking traditional historical processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Historical methodology
• collaborative history research
• youth historians
• digital research
• oral history
• history of Harlem education

Introducing the Youth Historians in Harlem (YHH) project

I vividly recall one afternoon after I moved to New York City, walking through hallowed Morningside Park, the long, narrow stretch that separates the grandiose structures at Columbia University from the historic Black neighborhood of Harlem. Here I was, a white graduate student from the Midwest – an outsider – passing through the site of the infamous 1968 Columbia University protests where the Harlem community successfully halted the university’s proposed building of a campus gym on public grounds (Bradley 2003, 2009). I had read about this poignant story in one of my early graduate classes, but, despite my profound interest in this history, I also knew it was not my story to tell. Or, at least, it was not my story to tell alone. I imagined one day starting a collaborative youth history program in Harlem, where young people could tell these educational stories of their community: stories about achievement, about activism, about struggle. I could bring skillsets and resources, and young people could bring meaning and insight (and more) – and perhaps we could create magic together.

Fortunately, this idea eventually came to fruition, and I established the Youth Historians in Harlem (YHH) program. The program began with a broad set of developing questions as I simultaneously navigated my scholarly identity. On one hand, as a historian in training, I was primarily concerned with producing new scholarship on the history of education. Yet, as an educator, I was also interested in another methodological tradition due to my interest in young people: Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR), a research framework that centers youth as capable knowledge producers and agents of change by having them participate in social justice-themed research, particularly in ways that ‘break down the barriers between the researcher and the researched’ (Akom, Cammarota, and Ginwright 2008, 5; Cammarota and Fine 2006; Morrell 2006). As I thought about weaving together these two different contexts of history and YPAR, a compelling line of inquiry arose in the vein of a public history project: how could the young people I was about to work with substantively participate in the production of historical knowledge (particularly in my subfield of history of education)?¹ More broadly, how would this potential collaboration add to public history scholarship that seeks to explore the ‘process by which history is constructed’ (Martin 2013, 1) and the co-production of knowledge with communities? To be sure, these were not new questions, but perhaps I could initiate a novel process within the university setting as I sought to explore them.

For three years, I worked with local high school students from a small Harlem public school in my after-school Youth Historians program.² The program encouraged students to discuss history beyond the textbook, introducing them to scholarly research practices that enabled them to learn the history of their Harlem neighborhood by using ‘the city as [a] teacher,’ (Calhoun 1969, 312–325) with a goal of becoming ‘critical public historians’ (Morrell and Rogers 2006, 367). By ‘critical,’ I wanted students to not only be able to understand history as a source of shared knowledge and as a dynamic discipline, but as a source of identity. Through this program, students benefited in a variety of ways, both academically and socially; for example, YHH helped students develop their public speaking skills, learn how to navigate archives and collegiate settings, and perform basic research online (i.e. navigate JSTOR catalogs). Students also demonstrated an increased interest in history and a sense of empowerment as emerging ‘scholars’ (Goldenberg 2016).

I benefited as well. Helping these high school students find historical sources, read and interpret them, and learn about Harlem improved my thought processes as a scholar. I began to develop a more nuanced understanding of Harlem in the present as it pertained to education – what interested students, the significance of their family histories, and the challenges (and opportunities) living and learning in the neighborhood. Participating in historical dialogue with high school students about their present-day perspectives of Harlem education led me to think about my own research methodologies. I was reminded of what Joyce Appleby wrote two decades ago: that historians must ‘make more salient the embeddedness of history in the present,’ and that doing so can help us ‘view the whole from a different angle of vision’ (Appleby 1998, 12). Working with local youth, I realized, could provide a new contextual portal through which to create, and examine, historical questions about education. By the third year of Youth Historians, the program had added a public history dimension that I first imagined during my initial treks through Morningside Park: together, students and I began to more explicitly confront the process by which historical knowledge is created while (still) simultaneously examining the histories of students’ neighborhood, particularly its robust (but underexplored) educational history.³

This essay explores this aforementioned third year of my collaboration with youth, focusing on the methodological implications and opportunities behind our public history experiment in conducting historical education research. Of course, these questions around collaboration and authority are certainly not new in the field of public history. For example, Denise Meringolo (2012) has documented how scholars have engaged in public history – think about the creation of monuments, museums, and other structures in public spaces through collaboration – for more than a century. Thus, this project is humbly grounded in this long scholarly tradition, where questions of authority, voice, and challenges to ‘conventional approaches to history’ have long been explored (Martin 2013, 1). Yet, unlike other public history scholarship, the historical content of this project centers on a school that, if not a public ‘space’ in the way that Meringolo and others have described, still an important public-facing institution nonetheless. Furthermore, this project focuses not just on the outcomes of a collaborative project, but on our collaborative process – and a process not with adults, but instead, with youth located inside the physical and intellectual confines of the university.

Detailing the collaboration between local youth and historians of education

At the start of this third year, a group of students of color, all male and primarily in the 12th grade, and I worked together on a broad-scale original research project on the history of education in Harlem.⁴ Each student volunteered to meet twice a week for two hours at Columbia University. The topic of our collective inquiry was an alternative school called Harlem Prep that existed from 1967 to 1974 and is generally absent from the historical record. Holding classes in an old supermarket, Harlem Prep was an independently financed ‘community school’ that served former high school ‘dropouts’ and non-traditional students. Even with limited resources, the school sent many hundreds of students to colleges during its existence (Goldenberg 2018).

Our collaboration involved three phases. In the first, planning phase, students and I devised a research strategy and identified compelling historical questions for the year, as well as learned the historical context of Harlem in the 1960s and 1970s. In the second, research phase, students and I learned oral history methodology and then co-conducted intergenerational oral history interviews with Harlem Prep alumni. Acting as the core of our project, oral history ‘offers a challenge to the accepted myths of history, to the authoritarian judgment inherent in its tradition’ – squarely in line with past public history initiatives (Thompson 2006, 29). Finally, in the third, dissemination phase, we created digital exhibits (using the Omeka content management system) to share our oral history interviews with both the general public (particularly the Harlem community) and the scholarly community, as well as held a year-end event where we presented our collaborative research-in-progress together at Columbia University.

