Oral History Center : Educational programs

Advanced Institute

We are now accepting applications for our 2026 Advanced Institute on a rolling basis. Please apply early, as spots fill quickly.

The Oral History Center is offering a virtual version of our one-week Advanced Institute on the methodology, theory, and practice of oral history. This will take place July 27-31, 2026. The Advanced Institute will be held online.

The cost of the Advanced Institute is $650. 

The institute is designed for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, university faculty, independent scholars, and museum and community-based historians who are engaged in oral history work. The goal of the institute is to strengthen the ability of its participants to conduct research-focused interviews and to consider special characteristics of interviews as historical evidence in a rigorous academic environment.

We ask that applicants have a project in mind that they would like to workshop during the week. All participants are required to attend small daily breakout groups in which they will workshop projects. 

In the sessions, we will devote particular attention to how oral history interviews can broaden and deepen historical interpretation situated within contemporary discussions of history, subjectivity, memory, and memoir.

Overview of the week

The institute is structured around the life cycle of an interview. Each day will focus on a component of the interview, including foundational aspects of oral history, project conceptualization, the interview itself, analytic and interpretive strategies, and research presentation and dissemination.

Instruction will take place online tentatively from 8:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Pacific time, with breaks woven in. There will be three sessions a day: two seminar sessions and a workshop. Seminars will cover oral history theory, legal and ethical issues, project planning, oral history and the audience, anatomy of an interview, editing, fundraising, and analysis and presentation. During workshops, participants will work throughout the week in small groups, led by faculty, to develop and refine their projects.

Participants will be provided with a resource packet that includes a reader, contact information, and supplemental resources. These resources will be made available electronically prior to the institute, along with the schedule.

Applications and cost

The cost of the institute is $650. We offer a limited number of participants a discounted tuition of $325 for students, independent scholars, or those experiencing financial hardship. If you would like to apply for discounted tuition, please indicate this on your application form and we will send you more information.

Please note that the OHC is a soft-money research office of the university, and as such receives precious little state funding. Therefore, it is necessary that this educational initiative be a self-funding program. Unfortunately, we are unable to provide financial assistance to participants other than our limited number of scholarships. We encourage you to check in with your home institutions about financial assistance; in the past we have found that many programs have budgets to help underwrite some of the costs associated with attendance. We will provide receipts and certificates of completion as required for reimbursement.

Applications are accepted on a rolling basis. We encourage you to apply early, as spots fill up quickly.

Questions

Please contact Shanna Farrell with questions.

Intro workshop

The OHC held their annual 2026 Introduction to Oral History Workshop virtually via Zoom on Friday, Feb. 27. 

This workshop is designed for people who are interested in an introduction to the basic practice of oral history and learning best practices. The workshop serves as a companion to our more in-depth Advanced Oral History Summer Institute held in July 2026.

The workshop focuses on the “nuts-and-bolts” of oral history, including methodology and ethics, practice, and recording. It will be taught by our seasoned interviewers and include hands-on practice exercises. Everyone is welcome to attend the workshop. Prior attendees have included community-based historians, teachers, genealogists, public historians, and students in college or graduate school.

Tuition is $175. We are offering a limited number of participants a discounted tuition of $85 for students, independent scholars, or those experiencing financial hardship. If you would like to apply for discounted tuition, please indicate this on your application form and we will send you more information. Please note that the OHC is a soft-money research office of the university, and as such receives precious little state funding. Therefore, it is necessary that this educational initiative be a self-funding program. Unfortunately, we are unable to provide financial assistance to participants other than our limited number of scholarships. We encourage you to check with your home institutions about financial assistance; in the past we have found that many programs have budgets to help underwrite some of the costs associated with attendance. We will provide receipts and certificates of completion as required for reimbursement.

If you have specific questions, please contact Shanna Farrell. 

Remote interviewing

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, OHC oral historians have developed new practices and procedures to enable remote interviewing and to consider the implications of this practice. In the documents below, we provide our latest guidelines on topics including: remote interviewing with Zoom, tips for getting started in oral history while sheltering in place, and more to come. We welcome feedback, questions, and suggestions for additional topics to cover.

Remote interviewing with Zoom

These protocols were developed to facilitate remote recording of narrators of the highest quality available during the COVID-19 pandemic. We developed these protocols for the Zoom video conference platform using both audio and video. We also provide instructions for additional, backup audio recordings. Interviewers, or the hosts of the interviews, will need to have a professional Zoom license; narrators need only access to a computer or telephone. 

Available for download: Remote Interviewing with Zoom

Recording with Zoom

Learn how to conduct and record interviews on Zoom with this webinar developed by Paul Burnett and taught by experts in oral history, who interviewed remotely during shelter-in-place. Watch the webinar. 

