Sustainable Stewardship: A Collaborative Model for Engaged Oral History Pedagogy, Community Partnership, and Archival Growth

Abstract

Our University of Kentucky team of professors, archivists, and oral historians have collaborated since 2013 to develop pedagogy that enables students to encounter and engage oral history, archival materials, and local community in meaningful ways. Through the impetus of the Jewish Kentucky Oral History Project and several semesters of collaboration and iterative syllabus design, we developed “sustainable stewardship” as a replicable model for course and project design to engage undergraduates in original knowledge production while simultaneously fostering archival access and growth. In this article we trace the evolving pedagogical conversations inspired by the classroom introduction of OHMS (Oral History Metadata Synchronizer), the questions of continuity they elicit, and our team’s development of sustainable stewardship to respond to those questions. We argue that sustainable stewardship provides a model to connect the classroom, community, and the archive in enduring, mutually beneficial, and transformative ways.