Sofia Bach, the program assistant at GCS and Claudia Dueck, the project assistant at GCS until November 2022, have spent the last year carefully curating a digital collection of four oral history interviews with four German women who migrated to Canada in the early 1950s sourced from Dr. Freund’s Master’s research. With funds from the Inclusion and Diversity Grant from the Waterloo Centre of German Studies and German-Canadian Studies, they were able to cover the costs of the website, of two translators and one illustrator (who created beautiful GIFs of the four women as the one included here).
This new resource is available in English, French and German and includes edited interview transcripts, full unedited audio recordings (in their original language) and short biographies of the four women. The aim of this digital collection is to encourage the use of Oral History accounts (both the recorded audio files and transcriptions) within multiple educational fields, including History, Translation Studies, and other areas of the Humanities. The website includes three lesson plans using passages from the interviews to teach about broader historical themes through the Historical Thinking methodology. Women’s roles and perspectives in history have traditionally been underrepresented. By creating this web-collection, GCS provides a resource for high school and university students, educators, and the interested general public, in Canada and abroad, to bridge the space between history as taught in the traditional course books and a history inclusive of migrant and working-class women’s experiences as reflected through the oral histories of German women in Canada.
We would like to thank the amazing team who has helped us bring this project to fruition: Dr. Alexander Freund for letting us use his archived interviews, allowing us to use our work-time for this project, and providing counsel throughout the process; Dr. James Skidmore and the members of the Waterloo Centre for German Studies for trusting us and offering us the Inclusion and Diversity Grant; The University of Winnipeg for granting us the Knowledge Mobilization Grant to share this project with the community; Amine Gundogdu for her great work translating the materials into German; Caroline Best for her assiduous and detail-oriented work as the English to French translator; Alexe Normandin for her beautiful GIF illustrations; Angela Carlson for her help with the administrative tasks and for her talent in dealing with communications; Dr. Kristin Lovrien-Meuwese for helping us come up with the title and her support throughout the process; and last but not least, the Oral History Centre for guiding us in the correct ways to use and share these interviews.
GCS launched the website on May 1st, 2023 and you can now explore this new resource on German-Canadians at this URL: www.whattheycanteachus.ca
German-Canadian Studies 