NYC Teachers Speak: Collecting & Sharing Stories with StoryCorps and the Museum of the City of New York

2020 has brought unprecedented challenges to the education landscape, from navigating remote learning to safeguarding our loved ones’ health to reckoning with racial injustice. History is happening and we all have stories to share. Oral histories enable us to connect and listen to one another, preserve our experiences for future generations, and empower our students to record and amplify their voices.

Join us for this free workshop, where you’ll hear how curators from the Museum of the City of New York are using oral histories to document how New Yorkers are experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic and the uprisings for Black lives, and learn how to bring an oral history project to your students from experts at StoryCorps.

This workshop will feature an introduction to StoryCorps' Great Thanksgiving Listen—a project ideally suited for a virtual or hybrid learning environment—as well as walkthroughs of lesson plans, tips from the field, videos and additional teaching resources, and a moderated Q&A. You'll be introduced to StoryCorps Connect, a first-of-its-kind platform that enables you to record a StoryCorps interview with a loved one remotely using video conference technology. The audio and a still photo from each interview goes into our archive at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. 

Click here to see a resource sheet for this workshop that highlights StoryCorps resources for students and educators, as well as information about how to add your story of teaching and learning in 2020 to our collection of educator stories.

This workshop is recommended for educators teaching students in grades 8-12. To use the StoryCorps Connect platform and app, all users must be at least 13 years old.

This workshop will be conducted via Zoom; participants will need an internet-accessible device with audio capability to attend. The Zoom link will be emailed to participants prior to the workshop.

FREE. Registration required. 1.5 CTLE Hours 

About StoryCorps

Founded in 2003, the non-profit public media organization StoryCorps has brought more than 600,000 participants together—two at a time—to record conversations about their lives. StoryCorps preserves its recordings in its archive at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress; its archive is the largest single collection of human voices ever gathered. The Great Thanksgiving Listen is an annual conversation collection project perfect for grades 8-12.

StoryCorps Connect is made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people, and is powered by Vonage.