Chapter 5 Oral History and Storytelling: Reflection on an Alternative Approach of Teaching History
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Abstract
Storytelling is a continuous, creative process of making sense of lived experience into a narrative that engages listeners by shared meanings. This definition of storytelling emerged from my attempts to share fishermen’s oral histories by the method of storytelling. Though it was known to many that cosmopolitan Hong Kong had been a fishing village, the life of fishermen is not part of our land-based people’s everyday knowledge. Oral history was the starting point of the process of sharing fishermen's knowledge. A group of university students were involved in making stories from oral histories. They studied the transcripts, selected interesting short pieces and organised the pieces into a storyline to give shape to the fishermen’s accounts. They told these stories to secondary school children in classrooms. Between the original oral history and storytelling, the university students served as a human medium to create and to tell the stories with meaning. They have had to make sense of the unfamiliar lived experiences as told in the oral history; comparing different lifestyles between land and water; and inserting useful knowledge in order for others to appreciate the lifestyle of fishermen. This chapter reviews the role of a human medium in facilitating history learning.