Oral history is a particularly useful way to capture ordinary people's lived experiences. This innovative book introduces the full array of oral history research methods and invites students and qualitative researchers to try them out in their own work. Using choreography as an organizing metaphor, the author presents creative strategies for collecting, representing, analyzing, and interpreting oral history data. Instructive exercises and activities help readers develop specific skills, such as nonparticipant observation, interviewing, and writing, with a special section on creating found data poems from interview transcripts. Also covered are uses of journals, court transcripts, and other documents; Internet resources, such as social networking sites; and photography and video. Emphasizing a social justice perspective, the book includes excerpts of oral histories from 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, among other detailed case examples.

Valerie J. Janesick, PhD, is Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of South Florida, Tampa, where she teaches classes in qualitative research methods, curriculum theory and inquiry, foundations of curriculum, ethics, and educational leadership. Her text Stretching Exercises for Qualitative Researchers includes ways to integrate the arts in qualitative research projects. Dr. Janesick’s writings have been published in Curriculum Inquiry, Qualitative Inquiry, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, and other major journals. Her chapters in the first and second editions of Handbook of Qualitative Research use dance and the arts as a metaphor for understanding research, and her chapter in Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Inquiry: Perspectives, Methodologies, Examples, and Issues addresses John Dewey and the arts and education. She is completing oral history interviews of female school superintendents as part of a larger project on women leaders and is currently taking classes in yoga and meditation. Her most prized possession is her British Library Reader’s Card, in particular for her work on an archival project on John Dewey’s letters to international educators and their subsequent influence.