From the outset, this experimental collaborative project faced unanswered questions not only about historical content but about the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of historical practice. This essay explores these opportunities and tensions involved when scholars work with youth apprentices in genuinely collaborative ways, guided by two specific questions:

• 1. When historians and local youth conduct historical research together, how does their work challenge notions of hierarchy and authority and/or complicate ideas about legitimate knowledge?

• 2. How do processes of historical research shift, and responsibilities change, when creating history with students via online digital formats?

While the remainder of Part I further frames the collaborative aspect of this project, Part II and Part III explicitly address the first and second questions, respectively. Note that I approach these questions with a sense of playfulness and a necessary comfort with the unknown. As sociologist Norman Denzin once wrote:

Since one can be trained only in what is already known, training sometimes incapacitates one from learning new ways; it makes one rebel against what is bound to be at first loose and even sloppy. But you cling to such vague images and notions, if they are yours, and you must work them out. For it is in such forms that original ideas, if any, almost always first appear. (1970/2009, 6)

Denzin’s poignant explanation can, and should, apply to scholars in history, particularly those in my subfield of history of education. Often located within colleges of education, educational historians have a unique opportunity to probe for new methodologies by working with youth. Our affinity for studying the history of education – and students particularly – makes us an ideal fit to research with them, in ways that might be less then optimal for historians located outside colleges of education or those who are traditionally not engaged in public history projects. Karen Graves (2014) recently reminded readers about how we must better elucidate the importance of our field in colleges of education with the increased pressures on the liberal arts in an era of school reform (see also, e.g. Fraser 2015). Projects like Youth Historians can help answer her call to action – researching history with local youth allows us to remain true to our discipline while also improving the lives of students through tangible hands-on collaborations. However, I believe historians of all fields should consider this approach. Public historians have been engaged in this work for decades, and I hope this essay – a reflection of my genuinely collaborative project with young people – encourages every historian to consider rethinking how to infuse public history methodology and the wisdom of youth into their scholarship.

Part I: setting the stage for collaborative historical research

‘Flipping’ the script on historical knowledge: a youth-led walking tour

Before jumping into this yearlong collaborative research project, I wanted to first create a ‘bridge’ activity that would help students recognize their unique Harlem perspective and untapped ability to share that insight. To meet those goals, returning Youth Historians and I were offered the opportunity to design a ‘walking tour’ of Harlem for a small graduate class at Columbia University, and for three weeks, seven high school students, a faculty member, and I strategized about what this tour would consist of.⁵ To be sure, this endeavor follows in the footsteps of many other public history projects, such as Student Community Action Tours in Philadelphia and New York, where students led community groups on historical tours of their community, retelling its history from their perspective. This program notably aimed ‘to encourage students to connect their personal history with the history of their immediate surroundings, to raise their consciousness about past struggles for social justice, and to empower them with skills to become agents of change in service to their own interests’ (Shopes 2014).

Our introductory walking tour certainly sought to meet those important goals. However, I wanted to move the goalposts one step further: to use the walking tour not only to position students as resident tour guides, but as way to position them as historical experts in an academic context that would help break down the hierarchical norms that they have been accustomed to. The goal was for high school youth to lead an informational tour around the neighborhood, helping graduate students (many of them pre-service teachers) – during their official class time – link their readings to the specific spatial context in which the history had unfolded. In preparatory sessions, we discussed elements of a walking tour, made decisions on how to design the tour as a history of young people in Harlem, and most importantly, chose seven spaces in Harlem to present during the walk.

It was this final task where our collaboration first confronted some initial tensions, challenging notions of hierarchy and authority within the norms of the typical teacher-student relationship. Despite my constant plea for students to select spaces in Harlem that might have been significant to young people, they were reluctant to do so. I had hoped they would identify places beyond the well-known and famous, using their perspective as young people to remind us to look for the places that mattered in students’ daily lives, such as popular historical after-school student hangouts. Although students’ lack of exhaustive knowledge of Harlem’s history was a factor, mostly, they were hesitant to identify their own ideas as valid in comparison to what had, elsewhere, been validated as the most important places in Harlem. Furthermore, students expressed apprehension about stepping into the role of an oral ‘storyteller’, weaving together both the history of the place and their own lived experiences – essentially, shifting the historical narrative within this (new) teacher-student context.

We ended up deciding on an eclectic list of stops that reflected our shared opinions.⁶ Whereas I thought mostly about specific buildings, the students also suggested broader spaces which reflected their lived experiences in Harlem. For example, during the tour one student discussed 125th Street and how it once served as an iconic location for restaurants, shops, and entertainment where youth would congregate. He also talked about how this space still serves as an important place in Harlem for youth today, which he elaborated on during the walking tour, beyond his notes and rehearsal sessions. Our richest preparatory discussions occurred when we discussed how to highlight students’ points of view, in hopes of making the tour more valuable and engaging for the graduate students in ways that Alan Peshkin (1988) and others have long advocated for. For instance, during the tour, one student presented the history of the public housing project where he lives close to Columbia University, commenting on the history of the space and his own experiences feeling excluded from the university and its adjacent, more affluent, housing structure.

In practice, the walking tour ‘flipped the script’ as high school students taught graduate students about Harlem’s educational history. The dialectic exchanges between high school students and graduate students blurred the lines of hierarchy in who possesses historical knowledge, in what forms this knowledge is shared, and in what setting – also forcing me to re-assess my own assumptions about the broader exchange of knowledge. For decades, Hayden White has argued that the history discipline is closer to the literary tradition than the social sciences, and in doing so, that histories are actually ‘verbal fictions’ more closely tied to the author’s imagined narrative then any set of established ‘facts’ (1978, 82, 1975, 2002, 2009). White’s push against the traditional orthodoxy of how we, as scholars, codify knowledge became apparent during the walking tour. Students’ constructed narratives of Harlem’s history and relation to their own lived experiences as youth were no less ‘historical’ than those of established scholars – at least as internalized by the graduate students who were learning about Harlem’s educational history for the first time. Thus, by taking on the role as tour guides and, most notably, as educators, students challenged the discipline’s acceptance that knowledge can only be shared by credentialed historians. Although historical accuracy remains important, events like a walking tour given to graduate students lend nuance to notions of legitimacy in historical research, particularly around oral displays of perceived knowledge (or lack thereof) by the historical ‘storyteller’.

