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Last Thursday, the elementary students investigated their new tools-eight digital voice recorders given to them by Hamline students. Playback from the recorders contributed to the commotion. Laughter and practice questions boosted the ever-rising noise level.

“We don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, and that’s the fun of this class,” said Prof. David Hudson. “It’s an alternate form of reporting, where the person being interviewed is participating.”

The university students, members of Hudson’s Special Topics in Journalism course, will be spending the semester working with the Hancoc-Hamline University Collaborative Magnet School class on an oral history project focused on their families’ emigration story.

For the first half of the semester, the seven journalism students will each be assigned three or four students. They are responsible for teaching them how to operate voice recorders, assisting them in creating meaningful questions, and getting them comfortable with the interview process.

“The objective is that they explore and reconstruct their family’s oral history; how they got to America,” said journalism student Carol Pflaumer.

The students’ families come from many different parts of the world: Mexico, Laos, Thailand, Ethiopia, Somalia, Burma, Vietnam, and Liberia, according to Hudson. Hudson also represents Hamline in the Hancock-Hamline collaboration.

“The kids met Dr. Hudson’s class just last week but I got the ball rolling earlier to get them to pick one of their family members to talk with,” said Walsh. “This Thursday we will start sending recorders home.”

“It really is a collaboration,” said Walsh. “I let Dr. Hudson lead because he knows the oral history part, but I know my 6th-graders.”

After the interviews are completed, the two classes will begin siphoning through the recordings, translating if necessary, and choosing what will be transcribed and contributed to the final work.

“The hardest part will be to listen to each interview and pick out the crunch, what is most impressive,” said Walsh.

“It’s different because this is a person’s history. There may be things they don’t want to share. It’s a collaborative project, and we will protect their wishes,” said Pflaumer.

By the end of March, with the help of the journalism students, the 6th-graders are scheduled to have a small oral history book finished. Then Hudson’s class will begin a more comprehensive recording of the oral history of some of the 6th-graders’ parents and other community members.

“Our class will make contacts in that community and work on more detailed stories of their history,” said Hudson. “It may lead to a book.”

Four years ago, another of Hudson’s special topics classes did something similar. Part of a larger community-based project, that class conducted interviews with both current and former residents of the Rondo neighborhood. Because of the construction of Interstate 94 in the late '50s and early '60s, the Rondo neighborhood, a mostly African-American community, was disrupted and dispersed.

That class’s research centered on interviews with citizens who were children in the Rondo neighborhood when the interstate was built.

Three and a half years later, because of the continued work by Hudson, a few of his former students, and others, Children of Rondo was finally published. They also contributed to the book Voices of Rondo, by Kate Cavett.

Although they do not know where their research will lead them, the current special topics class has high hopes for their project.

“This project is a collaboration. These people sharing their stories are our partners,” said Hudson. “If you don’t capture their stories, they will disappear.”

“By the end of the semester we should have full transcripts and people’s consent. The kids will learn about their history,” said Pflaumer.