The Oral History program at UBC, housed within the Department of History at UBC, infuses oral history practice into UBC classes. The class HIST 400, “The Practice of Oral History,” was first taught in W2023, and teaches Oral History theory and practice, with careful attention to ethical concerns. The class grew out of the earlier Punjabi Heritage Oral History project, which was designed to engage students of Punjabi and Punjabi Canadian history at UBC in the collection of oral histories within the Punjabi Canadian community of greater Vancouver. The goal of these pedagogical projects is to allow students to explore the power of Oral History to document and understand the past in a manner that has pedagogical merit for students and broad import for history. That project has continued in multiple forms over the past decade, both inside and outside of classes; for example, the “Punjabi in BC” (2019-2023) and “Caste in Canada” (2020-2023) projects extended the class-based Oral History program into undergraduate student-participant-research projects outside of the class-context. These too are based in the Department of History.

For a more extensive introduction to our oral history program and to learn more about its foundation, click here.