SOHP Outreach

"New Immigrants" Project Celebration in Durham

The Southern Oral History Program actively promotes a wide range of oral history outreach efforts designed to facilitate the use of oral history in classrooms and community scholarship. The SOHP periodically conducts basic oral history workshops tailored to fit the needs of a variety of institutions interested in embarking on or improving interview projects. These workshops provide guidance to county and school groups as they launch their own oral history projects. The SOHP also assists teachers through its cosponsorship of the North Carolina Humanities Council Summer Teachers' Institutes, which incorporate oral history methodology in helping K-12 teachers from across the state to rethink the ways they teach North Carolina history. At the university level, the SOHP offered a workshop on oral history and the teaching of North Carolina history as part of UNC-CH's Project for Historical Education.

The SOHP also encourages and develops public outreach that allows the subjects of SOHP research projects to become involved in the program's work in meaningful and beneficial ways. Such events have played an important role in many of the component projects of the Listening for a Change: North Carolina Communities in Transition initiative, and a reception served to bring together many of the interviewees - Democrat and Republican alike - in the SOHP's North Carolina Politics Project.