Furthermore, similar experiences also underscore the role that other factors – such as personal feelings, perspectives, and social power – can play in exchanges of historical information. Education scholars from other disciplines have illustrated the benefits of pre-service teachers learning from youth, and there is no reason this principle should not be engaged by historians (see, e.g. Morrell and Collatos 2002). In the case of the walking tour, having high school students take on the function of teachers enriched graduate students’ understanding of the key roles of young people in Harlem’s rich history. Pedagogically, and most relevantly to the scope of this project, preparing and leading the tour helped authorize the high school students as knowers, researchers, and teachers of historical knowledge – a necessary intellectual belief among students and starting point for more in-depth collaborative research later in the year.

Part II: challenging the norms of history research through co-conducted oral histories

In search of an accessible text that would push my high school students to think about their relationship with history, I remember re-reading Eric Foner’s (2002) cogently titled book, Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing World. In his preface, Foner hinted at the idea that history is in fact not the province of scholars alone and that many groups of people have claims of ownership on history.⁷ Beyond a short reading exercise for my students, I realized that the Youth Historians project built upon this notion specifically within the context of the academy: if historians are not the sole ‘owners’ of history, then it becomes troublesome when only some of the many people who ‘own’ history are authorized to produce historical accounts, and others, such as local youth scholars, are seemingly not. (To be sure, Foner also understands that there are ‘commonly accepted professional standards’ in the discipline that separate the lay person from the scholar, which remains particularly relevant in today’s era of digital accessibility and dissemination.) I wondered, then, what would happen – and what it would look like in practice – when high school students were trained in historical methodology, and then ‘authorized’ as scholars in a way that recognized them as historians, to also produce historical knowledge (for example, because of their affiliation with Columbia University).⁸

I believe that centering students as knowledge producers can change the way historians think about – or more accurately, conduct – our study of the past by challenging notions of hierarchy in the history of education (and other subfields, too). Currently, a hierarchy of who can write the past exists in historical research, and it seeps into our methodologies to create a hardened set of hierarchical norms that are difficult to disentangle. As scholars, how can we conduct historical studies about communities without their input and then expect these same communities to accept our scholarship when they did not have a genuine role in producing it in the first place? Part II of this essay examines how scholarly norms of hierarchy in methodological processes and authority in narrative-making can be explored and challenged through youth-scholar collaborative oral history interviews.

Learning oral history methods, together

Following the walking tour where I hoped students internalized the notion that they could have agency as historians, we moved forward with the project’s primary agenda: conducting oral history interviews with Harlem Prep alumni. In preparation, students and I first conducted preliminary research by examining an array of primary and secondary source materials. Next, we spent approximately four and half weeks learning oral history methods. Then, I strategically planned a series of workshops about oral history research in incremental steps. We discussed how and why oral histories differ from journalistic interviews, the great opportunity that students had to document the unrecorded ‘living histories’ of community elders, and the potential perils of relying on memory as a historical source (Perks and Thompson 2006).

Subsequently, I sought out strategies of teaching oral history methods to the youth in ways that involved a similar level of rigor and scholarliness as my own training. Students listened to and discussed a sample oral history interview that I had conducted with a former Harlem Prep student; I led a critical reflexive conversation with students where I reflected on my own nervousness at asking questions, which further helped students internalize that we were learning these methods together. Then, I taught students how to operate the professional audio recording equipment. For the final step, students read over various tips for asking questions from the Center for Oral History at Columbia University and thematically prepared a list of potential questions to ask interviewees (Albarelli and Starechski 2005). Students devised questions both based on what they had learned from the previous Harlem Prep materials and from their own experiences attending school in Harlem, creating six themes: Teachers and Teacher Pedagogy, School Policies, Students and Student Life, School Atmosphere and Environment, Historical Context of Harlem, and School/Physical Appearance. Notably, I was most interested in teacher pedagogy, whereas students were very interested in the school’s policies – a topic that I had previously theorized less about. However, the youth interviewers, who are affected by policies every day and find them essential to their feelings about their own school, were very eager to learn about policies that contributed to Harlem Prep’s energetic school atmosphere.

Seeking to expose students to a live interview before having them lead their own in small groups, I first scheduled a full-group interview with a former teacher at Harlem Prep, George ‘Sandy’ Campbell. We had a packed conference room at Columbia University: myself and two students, together, served as lead interviewers who would ask the questions; two other students operated the Tascam audio recording equipment; and the other four students acted as ‘observers’ who took notes on our interactions for later group reflection.

Admittedly, the interview was a bit unwieldy at first. Finding a rhythm and proper pacing as co-interviewers working together was initially quite challenging – a common challenge during group interviews (see, e.g. Slim and Thomson 2006, 148–149). I wanted the youth to start the interview and direct the dialogue as much as possible, with me interjecting only when I felt it was appropriate or needed to ask a particular question. Still, the students and I eventually developed a good cadence as we collectively thought that the interview was successful in both substance and process.⁹ Campbell felt that the interview evolved in much the same way as students and I did. ‘I felt a sense of discomfort’, he remembers at first. ‘Sitting before me were students who were equally uncomfortable about the questions they would ask and the manner they would present them’. However, he continued that:

Within a matter of moments, the discomfort disappeared and I was transferred back to many memorable moments of my teaching experience at Harlem Prep… They too were soon at ease with the rapport that developed between us…. I came alive with the desire to answer [their questions] and to explore with them what was the historical and significant impact Harlem Prep had made on educational practice in the 60s. By the time the interview was over, all of us felt a connection much like the ‘one family concept’ that permeated the Harlem Prep environment (e-mail communication, 14 September 2017).

