Going into HIUS 120D, I had figured that oral history would operate by a formal “journalistic format,” and that interview candidates would be selected beforehand and would be individuals of recognized authority or merit within a community, who would have been disposed beforehand to participate in an interview related to Race and Oral History, and might have had ties to the program beforehand. While such individuals were not precluded from being interviewed, I was surprised by the high degree of independence accorded to interviewers in finding oral history narrators, who may have been without institutional connections. If I were to take HIUS 120D again, I would have acted more proactively earlier in the course to reach out to potential narrators so that I could have established a relationship and secured an interview with a candidate at the site identified by our Community Partners at Mira Costa Community College. While the interview that I performed with a woman about Carlsbad Beaches went well, she was not a candidate that I had discussed with my counterparts at Mira Costa. Concerning the interview itself, in hindsight it would have been prudent to have timed the interview as it occurred, so as to know when to end the interview, though normally this would have been a function automatically performed by the Zoom site, and it was the result of some technical difficulties that my Zoom window did not display a timer during my interview. In essence, my advice to future students in the ROHP is to be proactive from the earliest opportunity in establishing relationships with your preferred interview candidates, and to be aware of the technical limitations of your devices, given that my devices displayed such inconvenient limitation during my interview process, requiring me to perform the interview a second time.
Written by David Sharak, History Major, Philosophy Minor Senior, Spring Quarter 2024, Mira Costa Community Partner.
