Educational Partnership Profile: Middlebury College’s Dr. Amy Morsman’s “Chronicling COVID-19” Project
Educational Partnership Profile:
Middlebury College’s Dr. Amy Morsman’s “Chronicling COVID-19” Project
In early winter 2021, Professor Amy Morsman reached out to the VFC Education Department with an invitation to become involved with her 2022 Winter Term course “Chronicling COVID-19: Capturing the Pandemic Experience in Vermont.” The course provided students the opportunity to study COVID in a historical context, considering it in relation to other community crises in Vermont’s history. Students also had opportunities to measure and chronicle the impact of the pandemic by engaging in oral history interviews with local residents. As they explain further down, they found this element of the coursework very rewarding, because of the human connections they were able to make and the insights they gained from a variety of Vermonters about living through such an unusual experience.
Students’ work published in local paper
Local paper, the Addison County Independent, profiled the Chronicling COVID-19 project in this article and also published three articles based on several of the interviews students conducted during the course:
VFC INVOLVEMENT
In January 2022, VFC education staff member Mary Wesley made two (virtual) visits to Amy’s class.
During her first visit, Mary made a presentation to the class, covering:
The mission and history of the Folklife Center
Collaborative ethnography as a methodological framing to approach the practice of interviewing or oral history
A review of VFC research and projects that have emerged as a response to public health emergencies
Ahead of Visit 1, students were asked to listen to several episodes of the VFC’s podcast VT Untapped, which presented VFC’s community-based documentation of Tropical Storm Irene and the covid-19 pandemic:
In the second visit, Mary facilitated a virtual story circle with the class with two goals in mind: first, to demonstrate an approach to documenting a collective experience; and second, to provide space for students to share and record their own perspectives of the impact of the pandemic in their lives. This recording will be added to the VFC Archive’s collections documenting covid-19 experience in Vermont.
Amy’s plans to examine the collective impact of recent and historic crises in Vermont aligned well with the VFC's mission of deepening our understanding of each other by engaging with communities across Vermont to document and share expressions of culture and collective memory.
This project exposed students to archival records produced in the aftermath of historic crises in Vermont in tandem with hands-on experience of creating new documentation with present day Vermont residents. Doing so through an ethnographic approach to oral history provided students with a broad view of the processes through which VFC staff strive to carry out our mission as a cultural research organization. Furthermore, by making their own contributions to the historic record through participation in a story circle facilitated by VFC staff, students had the opportunity to reflect upon their own subjectivity in the research process, an essential component of the ethnographic methods we teach. The students found the story circle to be a deeply rewarding experience.
AMY’S PERSPECTIVE
In the spring of 2021, it was time for me to think up a course that I would teach in Winter Term 2022. With COVID ever-present in my mind, I could not ignore it as a subject for study, and I thought it would be meaningful and fun(!) for my students and I to roll up our sleeves and do research on real people’s experiences with this historic community crisis. As I proposed a course on “Chronicling COVID,” I naively hoped that, by January 2022, we would be looking at COVID through the rearview mirror, not still dealing with it head-on with the Omicron wave surging. Of course, my students and I–as well as Mary–rolled with the disruptions that COVID created for us in our class discussions and in our outreach to the larger community.
Overall, the course was a great success, and the most meaningful elements of it, by far, were the collaborations with the VFC and the interviews that Mary emboldened my students to conduct on their own. It was tremendously useful for me and my students to be able to ground ourselves in the ethnographic work of the VFC. The podcasts available on the VFC website about Tropical Storm Irene as well as the early recordings of reactions to the COVID shutdown were valuable for the students to listen to in advance of working with Mary. Then she, as a visitor to our class, built upon that foundation to inform the students about ethnographic research and best practices for conducting oral history interviews. In hosting a story circle for our class, where she prompted us all to remember our own pandemic experiences, Mary modeled for the students how to ask just a few simple, broad questions and then listen and respectfully hold space for the stories the interviewees are willing to share. After the story circle, my students commented that they felt grateful for having the chance to learn about each other’s pandemic drama. Though the students were all roughly the same age, their perspectives were quite different, and they were impressed and moved by what they learned about their peers’ journey through the pandemic.
Their exposure to the story circle and the wisdom Mary shared with them also helped the students feel prepared to embark on conducting their own interviews with members of the local community whom they were just meeting in January. Here is where they really learned by doing. The nervousness they felt at the beginning of their Zoom interviews gave way to a sense of warmth and ease in talking with locals who were willing to share the details of their own personal pandemic saga. A real sense of connection came through, leaving the students feeling a deep sense of gratitude to their interviewees. They noted their interviewees’ investment of time and their willingness to have their conversations preserved. The students really felt that they had been a part of something substantive in preserving pieces of the past and making it possible for those pieces to be accessible for the future enjoyment and enrichment of others through the Folklife Center’s digital archives.
This course was developed and executed at a particularly unusual time. Will it feel right to teach it again during some other Winter Term down the line? Right now, it feels as if this was a special experience that should stand alone in 2022. Hopefully, with the nation approaching endemic conditions, COVID will fade from our everyday lives, and there won’t be a need to chronicle it as we have done here. Though my future Winter Term courses may focus on other topics, they may well involve the wonderful connections forged here with the VFC. Thank you, Mary!
STUDENT REFLECTIONS
Students had very positive reports about their engagement with the VFC and the supportive interview practices that Mary modeled for them. Being able to experience what it felt like to be both an interviewee (in the class Story Circle) and an interviewer (in the interviews they arranged with community members) was revealing and meaningful for them. Here are some of their thoughts shared in end-of-term reflections:
“This project has taught me a great deal! Not only was I able to interview and speak with someone who gave me an amazing story and outlook of her COVID experience, but I was able to interact and learn things about my classmates.”
“Through this project and other exercises in class, I feel as though I am finally able to write in a voice that is my own. Not only does this satisfy me, but the knowledge that I have created a product that will be stored as part of a historical collection is an extremely valuable experience to me. Having helped an individual share and record her story thereby assuring her that she has left a mark on this world is an incredibly rewarding accomplishment.”
“I really enjoyed this project because of how much I learned about how Covid impacted small business owners in Middlebury….The stories I heard in my interviews made it clear how Middlebury’s community is truly special because neighbors go out of their way to help each other....Moving forward from these interviews, I will remember to be grateful for where I go to college as it is filled with special people that are consistently looking out for the greater good of the town. Additionally, I will always be appreciative of this opportunity to hear such unique perspectives from the pandemic and the raw emotion during our conversations.”
“I used to be afraid to speak with new people, especially those who are much older and have more experience than me. However, my perspective on these interactions has completely shifted. I now see interviews and meetings as learning experiences and places where I can share my own thoughts and perspectives as well.”
Thanks to all who made this partnership possible!