This initial experience helped students understand both the power of oral histories as well as that the process of interviewing is certainly ‘no simple art’ (Howell and Prevenier 2001, 27).

Breaking down the hierarchy: the key to collaborative oral history interviews

We conducted four subsequent interviews with Harlem Prep alumni. I co-conducted all but one interview alongside three students: one co-lead interviewer, one audio operator, and one additional questioner/note taker.¹⁰ Notably, the co-lead student interviewer always initiated the dialogue, and I encouraged the students to frame the interview as much as possible – they were not just to be present, but active in sustaining discussion.

Although each interview had a different dynamic, collectively, they all flourished. First, the alumni were unanimously pleased to share their stories, as evidenced by each wanting to know about our future progress. ‘I’m glad you came here to ask questions. So thank you for taking me down memory lane a little bit’, exclaimed one of the interviewees (participant interview, 25 February 2015). Each of the interviewees offered similar comments about being grateful for the opportunity to tell their story. ‘It is a journey back home!’ wrote Sandy Campbell in a retrospective essay to me, in regards to his experience interviewing with the Youth Historians (e-mail communication, 14 September 2017). Of course, the students were excited to participate too and found the process worthwhile. ‘I enjoyed the passion that the interviewees had when they spoke about their old school’, noted student Ibrahim Ali in a later reflection (personal communication, 11 September 2017). ‘All these interviews affected me in certain ways’, wrote another student in his digital exhibit.

Particularly noteworthy was how the power dynamics shifted from the faculty member and I, to the young people during the interviews. Interviewees seemed to recognize that the youth were also co-experts, and consequently, often spoke directly to them in ways that transferred the history-making authority from the university scholars to the students and alumni. For example, one interviewee, over the course of almost one and a half hours, made eye contact almost exclusively with the youth. Although I ended up asking the majority of the questions for this particular interview, the Harlem Prep alumnus continually spoke to the students, as if I was absent from the table. The student operating the audio equipment declared to me after: ‘I didn’t say anything but he looked at me the whole time!’ Another alumnus, who had faced traffic difficulties and arrived at the interview unsure of the setting, noticeably became more comfortable when introduced to the youth, softening the tone of her voice and overall disposition. She also commented appreciatively about student preparation and involvement – it mattered to her that the questions came from the youth, as evidenced in the transcript when she asked for the lead student interviewer’s name before starting the conversation.

After all, this was to be expected; Valerie Yow has argued that ‘interview dynamics’, such as similarities and differences of race and cultural norms between interviewer and narrator can affect the outcome of oral histories, and in our case, it seemed that the young people’s status as both young people and, specifically, Harlem students, mattered (2015, 197). Each of the youth researchers had unique insights and perspectives about schooling and education that significantly differed from mine, a white researcher – and stranger to Harlem schools – who grew up in suburban St. Louis. It was important to understand that students’ experiences attending school in Harlem amounted to valuable ‘cultural capital’ that felt synergistic with the experiences of former Harlem Prep students (Goldenberg 2014).

Of course, students’ presence not only affected the interviewees’ demeanor, but also the actual substance of the narratives being shared; students’ agency to ask questions altered the trajectory of the interview in unique – and uncharted – ways. Alessando Portelli poignantly notes that, ‘each person is at a crossroads of many potential stories’, and students’ genuine involvement elicited stories and interactions from the alumni that may have not been expressed in the same way – or at all – if I conducted the interviews alone (1997, 58). For instance, one interviewee spoke intimately about growing up in a ‘rough’ neighborhood in New York City, using language and terminology that described some very intimate experiences that the high school youth could relate to differently than I could. From my vantage point, the resulting exchanges between the student and the Harlem Prep alumnus were rich and vivid, contributing to a transcript that seemed to be more detailed, if not possibly more honest and raw, because of the students’ participation. Taking this into account, I argue that the youth held a key role in drawing out ‘new’ legitimate knowledge – both by their presence and by their questions – in noteworthy ways that challenged the hierarchical norms that rely solely on (adult) scholars. Furthermore, the fact that students were operating as researchers within the academy while simultaneously retaining their membership to the Harlem community helped legitimize the interviewees’ personal narratives as potential scholarship. Although the interviews surely benefitted from my involvement, the students were the catalysts in this specific instance of oral history knowledge gathering. In fact, it was because the interviewees recognized students as having at least a co-equal role in the interviews that they seemed to be so open to sharing their stories in the fashion that they did. (Of course, the inverse remains true, too: it is possible that students’ participation prevented alumni from sharing certain information, even if that did not seem to be true in these instances.)

An intergenerational context: exploring authority in the transmission of narratives

A further analysis of the interactions between local youth and their elders raises additional – albeit more speculative and less understood – queries about the transmission of the created narratives themselves. As Perks and Thompson suggest, ‘schools are an important context for intergenerational oral history projects’, particularly for a project such as Youth Historians where the young people are positioned as legitimate knowledge producers (2006, 448). The students, by virtue of their Harlem membership combined with their status as (novice) scholars part of a university-sanctioned research project, have a unique capacity different than mine to be the ‘receptors’ of these elders’ untold stories.

One expected reason for this is that the narratives conveyed by the Harlem Prep alumni were highly personal, in part because, as the interviewees expressed with frustration, the story of Harlem Prep is relatively unknown. ‘Telling [my] story is something really special to me’, explains alumnus and interviewee Peter Hopson, and ‘telling it to the kids who understood [it] was very gratifying to me and it was good to know that kids knew what the Prep was’ (personal communication, 6 September 2017). Thus, today’s current Harlem youth researchers can become the heirs of these alumni’s stories on Harlem Prep. They are the group of people who have the greatest ‘authority’ and metaphorical claim on these stories; the interview exchanges between elders and youth were ultimately powerful because they represented something deeper and more ethereal like the passing of intergenerational knowledge in ways that go beyond instances of sentimentality alone (see, e.g. Lawrence 2014). Put another way, Michael Frisch suggests the term ‘sharing authority’ to explain this rather intrinsically defined commodity; there was certainly ‘something’ noteworthy ‘about the nature of authority enacted and manifest, shared or sharable or not, within the actual oral histories’ of the Harlem Prep alumni (2003, 113). ‘I was just proud to see the students participating in a bit of history about Harlem and about education, which they were now participating in from a completely different outlook’, adds Hopson upon further reflection (personal communication, 6 September 2017).

