Partners & Projects

Oral History in Castlemilk

Our grassroots, place-based Oral History project in Castlemilk has been run in partnership with Cassiltoun Housing Association, an anchor organisation in the community who provided us with a venue to facilitate six fortnightly sessions.

Members of a local creative writing group were first approached, while additional community members were recommended by Cassiltoun’s Community Team, comprising an initial cohort of eleven people. Attendee retention was good, with nine of the eleven group members staying the course.

None of the group had grown up with technology and they were a mixed group of adults with a range of ages. They were not especially confident smartphone users. While many had previously received training via Cassiltoun on the legalities and process of oral history recording, they were yet to put that into practice, therefore our engagement sought to address the next step: gleaning the technical skills to make and share recordings.

In years past, these recordings needed specialised equipment and training. Now, the power to do this can be in people’s pockets, and so for many (though by no means all) the access itself is democratised. But the knowledge that’s required to accompany the technology can be more scarce.

The first sessions were focused on making recordings in-class to gain familiarity with the basic functions of starting and stopping recordings, then listening back to them as a group. Throughout, learners were grouped in pairs or threes to peer-support and co-learn, with the aim that the group can become more self-sufficient as their confidence grows.

Basic editing followed, including ‘topping and tailing’ to remove dead air at the start and end of a recording – we first did this by asking participants to slowly count from one to ten and then editing their sound file to run from two to nine, a simple and clear demonstration of how this might work in practice. Further fun was had as words from within a recording were cut out to radically alter the meaning, eliciting an unprompted discussion on media literacy and manipulation.

However, at first glance, using a phone as a recorder is a somewhat limited task. The standard recording apps (as found, for example, on Apple or Samsung devices) have a record button and a stop button, accompanied by a scrolling list of previous recordings and a few options for editing.

Nonetheless, they contain a whole suite of accompanying transferable skills, from sharing and sending to naming, renaming, storing and shifting files.

One example is the share button. Participants used this to send their recordings to a WhatsApp group and also by email, but in our sessions we could build on this to demonstrate that the share button is seeded throughout their phones. So, in one direction, they could share from their recording app to other destinations like Facebook, and conversely, they could see that share button in other contexts such as finding a clip on YouTube and sending it to the WhatsApp group. Using the share function is the same core skill, regardless of the app it’s in, and by showing an initial use case we could demystify it and start to build its use elsewhere.

Similarly, file management skills such as renaming, storing or finding recordings are replicable in other apps and contexts, much as common navigation tools like the back arrow, home button and the three-dot ‘hamburger’ menu could be seen throughout attendees’ devices in a range of use cases. Moreover, terms such as cut, copy, paste and edit could be demonstrated in practice with a view to using them in other contexts.

Group feedback was enthusiastic and generous, with participants emphasising the fun as well as the joy of reminiscence. Confidence grew and transferable skills such as the share button became genuinely useful options for them.

Looking forward to how this experience can lead on to other things, the ideal would have been that the group members asked for further digital skills on the back of their experience – and that’s exactly what happened. As their skill set and confidence grew, they saw the potential that their phones might have for them and requested extra sessions on matters like managing calls and contacts, and navigating between apps and menus, the kind of essential smartphone skills that will relate to many aspects of the UK Digital Skills Framework which the oral history project hadn’t covered.

As a prototype for how oral history can facilitate durable digital inclusion work, this project was therefore a genuine success story, leading to self-directed requests for additional learning, broadening the scope and filling out the attendees’ capacity in the digital world.

Alongside that, the group expressed a clear wish for oral history in Castlemilk to continue. While this is in part a measure of the laughter and warmth felt in the room, that same laughter and warmth has been facilitated by a democratised access to digital tools and the knowledge – a fine example of the ways in which digital inclusion is social inclusion.