Dr. Samantha Cutrara:       Hi, Kristina. Thank you so much for finding time to talk with me today. I think your perspective of being an oral history expert, a historian of education, and someone who is so involved with the history education community will just brings so much to this conversation. Thank you so much.

Kristina Llewellyn:        Thank you very much for having me. I’ve been excited to watch this series so far.

SC:        It’s been really great to see how it is developing, and all the conversations layered on top of each other have been really exciting.

So the first question I’ve started with for everyone is about whether or not they have thought about history differently because of this moment – Because I have, for example, but a lot of people said that that wasn’t the case for them. Has the idea of history changed at all for you during COVID?

KL: It has changed somewhat, and that is because of my personal side of life right now. So, like many other educators and historians, I have my kids home. I have two children and I am now trying to support their learning at home. But, I made the mistake, like many parents, suddenly thinking that I had to save their school year by setting up a chalkboard in my kitchen and finding worksheets and anything I could on the web. I defaulted, as the Ontario government is doing incorrectly, to a focus on literacy and numeracy in what my children needed to know. And in the moment, I forgot almost everything I knew about children learning by being active [rather than passive through worksheets].

And I also underplayed, as a historian, just how important it would be for them to focus on social studies or history, which would actually teach them about engaged citizenship at a time when that’s what we need. That’s what we desperately need. We need to know how we are all connected to one another and how we have come to where we are now. We need to learn about change agents in our past, and we need to do all this in order to build a more engaged and equitable future. And we can do that by actually focusing on social studies and focusing on history and with that, will come all those other lessons.

So I really had to reassess my own defaults in this moment. And actually, I think one of the things that this moment has provided for me, is how important it is that we start to reprioritize history and social studies within the curriculum and within our learning goals for young people.

So in that way, yes: It’s been a reminder of something that’s very important. In some ways though, I’m not sure sadly that it has changed some of my perspective. I think history is often used for young people – and I think we’ve seen this in all the recent commemorative practices – as a way of having young people forget, or very selectively remember, certain parts of our past.

I think that the way we have collectively remembered has been this sense of national togetherness where we forget about all of our differences. We forget about how contested the past is. And in many ways, it’s that old adage that we only hear really from the supposed winners of history, or we only hear more elite histories.

And so what I am hoping for in this moment, is a different way of remembering. I’m not sure whether that will happen, but that’s my hope.

SC:        Yeah, I really appreciate that answer because I think maybe for me, a very similar thing happened. Like, I do have a perspective of history that can encapsulate this moment of crisis – but when the moment of crisis happened, I realize how many defaults I went back to that didn’t prioritize those histories that focus on change agents, or how easy it can be to only think of history as this bonus topic,  rather than essential for understanding ourselves and society. It’s interesting that you thought of those lessons while structuring the days for your sons as well.

KL:        I think focusing on the ways that my sons can be active in exploring and examining history has been quite important.

And again, that reminder came through a personal situation, which I have seen on social media that many families are doing. So my mother contacted us and said, “Hey, in a couple of days, it will have been your grandmother’s 95th birthday. Let’s do a Zoom call with the whole family.” My sister and her family, my parents and us. And we’re all going to share a virtual cake, which my mom did bake. And then we would share stories about her life. Her life stories and what those life stories would mean for us. And this was particularly meaningful for my children because they had never met my grandmother.

It was also really meaningful for me because my grandmother was one of the first people I ever did an oral history with when I was in an undergraduate program on women’s history with Karen Dubinsky at Queen’s University. It was really transformative for me learning what oral history meant. And I was hoping for my children as well.

That, in and of itself it seemed like a small thing within our family, but the active listening to these stories of other people’s lived experiences, was really important.

SC:        Yeah, that is great. That is such an interesting activity. And I haven’t heard of that one as much as people creating a scrapbook of the pandemic.

But I really appreciate that element of active listening and the sharing of stories you speak of because, I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of staring at a screen, which is a really silly thing to say while you’re filming a video series, but like, I see so many people going more to ‘analog activities’ and, in being with our families, we can share these stories.

I think that’s a really interesting way to get your children, and also your students, thinking about the histories of our own families and the moment we’re in our own families.