I sensed this most during one of the interviews that occurred outside Columbia University at an interviewee’s office building in Central Harlem, in which the Harlem Prep alumnus took an obvious interest in the students’ lives. As she shared her story, I felt that she did so in a tone and vocal direction that hinted at the need for students to know these stories – her story of Harlem Prep – as a part of a greater narrative that would help put students’ current understanding of education and the greater Harlem community in perspective. From her depictions of racism in schools as a child to her current work in the community at an African-American-owned company, from my perspective, it was as if she was saying to students: ‘this is what you are a part of, now go out and use this knowledge for the better’. 12th grade student Robert Randolph concurred, writing later in his digital exhibit that:

[The interviewee’s] story was especially moving to me because of the school she came from before she started attending Harlem Prep. The reason for this is because she experienced the problems associated with racism in her performing arts school. Usually as a beginning historian, we only hear about race being a factor in stunting one’s learning second hand. It was pretty special to hear that first hand (student exhibit, 2015).

Fellow co-lead student interviewer Ibrahim Ali concurred: ‘[The interview] was something that allowed me to learn something that could not be unveiled from any books or website. I learned about a school that was located in my neighborhood from a different era than the time I live in’ (personal communication, 11 September 2017). Ultimately, students in Harlem possess a particularly unique authority – or what social scientists might define as ‘positionality’ – to partake in the sharing of this knowledge linked by community and educational genealogy (see, e.g. Kinloch 2009; Milner IV 2007). Of course, what this sharing means in the context of oral history methodology is still not fully understood, and I hope that future projects explore this idea through similar undertakings with youth.

Overall, the students’ and interviewees’ participation in the process described above illustrate why I believe historians – and not just those in the field of public history – must re-think how to conduct inquiries of the past. We would be wise to include students in our research methods. Just as there are many owners of history, there should be many producers of it, too, particularly when knowledge is being created – through the subsequent interpretation of these oral histories – about one’s own community such as in the Youth Historians project. In these specific oral histories, students, trained in partnership with scholars, acted as the linchpin in generating these new sources. If hierarchical norms of the discipline suggest that students cannot – or should not – participate in the scholarly historical process, these youth-led interviews challenge this claim.

These interviews also, of course, intersect with salient questions in public history about who is ‘authorized’ to engage in this work and the authenticity of a ‘grand historical narrative’ as generated by scholars alone. Public historians like Raphael Samuel and others have consistently argued against this notion and the entrenched idea that knowledge produced by community members is often ‘not regarded as “proper history” by the academy’ (Samuel 2013, 3). While I wholeheartedly agree with this pushback – that history is a practice and not just a discipline only for scholars – the fact that students also gained tacit approval of the university to undergo historical research provides an additional challenge to the conventional norms of who has the authority to write the past.

Part III: shifting responsibilities through creating digital history exhibits

The third and final phase of the YHH project further helped crystallize the ‘flattening’ of the traditional hierarchies between university researchers and local high school youth. By the last months of the project, students evolved from being historical apprentices to largely autonomous youth scholars; they were not research assistants but full co-collaborators. From a methodological standpoint, this transformation was significant: working with students in this yearlong project not only helped me personally think in more expansive ways about Harlem Prep, but students’ insight benefitted the quality of our nascent scholarship as well. This culminating dissemination phase relied on that insight, focusing on Harlem Prep in relation to the totality of students’ high school experiences in Harlem today. Most were graduating seniors, and pedagogically, as a way to help students transition from conducting oral histories to dissemination and knowledge production (i.e. historical analysis), I asked them: ‘what did hearing these Harlem Prep stories make you think about in terms of your current education in Harlem?’ These students – community members who, by this point, had also been trained in basic historical methodology – were best qualified to decide on the historical aspects of Harlem Prep that were most relevant to issues in education in Harlem today.

Part III of this essay details the process by which students created Omeka exhibits based on the five aforementioned Harlem Prep oral history interviews (along with additional primary research).¹¹ In doing so, it explores the second question about digital history laid out in this essay’s introduction: how processes of historical research shift, and responsibilities change, when we create history with students via online digital formats. By the time students began creating their Omeka exhibits, both their roles and mine had further shifted from a hierarchical perspective as part of our evolution as a coherent research team.

The process of collaborative digital history-making

Methodologically, students paired up to build two distinct digital exhibits from the same set of sources, allowing for different historical interpretations that would be grounded in their particular individual positionalities. James Miller argues that we should engage the public in historical scholarship through a ‘more experienced-based approach’ that relies on personal experiences as a bridge to introducing theory and historical analysis (1989, 4). The Youth Historians are members of the public and part of the Harlem community, and their engagement in this project was born out of their lived experiences as high school students in Harlem. These experiences provided a crucial entryway to analytical discourse on the experiences of the Harlem Prep alumni.

As we transitioned from oral histories to Omeka, initially, it was critical to spend quality time theorizing and tangibly learning about this platform’s opportunities and limitations. First, I asked students to reflect on any prior visits to physical museums and what they noticed in terms of the various exhibits behind the glass. Essentially, I wanted to them to rely on their experiences at New York City museums – particularly how they are organized conceptually – to better understand the components of an Omeka exhibit. In particular, we compared the nonlinear components of both physical museums and online curations (see, e.g. Marsh 2013). For example, if, theoretically, a larger digital archive on Harlem Prep equaled the entire museum, then their individual exhibits would amount to the different exhibits, or parts, of that museum. (Unfortunately, students had not previously visited any museums that had represented their history, specifically, and had to draw on their select experiences at life science related museums.)

