Involving Students in Collecting Oral Herstories: An Italian Economic Exercise

This article examines the use of oral history, and of the collection of herstories in particular, as a teaching tool in university economics courses. Economics is commonly taught in a way that strips theoretical models of their historical and social context, and its archives systematically under-record the contributions of women. Against this background, we describe two teaching experiments carried out at our university: an exercise in which first-year undergraduates interview a living feminist economist and produce a blog post and a video podcast, and a Master’s-level activity in which students co-created a series of oral herstory podcasts with academics and media professionals within a research project on the economic thought of Italian women. We set out how each stage of the two exercises is designed to activate the dimensions of Fink’s Significant Learning, what the resulting student outputs document, and what they do not. We compare the two models along the student-created / co-created axis and argue that the choice between them follows from the balance between a pedagogical and a documentary aim.