Articles about remote interviewing

Storytelling at a distance: Staying connected while we are apart

Oral History provides a way for people to see the world through someone else’s eyes. In this article posted toward the beginning of shelter-in-place in April 2020, Amanda Tewes shares storytelling questions anyone can use to frame oral history life interviews and to have more meaningful conversations — even at a distance. 

The importance of rapport

In this article from March 2021, Shanna Farrell talks about the genuine human connection forged between an interviewer and a narrator, the challenges of establishing rapport remotely, and how it can be done. 

Looking to the future of oral history work

Remote interviewing has enabled opportunities that didn’t exist before. Amanda Tewes sorts out the pros and cons of remote interviewing in this article from May 2021.
 

Interviewing tips

During transformative times in history like these, it’s important to document the lives of everyday citizens. Willa Baum (pictured above), a pioneer in oral history and former director of the Oral History Center, shared the following tips on conducting oral histories.

1. An interview is not a dialogue. The whole point of the interview is to get the narrator to tell her story. Limit your own remarks to a few pleasantries to break the ice, then brief questions to guide her along. It is not necessary to give her the details of your great-grandmother's trip in a covered wagon in order to get her to tell you about her grandfather's trip to California. Just say, "I understand your grandfather came around the Horn to California. What did he tell you about the trip?"
2. Ask questions that require more of an answer than "yes" or "no." Start with "why," "how," "where," "what kind of ..." Instead of "Was Henry Miller a good boss?" ask "What did the cowhands think of Henry Miller as a boss?"
3. Ask one question at a time. Sometimes interviewers ask a series of questions all at once. Probably the narrator will answer only the first or last one. You will catch this kind of questioning when you listen through the tape after the session, and you can avoid it the next time.
4. Ask brief questions. We all know the irrepressible speech-maker who, when questions are called for at the end of a lecture, gets up and asks five-minute questions. It is unlikely that the narrator is so dull that it takes more than a sentence or two for her to understand the question.
5. Start with questions that are not controversial; save the delicate questions, if there are any, until you have become better acquainted. A good place to begin is with the narrator's youth and background.
6. Don't let periods of silence fluster you. Give your narrator a chance to think of what she wants to add before you hustle her along with the next question. Relax, write a few words on your notepad. The sure sign of a beginning interviewer is a tape where every brief pause signals the next question.
7. Don't worry if your questions are not as beautifully phrased as you would like them to be for posterity. A few fumbled questions will help put your narrator at ease as she realizes that you are not perfect and she need not worry if she isn't either. It is not necessary to practice fumbling a few questions; most of us are nervous enough to do that naturally.
8. Don't interrupt a good story because you have thought of a question, or because your narrator is straying from the planned outline. If the information is pertinent, let her go on, but jot down your questions on your notepad so you will remember to ask it later.
9. If your narrator does stray into subjects that are not pertinent (the most common problems are to follow some family member's children or to get into a series of family medical problems), try to pull her back as quickly as possible. "Before we move on, I'd like to find out how the closing of the mine in 1935 affected your family's finances. Do you remember that?"
10. It is often hard for a narrator to describe people. An easy way to begin is to ask her to describe the person's appearance. From there, the narrator is more likely to move into character description.
11. Interviewing is one time when a negative approach is more effective than a positive one. Ask about the negative aspects of a situation. For example, in asking about a person, do not begin with a glowing description. "I know the mayor was a very generous and wise person. Did you find him so?" Few narrators will quarrel with a statement like that even though they may have found the mayor a disagreeable person. You will get a more lively answer if you start out in the negative. "Despite the mayor's reputation for good works, I hear he was a very difficult man for his immediate employees to get along with." If your narrator admired the mayor greatly, she will spring to his defense with an apt illustration of why your statement is wrong. If she did find him hard to get along with, your remark has given her a chance to illustrate some of the mayor's more unpleasant characteristics.
12. Try to establish at every important point in the story where the narrator was or what her role was in this event, in order to indicate how much is eye-witness information and how much based on reports of others. "Where were you at the time of the mine disaster?" "Did you talk to any of the survivors later?" Work around these questions carefully, so that you will not appear to be doubting the accuracy of the narrator's account.
13. Do not challenge accounts you think might be inaccurate. Instead, try to develop as much information as possible that can be used by later researchers in establishing what probably happened. Your narrator may be telling you quite accurately what she saw. As Walter Lord explained when describing his interviews with survivors of the Titanic, "Every lady I interviewed had left the sinking ship in the last lifeboat. As I later found out from studying the placement of the lifeboats, no group of lifeboats was in view of another and each lady probably was in the last lifeboat she could see leaving the ship."
14. Tactfully point out to your narrator that there is a different account of what she is describing, if there is. Start out by saying, "I have heard ..." or "I have read ..." This is not to challenge her account, but rather an opportunity for her to bring up further evidence to refute the opposing view, or to explain how that view got established, or to temper what she has already said. If done skillfully, some of your best information can come from this juxtaposition of differing accounts.
15. Try to avoid “off the record” information — the times when your narrator asks you to turn off the recorder while she tells you a good story. Ask her to let you record the whole things and promise that you will erase that portion if she asks you to after further consideration. You may have to erase it later, or she may not tell you the story at all, but once you allow "off the record" stories, she may continue with more and more, and you will end up with almost no recorded interview at all. "Off the record" information is only useful if you yourself are researching a subject and this is the only way you can get the information. It has no value if your purpose is to collect information for later use by other researchers.
16. Don't switch the recorder off and on. It is much better to waste a little tape on irrelevant material than to call attention to the tape recorder by a constant on-off operation. For this reason, I do not recommend the stop-start switches available on some mikes. If your mike has such a switch, tape it to the "on" position — then forget it. Of course you can turn off the recorder if the telephone rings or if someone interrupts your session.
17. Interviews usually work out better if there is no one present except the narrator and the interviewer. Sometimes two or more narrators can be successfully recorded, but usually each one of them would have been better alone.
18. End the interview at a reasonable time. An hour and a half is probably the maximum. First, you must protect your narrator against fatigue; second, you will be tired even if she isn't. Some narrators tell you very frankly if they are tired, or their spouses will. Otherwise, you must plead fatigue, another appointment, or no more tape.
19. Don't use the interview to show off your knowledge, vocabulary, charm, or other abilities. Good interviewers do not shine; only their interviews do.

