Life Story of a Teacher in Socialist Czechoslovakia. At an Intersection of Oral History, Life History and Traditional History Sources
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| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The first results of our project called “Everyday life of basic schools in the normalization period as seen by teachers. Applying oral history to research in history of contemporary education” (supported by the Czech Science Foundation, grant no. 14-05926S) were presented at the Vienna conference in 2014. We focused on project methodology and our preliminary results (from the first oral-history interviews). We discussed the opinion of some authors that studying biographies and life stories is many a time nearly the only possibility to identify important characteristics of former communist societies including their formal education through empirical research. Our research so far has confirmed that this is really so because the availability of archival written sources is very limited, due to both the legal environment and the archival collections waiting to be processed. Our research is based on the oral history method but it is proving increasingly fruitful to combine oral history with life history, specifically researching life stories of teachers. We are drawing on Czech research as well as works by I. Goodson (2012; 2014) focusing on the teacher, their professional life and theorizing the role of narrative theory. |
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