WRD 112: Section 20
Spring 2019
Professor Fernheimer 
Original Oral History Interview due by April 4, 2019
 
Timetable:
3/7 Introduction to Primary Research with Sarah Dorpinghaus, Annotated Bibliography Assignment Prompt Distributed
(meet in UKSCRC King Library)
3/19 Using UK Libraries Workshop (TBD)
Interviewees selected, contacted, scheduled
3/21 Interview Protocol Questions due–How-to Interviewing Workshop
4/4 Interviews, Release forms, Photos, and Reflective Essays Due to Dr. Jan and Kopana Terry

 This part of the project is worth 20% of your overall grade for the course: Oral History Interview Collection 20% (10% Interview/questions, 5% collaboration, 5% reflection 3-4 pages)

Overview: Working in small teams of  2 or 3 you will work together to do two types of original research. First you will identify a community member to interview, contact and schedule a time to conduct the interview. Then you will create an original interview protocol based on the template below and tailored to meet the needs of your group and the experiences of your interviewee. Second, you will follow the directions for creating an Annotated Bibliography (separate prompt) to further research the questions  your larger team is investigating to better contextualize the interviews you indexed and you conducted.

The Basics
Pair Portion: In order to produce this collaborative work, each small group of 2-3 students will do three important things.

1. Conduct an original Oral History Interview that will become part of the JHFE Jewish Kentucky Collection
2. Research and write an annotated bibliography of no less than 6-8 contextual, scholarly resources to help you develop knowledge and shape your perspectives on the research topic questions (each person is responsible for a minimum of two sources).
3. Write an individual reflection essay about the process of collaborating with your peers on the interview/research/writing of this portion of the project.

First you will identify some issues that you wish to explore/include in your collaborative piece, then you will identify an appropriate interviewee from the provided list, next you’ll conduct an oral history to deepen the context.  You will work together to both create the interview questions and schedule/conduct the interview. 

The Rationale
You’ve been working with oral history interviews all semester, and I hope by now, have realized how valuable they are for complicating the historical record. Now it is your chance to conduct an original oral history interview that will become part of the JHFE Jewish Kentucky Oral History Collection. This assignment serves two important functions:

1) It helps you conduct necessary outside research to contextualize and deepen our understanding of the oral histories you’ve been working with all semester, thus enriching the narrative you’ll tell in the final audio essay.

2) It helps build and sustain the collection itself by furthering the scope of material included within.

For this small-group interviewing assignment, the goal of the assignment is to help you learn more about primary and secondary research, to create and conduct an original oral history interview, develop the ability to synthesize and analyze resources in order to better conduct and contextualize interviews, and eventually create a compelling, contextualized narrative for a public audience. 

The Nitty Gritty
Resources/Potential Interviewees
The Nunn Center recording studio is available to you as are several professional quality audio recorders. To schedule a time to use the professional recording studio, email Kopana Terry  kopana.terry@uky.edu in the Nunn Center with your scheduling requests.  In addition to allowing for professional quality audio, the Nunn Center staff will work with you to ensure that the recording devices are set-up and used properly. The interview you collect must be accompanied by a signed Nunn Center release form (downloadable from our Canvas site under files), so it can be added to the Jewish Kentucky Oral History Collection, thus building and expanding the repository. (You will not be tasked with indexing it, but future students will, so it will become searchable and accessible).

The following local community leaders and participants have already agreed to make themselves available for an oral history for the purposes of this class and the larger JHFE Jewish Kentucky Oral History Project. *List is maintained on our Canvas Site to protect the privacy of community members.  You are not limited to selecting from this list, but I did want to provide you with contacts who are already amenable to participating in the project. If you have other ideas of potential interviewees, please discuss them with me and we’ll determine if it is feasible to complete the interviews in the timeframe you have.

*(Note: As the instructor of record and as a member of this community, I reached out to individuals before the class began to make sure they were both willing to be interviewed and able to work within the tight time constraints of the semester rhythm. I also provided a list of these individuals that included their names and topics I thought they might be able to address, so that students could select an individual based on their own research interests.)

Possible themes to flesh out with the interviewees listed above—

• Jewish community life in Lexington
• experiences as a Rabbi in a mid-size, Southern town
• contemporary perspectives on Jewish student life at UK (Hillel, Jewish fraternity/sorority life)
• Women’s leadership roles
• generational issues within the Jewish community: attitudes toward Israel, Holocaust memory/education, Jewish practices, others?

Other possible lines of inquiry:

• Hadassah and Lexington Jewish women’s national prominence in this organization
• Jewish Summer Camp in Kentucky
• B’nai B’rith Organization

Scheduling
It is best for your team to find several times that work for your group first, then reach out to Kopana Terry at the Nunn Center to reserve these slots in the studio. After you have a tentative hold on the studio times, reach out to your interviewee to see what (if any) of the slots work for them. Use the template below to contact them by email. Note, you want to reach out as soon as you can, as scheduling is often a challenge for all parties involved.

