High School Students Chronicle the History of At-Risk Coastal Communities

The Louisiana Sea Grant Coastal Change Oral History Project is launching with the new school year. The project objective is to collect oral histories from people living in at-risk parts of southern Louisiana while simultaneously involving the youth of these communities in their own cultural past.

“High school students will go into the field in groups or pairs to interview the people who have personally experienced the coastal and environmental changes that are threatening to overcome Louisiana,” said Darcy Wilkins, LSG research associate managing the project. “Not only is the land rapidly disappearing, but with every square mile of earth that succumbs to the Gulf, the culture that has thrived in southern Louisiana is swallowed up as well.”

Four schools are involved in the project. Sue Ellen Lyons, Lonn Ellzey and Warren Bernard will lead the Orleans Parish Holy Cross School high school students. David Sneed and Jed Pitre of Thibodaux High School in Lafourche will be heading the project with their students. Vanessa West will lead grade 9-12 students at West St. Mary High School in St. Mary Parish, and Tina Savoie will be the leader of her class of environmental science students at South Cameron High School in Cameron Parish.

“Oral history is a powerful tool of relatability and understanding,” said Wilkins. “Figures and scientific evidence are by and large abstract concepts, so for many people numbers on paper are far removed from reality. The human story, however, is almost universally relatable. Though the figures of South Louisiana’s wetland loss are shocking, and the scientific predictions of where we will and will not be 50 years from now are utterly devastating, those numbers and facts don’t always move people the way fire behind the eyes and conviction of speech can.”

Full audio recordings of each recorded interview will be archived at T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History with LSU Libraries and made available online at the Louisiana Sea Grant website. Students also will share what they’ve learned in creative ways. Their end products could be original songs, portraits, short documentaries, research papers, models, replicas of how things once were, and so forth. “The main product desired from this project is inspiration; to do, act, change and get involved,” Wilkins said.

For teachers and others interested in collecting oral histories, video training and a variety of other pertinent materials are available on Louisiana Sea Grant’s website at www.lamer.lsu.edu/oralhistories/. The videos discuss the technical aspects, as well as nuisances, of conducting an oral history interview.