“I Have a History!” Life Sciences Teaching with Oral History Activities

Abstract

The course of life sciences aims to help students to recognize themselves, their families and their close environment. One of the elements helping this recognition process is history education. Students primarily recognize their own families thanks to history education. Later, they learn about the history and culture of the nation they belong to. Recognizing history and culture allows them to make sense of social rules, and thus, to form a connection between the past and present. This constitutes the basis for them to develop a historical understanding.

Studies in the literature show that teaching history based only on textbooks in primary school fails to develop historical understanding in students. Thus, the aim of the study was to present the contributions of history teaching by using various oral history activities on 3rd-grade students. In this study, the syllabus “I Have a History” designed by Diekema (1989) was followed for seven weeks. In addition, the activities named “Living Generations” and “Then and Now” prepared by Hickey (2017) were used. The model of the study was action research from qualitative research methods. The 3rd-grade students (n = 9) of a private school in Istanbul constituted the study group. The data of the study were collected from oral interviews with history students, semi-structured interviews with participating students, family trees, family maps, time schedules, time capsules, oral history interview self-assessment forms and the “Simultaneously Living Generations” and “Then and Now” activity forms. Content analysis was used for analyzing the data obtained.

The results of the study showed that oral history activities developed historical thinking skills of students, such as perception of time and chronology, establishing a cause-effect relationship and perception of change and continuity. In addition, the students realized that they had a personal history and that they were a part of history. Moreover, they had the opportunity to materialize and make sense of concepts difficult to understand for primary school students such as “time” and “generation”. Classroom teachers can choose oral method to help students to make connections between the past and present.