These tips are from Willa Baum's Oral History for the Local Historical Society (1971).

Classroom resources

Oral History interviewing

Find recommendations for how to build a class in which the students conduct interviews. For education during the COVID-19 pandemic, there is also information on how to record interviews using Zoom.

How to Build a Class Around Oral History

Recording Oral History Using Zoom

General resources

Get the information you need to use existing oral histories in the classroom, with a guide for how to use our advanced search tool to find content in our oral history collection, as well as examples of different types of assignments students could do using our oral histories.

How to use our advanced search tool to find material from among our 4,000+ interviews!

AIDS curriculum

This grade 11 curriculum module was designed for teaching the history of epidemics in U.S. history. Although there is a brief primer on the broad patterns of epidemics in U.S. history, there is a strong focus on the primary sources of our collection of interviews about the early years of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco.

This module makes extensive use of our seven-episode First Response podcast, which provides an accessible history of the epidemic using the interviews from our collection. Use the podcast to help students identify themes in the interviews that will help them think about their assignments. There is suggested content for assignments in four topic areas: women and gender in the epidemic; researchers hunting for an unknown disease in different ways; public health and early treatments for an unknown disease; and the struggle for gay rights in the context of the epidemic. Each of these topics was touched on in the podcast, but there is plenty of room for students to take them further in their assignments. However, it should be a requirement that they not merely duplicate the information that is in the podcast.

Finally, there is a page of additional online primary sources for the students to consult. The actual nature of the assignments depends on your class level. We had in mind a grade 11 class of motivated students.

Introduction to Epidemics in History Module

The AIDS Archive Lesson Plan: Oral History as Evidence

Historical HIV/AIDS General Resources

HIV-AIDS Assignments Grade 11

This document contains the following assignments:

• Sample assignment to work on together as a class
• Women on the Front Lines: Gender, Identity, and Values
• Virus Hunters: The Search for HIV
• The Early Search for Treatments
• Pride and Prejudice: Gay Rights vs. Collective Responsibilities in the Shadow of AIDS

See also an example of the Virus Hunters assignment completed by a high school student (rising sophomore). This project took approximately 20 hours: Virus Hunters Newsletter.

Photo: Selma Dritz, M.D. (1982), early AIDS researcher, epidemiologist, and San Francisco public health official, from the Sally Hughes AIDS research collection at UCSF, on Calisphere. Photo by Jerry Telfer, San Francisco Chronicle.  

Prizes

The Carmel and Howard Friesen Prize in Oral History Research

The Carmel and Howard Friesen Prize in Oral History Research recognizes scholarly achievement in using primary source material. The $500 prize will be awarded to a UC Berkeley undergraduate who submits the best essay in any discipline that draws upon Oral History Center interviews. 

