Dutch voices: exploring the role of oral history in Dutch secondary history teaching

Oral history may enhance students’ historical content knowledge, historical reasoning competencies, and motivation to learn history. However, little is known regarding the role of oral history in Dutch history education. This study therefore explores the role of oral history in Dutch history education. We developed student and teacher questionnaires to examine secondary school students’ views (n= 280) and history teachers’ views (n=40) on the role of oral history in Dutch history education. In addition, we conducted interviews with three educational experts on the role of oral history in Dutch history education. The results showed that most students, teachers and experts believe that working with oral history is interesting, motivating, and may contribute to significant insights into the past. However, our results indicate that oral history plays only a marginal role in the teaching and learning of history in the Netherlands. Our study may be used by history teachers to implement oral history in their curricula and help teachers develop meaningful oral history tasks