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It has been 50 years since the publication of Studs Terkel’s groundbreaking book, Working, which consists of a compilation of interviews carried out with over 130 workers in the United States. In this chapter, the author revisits this masterpiece, which offers a penetrating analysis of the dehumanization and degradation of work. The author argues that Working is an ode to, and guide for, ethnographic scholarship on work and that it remains as powerful and relevant today as when it was originally published a half of a century ago.

General and Historical Works, Nevins, Allan. The Gateway to History. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1963.

The full ‘storytelling’ paper was written in 1978 and was influential in its time. It is reprinted here, introduced by an Author's reflection on it in 2014. The chapter describes the author’s early disenchantment with traditional approaches to educational research.

He regards educational research as, at best, a misnomer, since little of it is preceded by a search. Entitled educational researchers often fancy themselves as scientists at work. But those whom they attempt to describe are often artists at work. Statistical methodologies enable educational researchers to measure something, but their measurements can neither capture nor explain splendid teaching.

Since such a tiny fraction of what is published in educational research journals influences school practitioners, professional researchers should risk trying alternative approaches to uncovering what is going on in schools.

Story telling is posited as a possible key to producing insights that inform and ultimately improve educational practice. It advocates openness to broad inquiry into the culture of the educational setting.

Film provides an alternative medium for assessing our interpretations of cultural icons. This selective list looks at the film and video sources for information on and interpretations of the life of Woody Guthrie.

The author argues that we must stop and take a look at what our insistence on human labour as the basis of our society is doing to us, and begin to search for possible alternatives. We need the vision and the courage to aim for the highest level of technology attainable for the widest possible use in both industry and services. We need financial arrangements that will encourage people to invent themselves out of work. Our goal, the article argues, must be the reduction of human labour to the greatest extent possible, to free people for more enjoyable, creative, human activities.

Purpose: This chapter proposes narrative allyship across ability as a practice in which nondisabled researchers work with disabled nonresearchers to co-construct a process that centers and acts on the knowledge contained in and expressed by the lived experience of the disabled nonresearchers. This chapter situates narrative allyship across ability in the landscape of other participatory research practices, with a particular focus on oral history as a social justice praxis.

Approach: In order to explore the potential of this practice, the author outlines and reflects on both the methodology of her oral history graduate thesis work, a narrative project with self-advocates with Down syndrome, and includes and analyzes reflections about narrative allyship from a self-advocate with Down syndrome.

Findings: The author proposes three guiding principles for research as narrative allyship across ability, namely that such research further the interests of narrators as the narrators define them, optimize the autonomy of narrators, and tell stories with, instead of about, narrators.

Implications: This chapter suggests the promise of research praxis as a form of allyship: redressing inequality by addressing power, acknowledging expertise in subjugated knowledges, and connecting research practices to desires for social change or political outcomes. The author models methods by which others might include in their research narrative work across ability and demonstrates the particular value of knowledge produced when researchers attend to the lived expertise of those with disabilities. The practice of narrative allyship across ability has the potential to bring a wide range of experiences and modes of expression into the domains of research, history, policy, and culture that would otherwise exclude them.

I want to revisit also some of the ideas that linked memory and subjectivity that were popularised in the 1970s and 1980s response to limitations of the positivist tradition. I am concerned also with the relationship between the present and the past as it gets expressed in memory work to interrogate more fully not only ‘what happened’, but also how events come to be remembered in the ways that they are, and how they come to be understood as history. These ideas will be developed by drawing on some of what I consider to be key studies that use oral history, some directly related to education, some not. I will finish with voices that are not my own. These will be the voices of participants in an oral history project with which I have been involved. They will demonstrate in a more meaningful way, the ideas presented here and how a coming together of the fields of oral history and memory studies can enrich the understandings we have of experience in the history of education.