Yet, I still had to unravel, on a practical level, how to best employ students’ experiences in a way that promoted historical analysis within the context of a tangible digital history project. As William G. Thomas III explains, ‘to do digital history, then, is to create a framework, an ontology, through the technology for people to experience, read, and follow an argument about a historical problem’ (Cohen et al. 2008, 454). Constructing the framework in which the students would interpret and share these personal stories of the Harlem Prep alumni – interlaced with their own experiences in education – was the final step before they would work independently.¹² Thus, we spent time brainstorming additional questions relevant to creating a digital historical exhibit: whom is the exhibit for, and why did the students’ exhibit matter? Discussing these questions made the unique nature of the immediacy of digital history become apparent. Students could craft a meaningful argument with each exhibit, knowing that its nonlinear format and ease of access combined with its interactive ability offered an effective platform for (their) student voice. Students unanimously concluded that they hoped these exhibits would influence teachers, administrators, and policy makers help create better schools.

This digital, collaborative process also necessitated me to internally negotiate my role as project director. With no exhibit of my own, I had a new responsibility to shift from lead facilitator to a ‘brainstorming partner’ with students (Goldenberg, Wintner, and Berg 2015). These exhibits were based on their interests and their interactions with the Harlem Prep alumni – not mine. This final shift in hierarchy was key; the opportunity for students to fully act on their intellectual agency and reflect on their educational experiences was key in setting the stage for their specific historical analyses and particular interpretations on Harlem Prep in ways that authentically differed from my own.

During the remaining weeks of the program, students worked in pairs, developing an organic digital working process in Omeka.¹³ It was here that students engaged most consistently in their historical analysis: going through all the data and research, figuring out their key themes, negotiating the main ideas they wanted to explore in their exhibits.¹⁴ For the students, however, the real intellectual challenge – the historical thinking and potential knowledge production – was sifting through the interviews, and both interpreting and analyzing them within the context of their exhibit’s thesis. For example, two students observed a consistent life pattern from re-reading the transcripts, in which each Harlem Prep alumnus underwent personal struggles at his/her previous high school before later achieving success at Harlem Prep. In his classic book about the symbiotic relationship between history and power, Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1997) asserted that the interpretation of the past through various sources – in this case, largely the oral histories – is the actual derivation of knowledge production. And, as he continues, it is this ability to engage in knowledge production that has traditionally been associated with particular hegemonic power over the past. Notably, by operating (in part) within the academy, students were able to regain some of that power through this project; they had the opportunity to modify old narratives and/or introduce new ones about elders in their community based on their points of view and historical analyses.

This was all highly collaborative work. At this stage, the young people were fully in charge, and it was exciting to observe students communicating to each other such as when a student discussed a particular oral history quote, deciding whether or not it was relevant to his argument, and, if so, where it might fit esthetically in Omeka. This collaboration was aided, in no small part, by my evolving role as program director to just another a member of the team. Also, the fact that both instructors and students could provide real-time, simultaneous feedback as the exhibits were being built was an important characteristic for making this digital work so collaborative. Dougherty and Nawrotzki (2013) discuss this experience writing with faculty online in their collaborative book Writing History in the Digital Age. Furthermore, as alluded to, undergoing these digital processes together seemed to help break down any remaining internal hierarchies between instructors and students. In essence, the working digital repositories of Harlem Prep that we created ‘shifted the dynamics of doing historical research by changing who is able to conduct the research and how research is done’ (Bolick 2006, 122). Ultimately, our digital arena where our methods were transparent and our sources freely available to the group brought to light how working virtually in Omeka helped ‘democratize’ the process of producing history in ways that archeologists Gadsby and Moyer (2014) suggest can occur through collaborative archeological research. For example, in their partnership with high school students, Gadbsy and Moyer, in part, illustrate the opportunities latent in having young people shape the narratives of contested spaces in their community through archeology. Online platforms, in some sense, can work the same way; without the confines of the archive or any type of gatekeeping barrier (logistical or otherwise), students were able to have full access to the sources we both found and generated in a fully democratic manner.

The exhibits: the stories that students wanted to tell

By the end of the year, the students had created two Omeka exhibits, each with a different focus (but based on the same five oral histories).¹⁵ One exhibit, entitled ‘Achieving Success at Harlem Prep’, analytically and chronologically detailed the lives of the four Harlem Prep alumni through oral history clips in five pages: ‘The Early Lives’, ‘Their Struggles Before the Prep/Introduction to the Prep’, ‘Success at the Prep’, and ‘Success after the Prep’, plus a final ‘Reflections’ as well as an introductory page. This exhibit ended up deeply reflecting the positionality of one student in particular, who came up with the idea. As someone who has experienced significant personal struggles, he could authentically relate to the struggles of each of the four Harlem Prep alumni. Yet, since this student – born and raised in Harlem – has overcome these hardships, it is fitting that he would create an exhibit that similarly illustrates how the interviewees also overcame various hardships living or learning in Harlem.

The second exhibit, entitled ‘What Made Harlem Prep Successful?’ was four pages in length. Each discussed the various teaching strategies, the student-teacher relationships, how students enjoyed learning, and an epilogue-like page entitled ‘Why Do We Care?’ which directly compares the students’ high school to Harlem Prep. Using both primary and secondary sources, students argued that Harlem Prep’s method of teaching students was the main reason for student success. Unlike the prior exhibit, these two students relied on evidence beyond the oral histories, including other primary sources materials. However, similar to the other exhibit, this one also reflected the experiences of its student creators, as neither student felt that they had effective teachers at their own high school. Ultimately, the visual and textual narratives in the exhibits reflected students’ positionality – unique positionalities grounded in educational experiences of the community we were collectively researching.