Do you think – so the second question is about the future – Do you think that the ways that we will teach history will change after this? Do you think that some of these lessons that we’re learning in our own homes will come into the classroom in formal and informal ways?

KL:        I certainly hope so. I think there’s been a movement afoot for quite some time by a number of amazing educators and scholars attempting to make history that is about our communities. It builds a sense of relevance and connection to the present and that it is active. It’s young people actively creating history or actively assessing history. It’s not a passive process anymore. And so those learning goals are in a lot of the curriculum guidelines across the country and how that then manifests itself into the classroom is really important. For me, as an oral historian, I would hope that we see this as a moment in which we need stories more than ever.

SC:        Yes, yes.

KL:        We need stories, we need stories of our community, we need to understand those stories, and those are difficult stories. So I’m interested in all the stories that come with that. With resilience and hope. I think that that emerges out of difficult knowledge, but I think we need to really prepare young people to also hear difficult stories in our community and that is going to be what calls them to do otherwise going forward. It’s that kind of listening to other people’s lived experiences: what does that call us to do differently?

Those kinds of questions are the ones that I hope students get. And I hope that we can do this with community. Of course, George Dei talks about oral history being the oldest part of historiography, and we know from indigenous people the importance of oral tradition for cultural preservation. It’s very important that we learn from those complicated contested stories that we all live, which have an individual resonance for our own family, but they’re also very social stories that connect all of us.

I guess my hope going forward for teaching, and it has been my hope before this moment, but I think it’s ever more important, is that we actually engage young people in oral history in a myriad of ways. I think oral history is more inclusive. I think that you hear stories of the every day. I think it’s very relatable. I think when you hear someone’s lived experience, it provides a very human element to what history is. You can’t be listening and bearing witness to someone’s lived history that has a legacy that lives on for them in their lives and not feel a sense of responsibility to those stories.

I think also that it can be very active. We can have young people actually doing oral histories. Co-creating them with community. And that can be as simple as connecting with someone who’s an older member of your family.

There are also a whole raft of oral histories that have been pre-recorded sometimes of veterans, for example, and local libraries. I know that’s the case in Waterloo, where you can listen to those stories.

Bronwen Low talks about this as a pedagogy of listening. I heard someone say that we’re hearing all new sounds now that we’re all social distancing and things are less hectic. Well, now is the time to listen to each other’s stories, and schools can be such loud busy places. Actually taking the time to listen to stories, to listen to history I think is really powerful. And Bronwen Low talks about it as ‘extending the ear to the other.’ You’re not being passive. You’re being active because ‘extending that ear to the other’ means that you’re taking the time to listen and that calls you to do something different.

So for me, I think that this kind of stillness at this time, and also very difficult knowledge that we’re all grappling with, means that I hope that we re-engage with the connectedness of listening to each other and learning from one another. And I think that that, selfishly, it is my hope for how oral history can have a more prominent place within schooling as well.

SC:        You brought up so many really interesting points. And one of the things I immediately thought of was one of the first interviews I did with Dr. Mary Chaktsiris who said that this moment can really help our students think of themselves as historical actors.

I think that because we are in this moment of crisis, in this moment of difficult knowledge, when you invite students to participate in the sharing, and telling, and listening of stories, it can help them understand themselves within a moment and then hopefully also help them understand how other historical moments get created.

KL:        Yeah. One of the examples I can provide is a current project that I’m working on called Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation. And it’s actually a whole project around The Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children. So this project has been co-created with the former residents of The Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children. This was a home that was opened up in 1921. It was open for over 70 years. And the former residents started speaking out about the kind of discrimination and abuse and oppression that they had suffered within this home. They started speaking up decades ago, actually.

They were such incredible activists building their own networking community that they were able to have the launch of a restorative inquiry into why did this abuse and discrimination happen, and how can we build a better future. And their whole premise, their whole work is about questioning how do we reach into the past to get what we need to know in order to fly forward to the future? It’s represented with this symbol of the Sankofa bird.

I’ve been really fortunate to build relationships with this community of former residents, where myself and other groups of scholars across Canada, have been working with them to create a virtual reality experience that grade 11 Canadian history students can have where they can actually go into the home and listen to stories.