About Carmel and Howard Friesen

The prize is named for Carmel and Howard Friesen, Cal alums who shared a love of the campus (where they met), The Bancroft Library, and undergraduate education. In 2015, the Friesens granted the Oral History Center a generous endowment that supports this prize, with the goal of encouraging and recognizing undergraduate student achievement in research. The endowment also supports oral history interviews, and Howard Friesen is a narrator of his own oral history, Howard R. Friesen: Engineer, Entrepreneur, and Philanthropist of UC Berkeley. Carmel (Candy) and Howard were married for 64 years until Carmel passed away in 2015.

About Oral History Center interview topics

The Oral History Center has interviews on almost every topic imaginable — with a focus on the United States and a smattering of international interviews. A project like Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream, for example, addresses issues including California’s coastal climate, food and wine agribusinesses, and the growth of multinational corporations. Interviews are easily accessible online.

Thematic areas include arts and literature; the environment, science, engineering, and medicine; social movements; community history; business and labor; politics and government; law and jurisprudence; food, wine, and agriculture; and the history of the University of California.

Major projects featuring multiple interviews include: the Berkeley Free Speech Movement; the marriage equality movement; Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front; venture capital; Kaiser Permanente and health care; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; mining and the environment; the law clerks of Chief Justice Earl Warren; the Sierra Club; the disability rights and independent living movement; Napa Valley; and Japanese American Confinement Sites, to name just a handful. 

Searching the collections

Use the search feature on the OHC overview page to search by title, topic, or keyword. Or you can browse our projects. After you’ve conducted your own search, you can contact Director Paul Burnett if you have an idea for a paper and would like some assistance culling through our collections. 

Due date and submission requirements

The deadline for the prize is the last day of the spring semester at 11:59 p.m. The prize recipient will be notified over the summer. 

Submissions should be delivered via email to OHC Director Paul Burnett. You may submit a paper at any time throughout the year. 

Eligibility and selection criteria

Eligibility

• You must be a UC Berkeley undergraduate.
• The paper must be written for a credit course at UC Berkeley.
• Papers should have been written during the current academic year, the previous summer, or the previous spring. For example, for the spring 2021 prize, students can submit papers from a class taken in spring 2021, fall 2020, summer 2020, or spring 2020.
• The essay should be no longer than 15,000 words and should contain appropriate citations. There is no minimum length.

Selection criteria

The selection committee will evaluate the submission based on these three criteria:

• How well oral histories are integrated within and essential to the overall essay
• How creatively oral histories are used in the essay
• The overall quality and persuasiveness of the essay

Financial aid regulations

Please note: Federal financial aid regulations require that all awards received by a student not exceed their financial aid need as determined by a Congressional formula. It is possible, therefore, that the cash award for a prize could reduce some component of a student's package of financial aid awards. In these cases, the Financial Aid Office attempts first to reduce loan or work aid; fellowships, grants or scholarships are only reduced as a last resort. 

Questions 

Questions may be directed to OHC Director Paul Burnett.

Environment exhibit

Voices for the Environment exhibit: October 2023 – November 2024

Voices for the Environment: A Century of Bay Area Activism opened Oct. 6, 2023, and ran through Nov. 15, 2024, in The Bancroft Library gallery.  

This exhibit charts the evolution of environmentalism in the San Francisco Bay Area through the voices of activists who helped galvanize public opinion to advance their causes. No state grappled with these causes more than California, and few regions were as significant for the evolution of environmentalism as the Bay Area. From tensions over preservation in the wake of the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, to the midcentury inclusion of environmental protection in state regulations, to demands to address the disproportionate burdens of pollution and illness that communities of color endured, the Bay Area was on the front lines. The historical recordings featured in this exhibit offer rare firsthand narratives of these seminal events and the people who led the charge. This interactive exhibit, curated by the Oral History Center, is the first in-depth effort to showcase oral history along with other archival collections of The Bancroft Library.

Prologue

The exhibit opens with paintings: representations of a romantic ideal of nature — a wilderness whose beauty inspires and restores the spirit, and which stands in contrast to the explosive and often damaging growth of modern cities. They illustrate the notion that nature is more than just a source of food and materials, and that nonhuman organisms and their habitats have intrinsic value. But these paintings also represent the perspectives of European settlers, who alternately placed Native Americans and non-Europeans “in” nature or erased them completely from view. 

Through oral histories, people with different perspectives from different periods will describe in their own words what their environments meant to them, and of their struggles to change how they related to nature and to one another. Unlike paintings, which express the imagination of the painter, the oral histories in this exhibit are the testimony of witnesses to history which speak directly to you, across time. We invite you to engage with these voices from the Bay Area over the 20th century.

