Rethinking historical practice and community engagement: researching together with ‘youth historians’

Abstract

This essay describes a yearlong public history collaboration between graduate students, a faculty member, and local public high school students collectively producing original scholarship on a topic in the history of education. This collaboration occurred in three parts, described chronologically: a planning phase, where the group devised research questions; a research phase, where graduate students, faculty, and high school students co-conducted oral histories; and a dissemination phase, where the group created Omeka exhibits based on oral histories and other secondary research. By focusing on the methodological implications of this type of novel scholar-youth collaboration, this essay argues that there are untapped opportunities and scholarly benefits to researching topics in the history discipline (particularly the history of education) with historically trained, local high school youth. This experimental collaboration is meant to spark dialogue about how to combine the traditions of the history field with important hands-on youth/community work for the purposes of rethinking traditional historical processes.