Teaching with the COHDS Oral History Archives

This roundtable panel centres on the collective experiences of teaching oral history at Concordia University by core affiliates and student affiliates of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS). As educators and oral historians, we will discuss innovative approaches to working with COHDS’s archival collections and reflect on pedagogical strategies for engaging students with these resources. Drawing on our respective experiences of working with interviews from oral history collections such as: Montreal Life Stories (Refugee Youth Working Group, Rwanda Working Group, Haiti Working Group), Urban Changes in Little Burgundy, Pointe-Sainte-Charles: Balconville to Condoville, Urban History Laboratory among others, we are looking to share how the diversity of these oral history collections inform our pedagogy and work towards educating the next generation of oral historians.

A key facet of oral history practice is deep listening—a skill which must be cultivated in the classroom. For each panel participant, the COHDS’ archival collections have been a crucial space where students have had the opportunity to develop deep listening and understand the interviewer-interviewee dynamic in all its contexts: from listening to audio interviews, to reading a transcript, to analyzing the shared life stories and recollections of narrators. Through lively conversation and reflection, panelists Dr. Steven High, Dr. Barbara Lorenzkowski, Derek Xavier Garcia, Kelann Currie-Williams, and Lauren Laframboise will share the successes and challenges they have faced designing and incorporating interviews from COHDS’ collections into courses ranging from undergraduate to graduate levels.

Through this roundtable we will discuss: how can oral historians and educators design in-class activities that encourage a deep listening practice with archival materials? What are key approaches we can take to prepare students to engage ethically with interviews from the archives, particularly those from marginalized communities and difficult histories? How do we honour the ethical responsibilities to narrators who have donated these materials? How can educators engage with the resources available at COHDS and provide students with tools to engage with the multiplicity of interviews available online?

How can you participate? Join us in person by or online by registering for the Zoom Meeting or watching live on YouTube.

Have questions or if we can make this event more accessible for you: Contact us at info.4@concordia.ca

Steven High

Steven High is lead co-director of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. He is the author of many books and articles on oral history methodology, theory and ethics, including Oral History at the Crossroads, Deindustrializing Montreal, Beyond Testimony and Trauma, and Remembering Mass Violence.

Barbara Lorenzkowski

Barbara Lorenzkowski is an oral historian of childhood and youth whose work explores the ways in which global processes of migration, displacement, and violence have shaped small people’s lives in outsized ways. She recently published the co-edited anthology Small Stories of War: Children, Youth, and Conflict in Canada and Beyond (with Kristine Alexander and Andrew Burt, McGill-Queen’s University Press 2023) and is currently completing a FQRSC-funded book project on The Children’s War, a large-scale oral history project on children’s sensuous and emotional life-worlds in Atlantic Canada during the Second World War. Dr. Lorenzkowski served as the Lead Co-Director of COHDS between 2023 and 2026.

Kelann Currie-Williams

Kelann Currie-Williams is a writer, visual culture scholar, and oral historian based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. They are currently a PhD candidate in the Humanities Program at Concordia University’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture, where their research focuses on the histories of image-making and the photographic preservation practices of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora in Canada during the 20th century. Kelann is a core member and student affiliate of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS) and a member of the Kitchen Table Collective. Kelann’s writings have appeared in Urban History Review, the Canadian Journal of History, Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, and Philosophy of Photography.

Derek Xavier Garcia

Derek Xavier Garcia is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Concordia University, Montréal, and a 2025–2026 Scholar-in-Residence at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. He was previously a 2023–2024 Mellon Foundation Resident Scholar in Latino Studies at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His research falls at the intersections of the culture, memory, and history of Mexican American activist movements, particularly at the first Mexican American college in the United States, Colegio Jacinto Treviño (1969-1976). He has published in American Quarterly and Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies.

Lauren Laframboise

Lauren Laframboise is a Vanier Scholar and PhD candidate at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling in the Department of History at Concordia University. Her research explores how international unions contended with trade liberalization and deindustrialization in the garment industry in Canada and the US. She has worked on a variety of public history projects exploring labour and immigration history, including museum exhibitions, online oral history platforms, walking tours, and radio, including the Voices of the Immigrant Workers’ Centre oral history project. Lauren has also taught in Concordia's History Department, making use of the COHDS oral history archives to teach the history of Montreal.

Piyusha Chatterjee

Piyusha Chatterjee: Trained as an oral historian in India and Canada, my research addresses questions of socio-economic inequalities, dynamics of power in place and questions of labour and gender in the Global South, including geographies of poverty and informality within the Global North. My current research, "Not Cheap Labour: Women's Lives in Garment Supply Chains" (which received the 36-month Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship) examines the impact of economic restructuring on labour’s experiences through the Global South lens. It aims to transnationalize the conversation around deindustrialization, while also exploring the entanglement of economy and culture through a focus on women’s labour.