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Volume 21
Number 4 Summer 2004 |
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Departments:
Campus Views | Letters
| News & Notes | Parents
| Class
Notes | Aggies Remember
| End Notes
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Assignment VietnamThere’s no better way to learn about history than to hear from those who lived it, as the students in a course on the Vietnam War learned this spring. Below is instructor Eric James Schroeder 's description of the class and its goals, followed by links to excerpts from his students' journals and to excerpts from veterans' oral histories. By Eric James Schroeder
But the exciting common denominator proved to be that a majority of the students chose to interview relatives—the subjects were the students’ mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, and in a few instances, grandparents. So the oral histories not only provided these students with a personal window on the 1960s but also put many of them in touch with a piece of their own family history. At the end of the quarter the students felt that this assignment had been the most valuable component of the class, citing the way it had given the history of the period an intimacy and immediacy that they hadn’t gotten from other course materials, not even from the documentary footage of the 1960s that they had watched in class. This year the Veterans’ History Project sponsored by the Library of Congress provided another opportunity for a learning experience that reached beyond the confines of the classroom. Recognizing that as our veterans die their stories often die with them, the Library of Congress is seeking to archive interviews with veterans of conflicts ranging from World War I to the Gulf War. And to help accomplish this immense task, the Library of Congress is encouraging citizens to conduct the interviews. A perfect real-world task for the students in my course on the Vietnam War. In this case, the students had few personal connections to the Vietnam War, so I had to supply many of the Vietnam veteran contacts. But regardless of whether the veteran was a family member or a new friend, all the students came back with stories and insight into what it was like for young men to go off to war. They learned a lot about the war and about the Vietnam veterans themselves, including that they are schoolteachers, nurses, politicians, artists—regular sorts of people whom they encounter in their daily lives. Importantly, the assignment brought the Vietnam War out of the textbook and into their lives. Eric James Schroeder is a lecturer in the English department . |
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