A preservationist spirit

On the morning of April 18, 1906, a massive earthquake struck San Francisco and the broader Bay Area. The quake crumpled buildings and ignited enormous fires that destroyed 80 percent of what was then California’s largest city, leaving a death toll of more than 3,000 people. Strong sentiments to preserve and protect California’s unique environment from human and industrial use had been in circulation for decades, demonstrated by the 1892 founding of the Sierra Club by John Muir and others. After the earthquake and fires, however, demands to rebuild San Francisco targeted the state’s ancient and fire-resistant redwood trees, while desires for a reliable water supply called for damming the Hetch Hetchy Valley within Yosemite National Park. In the decades that followed, an outpouring of activism shaped the ensuing conflict between economic development and environmental protection, and fueled a preservationist spirit in the Bay Area that would only grow over the next century.

Tides of conservation

After World War II, California experienced another development boom, especially throughout the Bay Area. With population rising by the millions and space at a premium, developers targeted the 1,600 square miles of the bay itself, proposing a host of fill projects that would turn its waters into habitable land. In response, activists inundated city council meetings and demanded that local officials protect the region’s famed waterfront from such development schemes. Activists rallied under the banner of the Save San Francisco Bay Association. By 1965, the association’s advocacy led to the creation of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, or BCDC, a new state agency charged with regulating all development on the bay. The creation of BCDC marked two important steps in the evolution of Bay Area environmentalism. First, it gave environmental considerations a permanent place in state government.  Second, the agency aimed to strike a balance between economic development and environmental conservation, as reflected in its name. Ultimately, BCDC would establish the blueprint for other regulatory agencies, such as the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, the Delta Stewardship Council, and the California Coastal Commission.

Environmental justice for all

By the late 20th century, some decisions about development and environmental protection became embedded in government bodies, but not all Bay Area communities experienced equal protection. Across the nation, communities of color had long confronted environmental racism—the disproportionate burden of environmental hazard and harm placed on underrepresented communities from toxic waste and industrial pollution in their neighborhoods. In the Bay Area, the city of Richmond proved a case in point. Home to the Chevron oil refinery and a host of other industries, neighborhoods in Richmond experienced higher levels of pollution and toxins, habitat destruction, lower qualities of natural resources and environmental amenities, and exploitative dumping. Yet again, residents organized to demand change for their communities, this time for environmental justice—the equal treatment and meaningful involvement of all people in environmental decision-making. By the close of the 20th century, citizen activists from Richmond and other Bay Area communities played an important role in placing people—not just landscapes—within the environmental agenda. Their ongoing efforts, from shutting down toxic incinerators to ensuring a community voice in decision-making, have reshaped public policies to include the principles of environmental justice at federal, state, and local levels.

Immersive experience

Podcasts can be accessed through smartphones during the exhibit, as well as after, so for those with more time, headphones are recommended.

The Voices for the Environment exhibit provides a unique immersive audio experience. This audio is available in two formats: audio spotlights within the gallery and podcasts that are accessible within and outside the gallery through a smartphone. Each section of the exhibition features audio spotlights from oral histories as an integral part of the exhibit. For those with more time and a smartphone, three podcast episodes explore each theme in more depth, guiding guests through the history displayed in the exhibit (headphones are recommended). 

The in-depth podcast episodes are available on SoundCloud and accessible at any time. Written versions of the audio are provided for the deaf and hard of hearing, and can also serve as a valuable research tool for students and scholars.

Educational resources

We have created resources for K-16 educators to complement the exhibit. These resources include the following:

• Exhibit workbook presents environmental history and oral history concepts and poses historical questions based on the exhibit. The questions are designed to be able to be addressed by students in various grade levels. The Bancroft Gallery welcomes school groups! If you’d like to bring your students, please contact bancroft-library.berkeley.edu or call The Bancroft Library administration office at 510-642-3781.
• Podcasts about each section of the exhibit, which delve more deeply into each theme, along with written versions.
• Online exhibit: After the closing of the exhibit in November 2024, we will have an online version available for use in classrooms. 

Credits

Curators:
Todd Holmes, Oral History Center
Roger Eardley-Pryor, Oral History Center

Designer:
Gordon Chun, Gordon Chun Designs

Podcast narrator:
Sasha Khokha, KQED San Francisco

Your support makes our work possible

Your support enables us to capture and preserve a wide range of perspectives on the world’s most pressing issues. While we receive modest institutional support, we are a predominantly self-funded research unit of The Bancroft Library. We must raise the funds to cover the cost of each oral history, as well as our educational resources; interpretive materials, such as our podcasts; and exhibits like this one. Learn more about us and donate here.