My name is Jess Batychenko, and in the spring of 2022, I completed an immersive fellowship with Rivers of Steel, a local non-profit with a goal of preserving and sharing the industrial history of Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania. As a 5th year PhD candidate in the English department, this experience was beneficial to both my experience as a scholar and a member of the Pittsburgh community. My academic research focuses on everyday literacies that center student’s lived realities and teaching practices that get students invested in collective action or community building over individualized achievement. I have a particular interest in how oral history and community engagement can be used as a pedagogical tool for teaching across different educational settings, and my Humanities Engage Pitch Your Own Immersive Fellowship with Rivers of Steel this spring has supported bringing that work into practice.
Through my work with Rivers of Steel, I learned to collect orals histories and began working with a local high school teacher to bring oral history education into high school history classrooms. Though I have worked with oral history in the archive, this fellowship moved my academic experience beyond the archives and theory and into practice as I learned to conduct and transcribe interviews and developed resources and lessons for high school classrooms. As is our new normal, the January and February COVID spike resulted in a late start to my fellowship as Rivers of Steel temporarily moved into virtual work mode. However, in March, I hit the ground running and began learning to conduct oral histories – everything from tech to interviewing techniques to transcribing and archiving – under the guidance of Rivers of Steel’s historical director. In the midst of an ongoing pandemic, this experience brought the value of community and human interaction to the fore and highlighted the importance of learning to listen and learn from each other.
After learning to conduct oral histories and refining my own skills, I began working with a local high school teacher to create resources to teach high school history students about the value of oral history and how to conduct interviews. In several sessions, the teacher and myself moved the students through listening to and analyzing oral histories and a “how to” session on interviewing techniques and conducting oral histories, all of which culminated in the students collecting an oral history of their own and sharing it with their classmates. As someone whose teaching experience is primarily in a university classroom, I learned to be flexible and responsive as I worked with the students and their teacher to adjust and modify classroom materials and content to fit the needs of eleventh grade high school students – all while being pleasantly reminded of the wonderful energy high schoolers bring into a classroom. Seeing students learn to articulate the value of the knowledges present in their own communities also validated my own investment in the value of oral history as a pedagogical resource.
Because of this opportunity to work with Rivers of Steel, my involvement with them has extended to include a larger initiative that will move beyond a few oral history sessions over the course of a couple weeks to a larger project that seeks to build a community oral history project into the social studies curriculum. This is work that will be integral to my own understand and development as a teacher invested in community-based learning and literacies. Moving through non-profit and community spaces, I am able to see first-hand the value this type of teaching and research has on students in lived education spaces, particularly spaces outside of the university. As I enter the final years of my PhD program, the practice-based nature of this research will help provide the momentum and motivation to continue this work while also providing an opportunity to collaborate and make connections with non-profits and local high schools around Pittsburgh. My work (previous and ongoing) with Rivers of Steel will help me to hone organization and communication skills that will make me marketable in a variety of different workplaces as well as develop expertise teaching at different levels and in different academic subjects and cultural contexts.
My suggestion for maximizing your immersive experience is to use the fellowship as an opportunity to reach out and talk to as many people as you can. My initial contact with Rivers of Steel was limited to me asking to conduct a few oral histories for their organization, only to have my initial contact person suggest a number of other folks I should reach out to. While even just learning to conduct oral histories would have been a great immersive experience, I discovered that Rivers of Steel’s education coordinator, other local non-profits, and local teachers had similar investments in oral history as a pedagogical tool. I am immensely grateful to Rivers of Steel’s staff for their willingness to take me on as a fellow and support my work with them. As plans from my fellowship spiraled (in a good way) beyond the original expectations and requirements of the fellowship, I found myself in community with archivists and educators with similar aspirations and investments in oral history and student-centered education.
Learn about all the Pitch Your Own Immersive Fellows and their experiences with their host organizations.