OHR Conversations: Janice Fernheimer on “Sustainable Stewardship” in the College Classroom

In this OHR Conversations, Janice Fernheimer, co-author of “Sustainable Stewardship: A Collaborative Model for Engaged Oral History Pedagogy, Community Partnership, and Archival Growth,” describes the processes at the heart of her classroom/archive/community partnership at University of Kentucky.

Drawing from the recently published article, “Sustainable Stewardship: A Collaborative Model for Engaged Oral History Pedagogy, Community Partnership, and Archival Growth,” co-authored with University of Kentucky colleagues Doug Boyd, Beth Goldstein, and Sarah Dorpinghaus, Janice Fernheimer shares how she and her partners have developed a collaborative and sustainable model for working with oral history in the college classroom over multiple semesters, in both first-year writing courses and upper level electives.

Listen to a student created podcast, an audio essay written by Fernheimer’s students in WRD 112: Writing Jewish Kentucky in Fall 2017 about the student organization Hillel at the University of Kentucky. 

OHR Conversations is a recurring series of audio and video interviews with the authors of recent Oral History Review articles. 

Listen to audio only.

Janice W. Fernheimer is the Zantker Charitable Foundation Professor and Director of Jewish Studies and Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of  Stepping Into Zion: Hatzaad Harishon, Black, Jews and the Remaking of Jewish Identity (University of Alabama Press 2014) and co-editor along with Michael Bernard-Donals of Jewish Rhetorics: History, Theory, Practice (Brandeis University Press 2014).  Along with her research collaborator Dr. Beth L. Goldstein, she established the Jewish Heritage Fund for Excellence (JHFE) Jewish Kentucky Oral History Project, a repository of 103+ oral histories for Jewish Kentuckians housed at the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History. As part of the model for sustainable stewardship her team developed, more than 50 undergraduates have presented or published research emerging from the Jewish Kentucky Oral History Project. In collaboration with author/illustrator JT Waldman, she is currently authoring an archives and oral-history based transmedia project America’s Chosen Spirit, which includes a webcomic and podcast series that detail the influences of Jews and other minorities on the Kentucky bourbon industry.  

Featured image: Community members and students working together. From left to right: Lowell Nigoff, Garry  Hoover, Allison Gant, Morgan Weilbacher. Courtesy of the co-authors.