Oral History Project

COVID-19 Teacher-Poets Writing to Bridge the Distance

Dear Teacher-Poet,

In collaboration with the Oklahoma Oral History Research Program at the Oklahoma State University library, a team of teacher-researchers are developing an oral history project entitled “An Oral History: COVID-19 Teacher-Poets Writing to Bridge the Distance” which will focus on the teachers’ poetry and writing experiences during 2020 COVID-19 school closings and the topics and insights that emerged.

We would very much like the opportunity to arrange an oral history interview with you. We will send you a collection of the poetry you wrote on Ethical ELA and ask you to select a few poems to read that may offer insight into the impact of COVID-19 on education, including the wellbeing of teachers and students. It is anticipated that interviews will last 1 to 2 hours and will be conducted virtually at a time that is convenient for you. You may choose not to respond to any question, may limit your responses in any area during the interview, and/or may withdraw from the process at any time. You also have the right to review and edit transcripts of the recording and to restrict or limit use and/or access.

Interviews will be audio or video-recorded, transcribed, and preserved. It is our hope that you will consent to preserving your story in your own voice for current and future generations of researchers.

We will conduct a pre-interview or test-run of the interview in the same manner of the interview to be sure you are comfortable with the process and gauge the sound and interview environment process such as ambient noise, background items, lighting, etc.

If you are interested in participating in this project, please contact me, Sarah J. Donovan, sarah.j.donovan@okstate.edu. Feel free to email if you have additional questions concerning the project. Thank you for your consideration of this request, and I look forward to learning more about your story.

Peace,

Sarah J. Donovan

(NOTE: This study has been improved by the Institutional Review Board of Oklahoma State University: https://research.okstate.edu/compliance/irb/)

About

During #verselove, I received some emails from our community about developing a project to archive the beautiful poetry being created as a way of celebrating the compassionate community of teacher-writers in this space. Further, as we wrote during this spread of COVID-19 and global quarantine, it became clear that COVID-19 made its way into the poetry explicitly (poems about the impact of the pandemic) and implicitly (poems reflecting experiences before, apart from, and beyond its reach).

How best to document this? How best to capture the evolving, dynamic, transformative and evolving impact of our writing on teaching, our teaching on writing, COVID-19 on poetry, poetry on COVID-19?

A oral history project is one way. We would interview one another about the writing experience, read poetry, discuss the past, present, and future. It would be our voices, our words, and we could archive them as primary source documents for future generations.

What is an oral history? Example: Sometimes it is helpful to see what “done” looks like, as in “what are we creating” and “what will this look like when we are ‘done’.” Here is what an oral history collection looks like in the Oklahoma State Library Collections. Our video, of course, will have a different look because our interviews will be done remotely.