Alliance Institute on Oral History in the Liberal Arts
Call for Project Proposals for 2023-24
Oral History in the Liberal Arts (OHLA) is an undergraduate-focused research framework for community-engaged teaching and learning using oral history and digital scholarship. OHLA supports digital projects across the Great Lakes Colleges Association and Global Liberal Arts Alliance, curates tutorials and pedagogical resources, and offers training at Antioch College. (Additional information on OHLA and oral history projects.)
The Global Liberal Arts Alliance is soliciting proposals for oral history projects as part of faculty-student research or as an assignment embedded in a Globally Connected Course. The Alliance will provide support to attend the Alliance Institute on Oral History in the Liberal Arts, project support through the 2023-24 academic year, and modest funding for equipment.
Project Support
Projects funded by this Call will engage with OHLA throughout the entire project cycle. OHLA offers the following resources in support of projects:
Alliance OHLA Institute – a five-day workshop will be held at Antioch College from July 26-30, 2023. Faculty leaders of accepted proposals will be invited to attend. Brooke Blackmon Bryan, OHLA Project Director, will facilitate the workshop. The training will introduce best practices for oral history methodology in higher education, tactical strategies for interviewing (and how to teach those strategies), digital tools for exhibit building, and pedagogical frameworks that support community-based research.
OHLA webinars – ongoing project support through the 2023-24 academic year, offered on an as-needed basis through Zoom video-conferences. These continuing education webinars convene faculty working in various stages of their oral history projects to ask questions about tools, methodology, and planning.
OHLA Tutorials – developed by Oral History in the Liberal Arts faculty and students on ‘high impact’ undergraduate research frameworks, tools for digital storytelling, and best practices for oral history in community-engaged teaching and learning.
Digital Exhibit Support – in cases where faculty do not have institutional repositories or platforms for publishing digital scholarship, OHLA will assist funded faculty in their development of searchable digital interview exhibits in the OHLA faculty repository.
Project Requirements
- The project will integrate oral history and digital storytelling into an approved Globally Connected Course OR will involve a faculty-student research project.
- The project must involve students as active participants in the project’s design, execution, and reporting.
- The project must result in a digital exhibit that can be shared via the OHLA/GLAA repository (see http://ohla.info/).
- Participation in the Alliance Institute on Oral History in the Liberal Arts by the project director is a requirement to receive funding.
- Advancing internationalization through cross-institution collaboration is a requirement of funded projects. We do not ask that you find a collaborator prior to submitting a proposal. Instead, we will pair “like” projects from among the accepted proposals with the requirement that the project leaders for each pair meet synchronously and asynchronously to share their work. The sharing should include discussion of your project goals; the group(s) you are working with; the questions you are asking; oral history methodologies and tools you are employing; and what you learned through the interviews and through the experience of designing and executing a project of this type. Additional guidance and a schedule for these paired sharing sessions will be provided once pairings have been made.
Applying
We invite proposals for oral history projects. Selection will be competitive.
To submit a proposal, please complete the Oral History Project Proposal Form and return it to Simon Gray ([email protected]).
Reminder: If your oral history project is an assignment within a Globally Connected Course, please also submit a Global Course Connections proposal and Course Information Table.
Funding
Each project will receive a $1,500 microgrant for project costs including travel and equipment.
Funding for Oral History in the Liberal Arts projects is provided by the Mellon Foundation through a grant to the Great Lakes Colleges Association. We seek applications from institutions across the Alliance. Due to funding constraints, a significant portion of the applications must be from U.S.-based Alliance institutions. Project leads of accepted proposals will be invited to attend an oral history workshop at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio (USA) from July 26-30, 2023. Travel support will include airfare (up to a cap), lodging (student dorm), and most meals. Participants who accept an invitation to the OHLA Institute must commit to attending all five days of the Institute. Those who are incorporating an OHLA project into a Globally Connected Course will be invited to attend the Global Course Connection workshop to be held at Antioch College July 31 – August 3, 2023.
Important Dates
June 3, 2023 – Proposal submission deadline (GLCA faculty only)
April 5, 2023 – Announcement of accepted proposals. Brooke Bryan will have a video conference with funded teams to answer questions prior to the workshop.
July 26-30, 2023 – The Alliance Institute on Oral History in the Liberal Arts (Antioch College)
July 31 – August 3, 2023 – Global Course Connections workshop (Antioch College)
Previous Institutes
Civic Engagement & the Liberal Arts: Local Practice, Global Impact, Kalamazoo College, Michigan, USA, October 2016
Leadership and Liberal Arts: A Foundation for Social Good, FLAME University, Pune, India, June 2018
Transnational Feminisms, The American University of Paris, Paris, France, March 2020