The youth historians experiment in retrospect

In reflection, the experimental nature of the Youth Historians project opens up both new ideas and continues age-old debates for how historians should go about their work. As I have attempted to illustrate in this essay and particularly in Part II, a scholar-youth collaborative project like this yearlong experiment has the potential to challenge disciplinary norms of hierarchy and authority. It also, I hope, as I described in Part III, adds to the growing conversation on digital history when considering the project’s shift in historical processes once the research moved to a digital platform; being able to work simultaneously online made it possible for the youth and I to collaborate more freely, efficiently, and democratically.

Above all, however, as a historian, this entire public history experience has led me to believe that ‘doing’ history with youth in genuinely collaborative ways can be a fruitful strategy to reflect on our disciplinary norms, broaden our methods, and perhaps even improve our practice. Most simply, I have benefited from collaborating with students and being exposed to their thoughts and historical analyses, making me conceptualize my Harlem Prep research in ways I would not have done otherwise. For example, I would not have asked insightful oral history questions about growing up in Harlem specific to the neighborhood, nor would I have been able to focus on the struggles of Harlem Prep students in an exhibit with such a detailed lens. And, while I certainly pushed students to improve their academic literacies and critical thinking skills, they pushed me to think beyond my self-imposed academic confines: I thought differently about potential readership for my future personal scholarship on Harlem Prep and how I might want to frame Harlem Prep’s teaching and learning to be less about pedagogy and more about relationships (or perhaps assign closer attention to their mutuality). For historians in my subfield, students can make us think about schools and education in ways that we inherently do not (and perhaps cannot) – in a sense, they are our eyes and our ears to present issues in education, which, I believe, compared to where we position ourselves as academics, is one step ‘closer’ to the historical narratives on these same topics that we seek to construct.

For historians of all subfields, I believe these same principles apply, in that working with young people can provide timely insight in yet-to-be explored ways. In the urban history field, for example, public historian Cathy Stanton (2006) in her ethnographic study on Lowell, Massachusetts shows the pivotal, if not sometimes contested, role that historians played in this community’s economic redevelopment. What does it mean for a historian to take part in crafting, even reinventing, a community’s history in tangible ways that can affect its economic, social, and cultural development? Hurley (2010), in his groundbreaking book Beyond Preservation about community-scholar partnerships in urban renewal in St. Louis explores this question and many others. Hurley creates a framework for historians to tangibly contribute to cities’ revitalization, and with his significant work in mind, urban historians should also consider partnering with young people – the heirs of their community – in these efforts. Although imperfect, this project sought to show how infusing long-held characteristics of public history research – collaborations with community members and a democratization of knowledge, for example – with traditional disciplinary methodologies in normalized university settings cannot just be possible, but fruitful for scholars and communities alike.

Coming full circle, contemporary education scholars who employ YPAR have shown how YPAR ‘situates students as experts of their own experiences with the responsibility to educate adult leaders about their findings’ (Mirra et al. 2013, 6). After genuinely collaborating with students in historical research in which they were similarly situated as experts of their experiences, there is no doubt that students educated me about what they saw as the most significant aspects of Harlem Prep’s existence, and, I hope, others in the future through their Omeka exhibits. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot reminds us in his eloquent paraphrasing of seminal French historian Marc Ferro, ‘history has many hearths and academics are not the sole history teachers in the land’ (1997, 20). Historians of all subfields would be wise to remember this advice; I believe there remains vast untapped methodological potential in youth-scholar collaborations.

Separate from the methodological implications that are the focus of this essay, however, there is one more important question this project raises: how did the project affect the youth involved in it? Although I did not undergo any empirical or systematic measures of student impact – my focus was on co-equal collaboration and not on evaluation of my fellow youth researchers – students did unanimously feel that their participation was beneficial in anonymously conducted year-end surveys. The young people’s comments coalesced around three themes: skill-building, research, and community. First, and most predictably, students described the various skills that they learned that helped them find ‘information that isn’t available to the public’ as one student wrote, and ‘how to work with more technological equipment’ over the course of the year. Two, students developed a newfound appreciation for research. For example, one student wrote that he thought ‘young people need to know about the importance of doing research. Researching is a major contributor to the knowledge of mankind’. Another explained that: ‘This program has taught me that I can do research even as a high school scholar’. Finally, students loved the community aspect of our collaborative approach together. ‘This program builds community’, identically wrote two students in two separate responses. The overall reflection of one student sums up the program in his eyes: ‘We have become better readers, writers, and scholars because of this program. You know how discontent I am with my school and this program has given me chance to learn something and grow as a student’ (student survey responses, 18 May 2015).

For scholars interested in replicating a similar project, it is important for students to not feel like they are being assessed – students are constantly evaluated inside their classrooms, and students felt liberated by not having to work in a similar atmosphere. They became more and more engaged with the intellectual freedom and refreshing malleability of the historical process. To be sure, I was constantly in dialogue with students, carefully tailoring the program to their needs based on their constant verbal feedback. However, as an out-of-school program, our collaboration was more productive because students bought-in to the idea that they were co-equal researchers and not just student assistants – this program ‘was an experience that made me feel like a true scholar’, recalls one student (Ibrahim Ali, personal communication, 11 September 2017). One of my biggest challenges as leader of our research team was to make sure the young people knew that research is, by nature, an unwieldy and sometimes unpredictable process opposite of a structured lesson plan. Thus, I would encourage future scholars undertaking similar projects to think deeply about designing a program that best promotes that intellectual reorientation amongst students.

In the same vein, an evaluation of whether we met our broadly-defined project goals reflects the fluidness and even inexactness of this type of collaborative experiment. Outside of my personal desire to positively affect the lives of these young people, the overall goals of the project were the same for both students and I: one, make a small scholarly contribution to the history and education field; and two, challenge traditional norms of historical methodology that have long been discussed in the public history field. With the former, the level of our historical contribution can surely be debated, as perhaps the two digital exhibits about an unstudied alternative school in Harlem was smaller in scope than I originally envisioned. However, I am more certain of our second goal; our ability to collaborate all year long suggests to me that we successfully, as a group, challenged the norms of the discipline and most importantly, raised additional questions about authority, knowledge production, and methodology latent in public history discourse. All challenges and missteps were largely pedagogical in nature – the logistics of running an after-school program and planning lessons that taught students unfamiliar research processes, for example – and less about the substance or desire of reaching our goals.