It isn’t a game where they get to interact or change the stories or do some kind of role play. That’s not what this is. This is the place that the home is recreated – because students can’t obviously go to the home, the home has changed over time – but the home has place-based memories that are very important to the story. So we’ve recreated that in virtual reality. Then students go into that virtual world and hear the stories from the former residents that are so important to hear about what happened to them in the home, but we’re in no way trying to get young people to put themselves in the shoes of others or of a child in any way.

What we’re trying to get them to do is to listen carefully to difficult knowledge, which can compel them to ask far more deep questions like, how did this happen? To ask questions of ‘now that I know that this has happened, what does this call me to do?’. And these questions are part of a much fuller curriculum with further lessons; building of historical thinking concepts that actually engage them with various different primary source material, which they get to compare to oral histories to other primary sources, and then they get to take an action plan.

They get to take an action plan that seeks restoration in the sense that they say, “I’ve heard these stories now, now I need others to know what I have learned from these stories.” And it really builds a sense of connection for students who may be part of the African Nova Scotian community or may not be part of the African Nova Scotian community, but they all see the way that systemic racism within that province, which is a very long history, had led to what happened in the home and still left a legacy for how they’re all living together and then how they all have to live differently together.

So that’s what I mean by what stories can compel us to do. We don’t always know what that’s going to be for young people, and I think that that’s okay. It’s really about focusing on how we build new knowledge and new relationships through our stories of the past.

SC:        Yeah. And congratulations on the project. It’s got such a great press and it’s so fantastic and it’s really transformative in the Canadian history community. Congratulations again on that project.

So I went to the Alcatraz Museum in San Francisco in 2010 and there was an audio guide in which people were sharing their stories of being imprisoned at Alcatraz, and it was one of the most transformative museum audio guides I’d ever heard, because you are standing in this space, in this case not virtual reality but in the building, and you are hearing these stories. And I remember it took some time after to process and think through what I leant about this experience because it was this affective, emotional history that has stayed with me longer than so many other histories I’ve encountered in museums. So it’s really exciting that your project is able to pick up on so many of those elements related to Canadian history.

KL:        Yeah. Well, interestingly, I was at that same museum in August 2019 and I had the same feeling about that storytelling within that. And again, storytelling from really diverse perspectives, which was amazing. And I think we really underestimate the kind of stories that young people can hear and what that will provoke them to want to know more about.

SC:        Yes!

KL:        So we often think, ‘well, first, we’re going to teach them about Alcatraz and then maybe the difficult stories.’ But no, if they hear some of the difficult stories early, there can be a call of wanting to know more about prison life, wanting to know more about our judicial system, wanting to know more about how it’s developed the way it has. Story allows for more questions to emerge, and so for me, stories are a really amazing starting point.

SC:        I think that teachers can be really nervous about bringing in difficult knowledge, but I have found, and this is something I talk a lot about in the video series, that students want connection, complexity, and care. And that complexity is often what might some students have said like the ‘gruesome stories’. The ones that are difficult. The ones that, seemingly, the ones that young people shouldn’t hear, but those are the ones that they want to hear and have questions about, because they also know those histories. Sometimes they know them as embodied stories and can’t articulate them, but they also know them just being in the world and seeing movies.

And I think the more that we allow students to engage and explore those stories, the more it will lead them to want to take action. And so the action part of your project is such a great element of this work.

KL:        I think about what you said about affect is so important. I mean, for me, the very first oral history, I did – although I did not call it that at the time and its only recently that people actually call themselves oral historians far more – I was in grade four or grade five. I had a teacher who just said, “Go and interview.” Like, go talk to a grandparent or someone else in your family who is somewhat older and just ask them about their life history, their life experiences. And that was my like social studies project I needed to do.

Now, my grandparents lived further away, so someone who was like an uncle to me or who called uncle who lived in Toronto where I lived at the time, I ended up going and interviewing him about his life. And it provoked so many questions for me because he ended up telling me he was from the Netherlands, but he had been living in Germany during the Nazi regime. He was brought in for questioning with the Nazis and was accused of being homosexual. He was homosexual. And he had to have an excuse that the butcher’s daughter, he lived above a butcher’s shop, and they had to call in the butcher’s daughter to try and see if she would cover for him, and she did.