Template for Contacting Potential Interviewee:
Dear Mr./ Ms./ Dr. /Professor /Rabbi________:

Hello, we are  X and Y, students in Dr. Fernheimer’s WRD 112: Writing Jewish Kentucky Course this semester.  We’ve been listening to and learning from interviews in the Lexington Jewish Community and Jewish Heritage Fund for Excellence Jewish Kentucky Collections all semester, and as part of our final project, we hope to conduct an oral history with you that will become part of the JHFE Jewish Kentucky Collection. Our group is interested in contextualizing   X issue, learning more about Y, hoping to learn more about Q…. [tailor to your needs!]

We  would like to schedule a morning or afternoon with you to conduct what we hope will be a 1.5-2.5 hour interview to take place in the Nunn Center for Oral History’s Professional Studio on the UK campus. Which of the following windows is most convenient for you? {you should find some slots that work for both students and the Nunn Center’s availability and offer a minimum of 3 windows for the interviewee to choose from}. If none of these times work with your schedule, please provide some windows that do.

Sincerely,
Student A and Student B

*Note, you can offer the interviewee a free parking space on campus if you coordinate with Marie Daley in the Nunn Center and/or with me, as I have an arrangement with the Boone Center.  If your interviewee parks on campus,It is important that one representative from your team meet him/her in the parking lot and escort them to the recording studio as they are not likely to be familiar with how to navigate campus.
Once you’ve scheduled the interview, you want to being working on the protocol right away.

Crafting a Tailored Protocol
To complete this part of the assignment, please create a Google document named using this convention_”InterviewProtocol_Yourintervieweesfullname_Yourfirstnamelastinitial_yourteammembersfirstnamelastinitial” that you share with me, jfernheimer[at] gmail [dot] com.   In it you should include your working protocol for the interviewee. To create the protocol, you want to do your homework–begin with the questions from the protocol below, but be sure to adapt and add questions that will help you explore your team’s research question and the individual’s personal experiences relevant to your project. To help you tailor the interview, you will want to look up your interviewee, using all the tools available to you–Synagogue directories, the finding guides for the synagogue/temple/Jewish Federation of the Bluegrass materials housed at the UK Special Collections and Resource Center. You also will want to check LinkedIN and or other social media resources to locate and identify relevant professional history and resumes. Dr. Goldstein and I will work with you to ensure that the protocol is viable; please do not conduct your interview until you’ve received the go-ahead and final approval on the protocol.

How to Get Started
You may have noticed that all interviews for the JHFE Jewish Kentucky Oral History Collection incorporated some similar questions. Below, you will find the general protocol template we used for developing the first section of questions based on Jewish life and community. Usually the second part of the interview was focused more on the person’s unique professional or communal contributions. You will be responsible for working with your peer and creating a complete protocol (selecting and reformulating appropriate questions for parts 1 and 2), which is due in class on 3/21.  You will receive feedback and revise the questions (if necessary) before you conduct the interview. In our experience, such interview protocols are revised at least 2-3 times before Dr. Goldstein and I sign off on them. Of course if you end up scheduling your actual interview earlier than that, you’ll want to make sure you get your protocol approved by Dr. Jan before the interview takes place.

All interview protocols should begin with the following template:

The Protocol

Some important things to remember about the interview situation and the creation of a protocol to elicit/prepare you to have a productive interview:

• Do your homework—look up some background information(use finding guides in Special Collections, Linked In and/or social media platforms, search the Herald-Leader archives,) and talk to Dr. Jan to know /learn more. After you’ve made your initial contact, you might do a follow-up by phone or email to learn more so you can prepare better questions.
• When you contact the person initially and/or to schedule, be formal and polite in your query. You’ll want to use a version of the template above if you’re connecting via email:

• Keep the questions open-ended. Do not ask questions that elicit a yes/no response, as they will close rather than open your conversation. Instead, begin with general questions that allow the interviewee some space to shape their response and also allow plenty of room for follow-up questions.
• Be prepared with lots of follow-up questions:
  • • Ex: Question—Tell me about your educational background….
    • Response—I went to X high school.
    • Follow-up questions—How many students were there? ….Oh, it was a big school ? Small one? What was that like? Tell me about your most memorable experience from that period of your life. Why do you still remember this experience to this day? How did it impact your choices about college/career/family later in life? Looking back now, what do you wish you had known or experienced then? What would the you of today tell the you of then?
• Be prepared to have to ask/revisit a question several times in slightly different ways to get a response. Remember all those tangents and repetitions from the interviews you indexed? They are likely to be part of your interviewing experience as well.
• You probably won’t get to ask all of the questions you prepare, and you’ll need to work together during the interview itself to make sure you get enough information to be helpful for your project.
• To generate a 90-120 minute interview, you’ll want to generate a minimum of 60-70 questions and at least 20 possible follow-up questions.

To begin work on the Interview Question Protocol, click here to see the model which you will adapt to meet the needs of your team and interviewee.

What follows below is the actual bank of questions we used to develop the questions for an interview in the JHFE collection to help ensure some consistency across the interviews.

Of course, what you’ve probably already noticed when listening—not every question gets asked, and even when asked, not every question gets answered!