By Andrew Lovdahl
Gargoyle staff reporter
Posted Wednesday, May 30, 2007, The OG, features

“CUTTING EDGE,” THE 10-plus-page multidraft scientific research paper regularly undertaken by each of Uni's new students, has amassed considerable notoriety as the academic hurdle of subfreshman year.

However, for more than a decade, there's been another assignment that every member of the class has spent many long hours on: the oral history project, a venture that builds and develops students' skills in a wide range of disciplines, especially research, interviewing, and teamwork.

This year, students worked together to gather information and hold interviews with community figures on the history of collegiate sports at the University of Illinois and elsewhere.

By next spring a staff of Uni volunteers will have completed editing this material into an hour-long documentary that will air on the WILL-AM 580 radio station.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Janet Morford's subfreshman history students were divided into four-person teams for the project. Each person had a specific responsibility: the team captain, the interviewer, the sound technician, and the scribe. However, everyone started out with the same duties: preparatory research on a previously chosen topic.

This year's project on college sports dealt more specifically “how these sports went from being the preserve and privilege of a largely white male population to being potentially open to all students, regardless of race, gender, physical disability or other personal characteristics,” according to a report prepared by subfreshman Mike Zhivov.

This initial stage of research was grueling.

“The preliminary research was very tedious at times, and I found myself working late at night so I could turn in my papers about historical context on time,” said subfreshman Amanda Hwu. “But you know, [the research] helped with the end product, so I guess it's all worth it in the end.”

With the topic in mind, students then learned how to write effective interview questions. Each of the four-person teams was assigned a “witness” from the Champaign-Urbana community who was judged to have sufficient experience and interesting opinions associated with the topic.

The general student consensus: The interview experience was initially nerve-wracking but ultimately rewarding.

“I thought I wouldn't have enough to say, or the person would for some reason hate my guts,” recalled subfreshman Charlie Newman-Johnson. “We all developed better people skills in my opinion, though.”

“I got to interview Gia Lewis, an athlete at the [University of Illinois], and she was wonderful,” added Hwu. “She had so many insightful things to say, and I learned so much from her. That hour and a half I spent interviewing her made everything from the research to the papers completely worth it.”

These interviews were conducted at the local studios of WILL, conveniently located a few blocks northeast of Uni High.

Dave Dickey, a longtime WILL journalist who is currently the station's director of agricultural services, provides guidance and assistance to the students by instructing them in how to use the station's recording technology and sitting in on the interviews. He also suggested the topic for this year's project.

After the interviews, the arduous process of transcribing the conversations began.

The purpose of this step was to help the production staff seek out interesting sections of the discussion. While in past years the “scribe” was almost solely responsible for taking notes and finishing the transcript, this year everyone on the team pitched in.

ALWAYS MORE WORK TO BE DONE

For most of the class, the end of the school year means the end of the project, but each year a handful of students opts to continue to assist with production.

Currently, seven freshmen (Sindha Agha, Katherine Allen, Alexx Engles, Maria Gao, Rachel Harmon, Linda Ly, and Maritza Mestre) are working alongside Dickey as “interns in production.”

“I have always loved journalism, and when I began working on the subfreshman oral history project I had such an amazing time,” Mestre wrote. “When I learned about the internship at the WILL radio station I jumped at the opportunity … the more I heard about it, the more enthusiastic I became about the prospect.”

In an e-mail interview with the Gargoyle, Ly provided a rundown of what the interns have been up to.

During summer vacation, they were each assigned interviews that would more or less become that student's responsibility. They listened to the recordings carefully and made notes regarding the most worthy portions.

In the fall, they began using the radio station's facilities to separate out these segments. Currently, they are working to build and maintain a Web site about the project as well as seeking out background music and other audio to feature in the broadcast.

This year is the first time that the project will have an online presence. The individual interviews will be available for perusal, as well as the completed documentary.

“The Web page will also feature pictures of the process, interviewees, interview teams, interns, contributors, and backgrounds and stories of each,” said Mestre, adding that the interns intend to work on other Web pages documenting oral history projects past as well as the awards that these projects have garnered.

For example, the Class of 2009's project about the local Jewish community won a Communicator Award of Distinction, as presented by Dickey during Uni's recent awards ceremony. WILL submits various entries, including the Uni-produced documentaries, to the Communicator contest every year.

Below is an excerpt from “The 20th Century Exodus.”

Some subfreshmen are already eager about the opportunity to continue to work on the project.

Rising freshmen Jenny Cooke, Katherine Floess, Sheela Gogula, Youyang Gu, Amanda Hwu, Adam Joseph, Zachary Korol-Gold, and Revathi Maturi have all been selected to intern this summer, according to Morford, who also notes that “most, if not all, of the current interns will also be returning.”

“I would love to be an intern at the radio station because I want to follow through with the whole oral history project,” said Hwu. “I want to hold the finished product and know that I did everything in my power to get it to the point it is at.”

Another Uni student, junior Ruth Welch, has been volunteering as a senior producer.

“Basically what my position entails is laying out the plan of the program,” she explained. “To do this I have listened to the six-ish hours of the potential air-time interviews repeatedly to decide what is actually the most interesting and how we will connect the different ‘blocks.'”

A senior producer may also provide narration for the documentary, as Welch did for “The 20th Century Exodus” (excerpt above).

“It's certainly a lot of work,” said Welch, “but I am enjoying it very much.”

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE PROJECT

With more subfreshmen like Hwu intending to continue work on the documentary, there will very likely be students from at least three grades collaborating to produce the final product over this summer and next year.

According to Morford, this is “one of the big points of [the project]: getting students at one level to share their experiences with students at another level.”

The oral history project instills several abilities that are central to the Uni history curriculum.

“I think one of the most important [skills developed during the project] is learning how to ask good questions,” said Morford. “We also work a lot on trying to understand the connection between personal experience and broader historical context. You're looking at the experience of one person, and how does that relate to other things that were going on; how does understanding one person's experience help you understand the broader historical process?”

Morford is already thinking about ways to improve the project for next year's students. The timeline of the project is expected to change, and Morford hopes to find a way to give more students valuable interviewing experience, instead of leaving the interviewing responsibility to just one student per team.

“I think one of the exciting things about it is that [students] are practicing these skills in communication with a real-life person, and knowing that they're not just talking about things in general or people who no longer live,” she said. “Talking with someone who you actually develop a rapport with makes the challenge of being thoughtful a particularly compelling one.”

Subfreshman Newman agreed: “It really brought history out of the history books and more into the perspective of, ‘We are part of this.'”

RELATED CONTENT

— External link: Class of 2009's project, “The 20th Century Exodus”

— External link: WILL-AM radio station home page