So I am nine, 10 years old. I didn’t know a lot about World War II. I didn’t know a lot about the Nazis. And this person who was like a grandparent to me was telling me this incredible life story for which I didn’t understand the full context of it, but it’s certainly affected me deeply that he was emotional, and that this had happened to him and I cared deeply for him, and I wanted to know more. And that was when I started to ask more questions of my parents and of others: “Okay, tell me more.” I started to dig and know more about that. It affected me personally. And I feel that way that we can make those connections for young people.

Even if it’s not a grandparent or someone like that, we can make the connections of it could be deeply personal or it could be something that is more about your community. How is it that your community developed the way you did and provide a sense of connection to that? And I think that students more and more see the ways that stories might seem very individual, but in actual fact, are very social stories. They’re very community-based stories. They matter for why we all live the way we do in connection with one another. And then that matters for, well, okay, what are we going to do going forward?

SC:        Yeah. I think the more that we talk to people and ask them to reflect on their experiences in the past, it allows us to understand how much of what we think about the past is created history, right?

Like, I remember being in undergrad and I was doing a lot of studying about the post-World War II period and this heightened anxiety about communism and nuclear war and I was telling my grandmother about that. During this post-World War II period she was raising three kids and said to me “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t think about that at all. That was not part of my life at all.” And I was like, “You’re wrong, because I read it at school.”

But it was such an interesting moment to remember that our own families can challenge these big stories and sometimes they have these really interesting and amazing stories, like your uncle did, and sometimes they’re just like, that wasn’t the experience for everyone.

I worked with one student, and I talked about this in my book , so I won’t spend a lot of time on this, but she was supposed to go and do an oral history with her grandmother, and her grandmother refused to speak to her about her history. And the assignment wasn’t graded, but if it was, she would have failed if she hadn’t found somebody.

And from this it made me think about how we can also actively listen to those silences as well. Can you comment on that at all?

KL:        Yeah, the silences are amazing. There’s lots of reasons —

SC:        Yes, yes.

KL:        I mean, first of all, no one should be forced to tell their story ever and no one should be forced to insist on that.

So Alexander Freund at the University of Winnipeg calls this our “confessional culture,” where we kind of assume that everyone should just be spewing out every story they’ve ever had.

And there’s a lot of crowdsourcing of oral histories of the pandemic right now. And we need to be very careful about what we decide to share or how we share or the how we ask the questions we do, and whether we want those to be more public. It might just be a personal encounter. There’s parts of oral histories with my own families that I’ve done that I would never share with others. There is that ethical obligation. Or, there might be stories that I am not ready to hear yet and they can decide that.

So those are all really important aspects to any kind of request around doing oral history. But the silence is, I think, even when doing an oral history or even when asking people’s questions and respecting those, they speak volumes. There’s reasons why people don’t want to speak to certain aspects even decades later, right? And that tells you something.

There’s also what Katherine Wheeler refers to as bad face  Meaning, we know that there was great anxiety about the atomic bomb. We know that, right? We just know that from duck and cover videos and all of the government initiatives, things like that. But if that’s a bad fact for your grandmother’s life – why? What is she trying to say was actually a priority in her everyday life that she really had to focus on far more than those concerns, and fears, and worries? She had different words on her plate, right?

SC:        Well, I think actually her worries involved dancing at the country club.

KL:        Oh, good!

SC:        My grandparents had a very active social life!

But I think that like it does speak to your point because for her, that period was the highlight of her life. Like, why would you bring in those kind of like negative ‘current events’, things that are happening to your life when you have so many other good things happening.

I think that this is also a really interesting point for right now because teachers are going to want students to tell their stories about their experiences during COVID, but students might not be ready and they might not have figured it out for themselves yet. And I think we need to be okay with knowing that a student might just be like, “It was fine. I just played on my phone,” and then in five or 10 years, they might think about it and process it in different way. So I like this idea of ensuring that we’re not forcing stories now too.

KL:        Absolutely, absolutely. I think we do have to be wary of the confessional culture of oral histories and just grasping for everyone to share everything. Those can have some long standing consequences as well.