Overall, I hope that this project prompts historians to consider what potential collaborations mean for the communities we write about (and often care about) so deeply, but too rarely interact with on a scholarly level. As Becker (1932) famously exclaimed, ‘everyman his own historian’, and as Dougherty and Nawrotzki (2013) have acknowledged, every woman and when possible, every child, too. We have the opportunity to make sure the latter comes to fruition and, I believe, the responsibility to help create structured opportunities for students to act on and use the authority inherent in them. For historians of education, particularly, projects like these can be a way to merge our scholarship and our historical skill set with our activism in direct and life-changing ways. When youth place themselves in historical narratives – which we are uniquely positioned to help them achieve – they forge a ‘deeper understanding of who they are and the society they live’. As noted critical educators Ernest Morrell and Jeff Duncan-Andrade argue, young people who write the past in turn ‘come to see themselves as authors of the future’ (2008, 117). As we write the past, we also have a beautiful opportunity to positively affect the lives of the students we work with at the same time – and for historians of other subfields, to meaningfully involve the communities we often relentlessly research. Ultimately, our historical work does not have to be divorced from our on-the-ground advocacy, and it is my hope that we can use our academic platform, our historical training, and our passion for young people (and/or the communities in which they reside) to re-conceptualize the roles, processes, and historical methodologies of our discipline.

Acknowledgements

Portions of this manuscript have been adapted from two serialized articles previously published at Education’s Histories.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Barry M. Goldenberg

Barry M. Goldenberg is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and serves as a Graduate Research Fellow at the Institute for Urban and Minority Education (IUME).

Notes

1. Although YPAR has primarily been conducted using social science methodology, there have been studies where young people have researched history, such as Arnand et al., (2002) Keeping the Struggle Alive: Studying Desegregation in Our Town. However, more rare has been historians of education engaging with young people through YPAR, with the goal of exclusively focusing on historical methodology and the scholarly benefits of collaborating with young people.

2. This work stemmed from my post as a Research Fellow at the Institute for Urban and Minority Education (IUME) at Teachers College, Columbia University. I continued directing the program with a new cohort of student after this project for one more year, before handing it to new directors. The program remains in existence today.

3. I want to thank Mary Rizzo for making me aware of the public history components of this project and for her very helpful comments during the peer-review process.

4. Unfortunately, due to personal reasons, two students were unable to finish the program. Specifically, the group of students consisted of five African-American males, two Latino males, and one male of Bengali-descent, each of varying academic skillsets – but with uniform curiosity and inquisitiveness. Seven of them were returning 12th grade students who previously participated in the program in addition to one new 11th grade student.

5. This history of education class was at Teachers College, Columbia University with graduate students that were a mix of pre-service social studies teachers, history students, and students from various other departments, all with little Harlem knowledge.

6. To practice their literacy skills and brainstorm the different places of interest, students created a tour map with historical information and personal experiences on the Neatline digital mapping platform. Students’ Neatline exhibit was originally intended for internal purposes only. Future efforts may be taken to allow this interactive tour map to be public on the Educating Harlem project website at http://educatingharlem.cdrs.columbia.edu/omeka/.

7. To note, most of Foner’s essays were written before the digital age, and this notion of ownership has certainly changed from when these essays were written in the 1980s and 1990s with opportunities to create historical interpretations online. However, just because information is online does not mean that it is recognized within academic circles.

8. Since this project seeks to break down barriers, I do not mean ‘authorized’ in a hierarchal sense, but only to connote that current norms state that institutional disciplinary training conveys credibility and credential.

9. One major issue at first was how students and I would initially stutter following pauses by the interviewee, unsure of who would ask the next question. In turn, our pauses would create ‘empty spaces’ during transitions between questions. For example, one of the lead students interviewers explained after that he ‘felt awkward during transitions’. However, as the interview progressed, we learned to make eye contact with each other before interjecting, and we learned to assume a follow-up question by the other.

10. Since two of the four interviews had to be scheduled on the same day and time, the supporting faculty member co-conducted one of them as I co-conducted the other, using the same student pairing set-up.

11. Omeka is a ‘web-publishing tool that can function as an archival service as well as a means of organizing and displaying exhibits and collections’, see Amanda Morton 2011, ‘Digital Tools: Zotero and Omeka’, Journal of American History 98, no. 3 (1 December 2011): 952–53.

12. To be sure, this can be seen as ‘presentism’, and I recognize this valid concern. However, the goal for these exercises was not to necessarily to have students ground their subsequent historical analysis only in the present, but to use their current experiences as a pedagogical ‘hook’ to increase motivation to do this work.

13. Of the six students who completed the project, two pairs of students worked on two different exhibits, while the other two students and I, along with another graduate student, made up the ‘tech team’ to upload all the various ‘items’ into Omeka. Initially, there was no planned structure for how we would operate as a working group. However, we developed an organic system where the four students working on exhibits would find small snippets from their oral history interviews that they would like to include and then communicate to the other two students and I the timestamps of these oral history clips. The ‘tech team’ would trim oral history clips, save them on our Google Drive folder, and then upload these clips (in addition to other primary and secondary sources) into Omeka using the proper metadata procedures. The flexibility to improvise a workflow system that best supported our collaboration and our different team roles was enabled by these digital tools and processes.

14. As Jack Dougherty pointed out in a discussion at the 2015 History and Education Society Conference, whether students were engaging in historical analysis or rather actually curating exhibits, is a worthwhile question. I very much appreciate this thought and recognize that there is an important difference between the two, of which a greater discussion is beyond the scope of this essay.

15. For more information about viewing students’ exhibits, visit the Youth Historians in Harlem page on the Educating Harlem project website at http://educatingharlem.cdrs.columbia.edu/omeka/yhh.