SC:        Yeah. That was an extremely long second question, but so rich. So let’s move to the third one about this notion of imagining a new ‘we’. So I think of this notion of imagining a new ‘we’ as a way to ensure that we have these increasing circles of inclusion of who we understand to be Canadian, who we understand to have ownership or responsibility for the land that we called Canada, and this notion of imagining to have room for collaboration in community.

I really question about what this would look like when we are all in a digital space? And a lot of people have been really kind of positive about what imagining a new ‘we’ might look like during and after this moment? Do you have any ideas? Do you have any thoughts?

KL:        I guess I would pull again on the idea of difficult histories and what we’ve done in the past with respect to youth. I think in large measure, when we’ve been engaging young people with some difficult knowledge, it’s taken us a long time to actually get past a glossy kind of vision of Canadian history. I think of the example of the North Star myth in Canada and how we actually didn’t teach about slavery in Canada’s own past, but instead with this land of the freedom for enslaved people from American. That is a real strategic story, with very troubling impacts, because it means that we are supposedly not like the United States with their racial tensions. If you believe that Canada doesn’t have any racial tensions, then you will not commit yourself, socially and politically, to taking action that would address those concerns in Canada. And that’s all based on a historical narrative and a myth.

And so the same actually happened post-9/11. So there are some great scholarship on the kind of teaching that happened in the United States right after 9/11, and the kind of narratives that were created and, it was really very closed narrative. It was sort of triumphalist, in the sense that it led to some argue just shore up that notion of US as a militaristic state and not questioning it. And that has long-term generational impacts with respect to identity, when you tell those historical narratives even in more contemporary or recent history.

That’s what I would caution or hope would not happen with respect to the idea of a ‘we’. I hope the idea of a ‘we’ is not something that’s an identity built up from historical narratives in which we tell a closed, more triumphant narratives of how we all got through this.

But if we’re able to also tell more a contested version of the ‘we,’ where we had very different experiences and impacts, just like you’re talking about with your grandmother, we had very different lived experiences of this traumatic time, and that can really question, for example, aspects that we hold onto very dear around our Canadian identity. It could really question or highlight the failure of capitalism. It could really highlight gender disparity of women who have the incredible burden of care providing whether it’d be in families or hospitals or other places. It could really question the idea of racial harmony in Canada again and the exacerbation of racism since the virus has emerged.

So I’m hoping that the new ‘we’ would be one that allows space for it to be very contested, for it to be difficult to hear, and we can grapple with all of that. And that’s my sense of hope. That, for me, is where we have a sense of hope from the histories that we tell. And that’s where I also see as an oral historian where we can have and listen to different lived experiences.

SC:        Yeah, thank you. I really appreciate that answer, and it makes me think about Dr. Sean Carleton’s video about that we can’t forget that colonialism is still happening and that we need to use this moment if we’re going to reconfigure elements of our society to not forget things like nation-to-nation relationship. it’s so easy in moments of crisis to gloss over in ways that don’t allow us to challenge our own notions of who we are in the space and how and in what ways we think of structures in these moments of crisis. So thank you. I appreciate that.

KL:        Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And I thought Sean’s video as well was really powerful in that way.

SC:        Yeah, it was. It was a really great addition to this conversation. Before we say goodbye, could you tell people where they can get more information about your virtual history project?

KL:        Absolutely. We have a website admittedly that we’re revising. It’s www.dohr.ca, D-O-H-R, which stands for Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation. You can get a bit more information there.

We are in the stage of revising the what was a two-week curriculum that we already piloted in the fall in Nova Scotia. We’re revising that now and working with our community partners in order to figure out the next implementation stage, which will be more widely available for people to have the VR experience and with the curriculum.

SC:        That link as well as other references that you talked about today will be in the information below.

Thank you so much, Kristina, for sharing this time. This was an amazing talk and I’m glad that we were able to do all these kind of interesting routes towards talking about the importance of oral histories and imagining history during and after this time. So thank you so much.

KL:        Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate you doing this. This is fun.

SC:        Have a great day. Take care. Bye!

KL:        Take care. Bye!