Staring Out to Sea and the
Transformative Power of Oral History
for Undergraduate Interviewers
Abigail Perkiss
Abstract: In January 2013, Abigail Perkiss, assistant professor of history at Kean
University in Union, New Jersey, began work with six undergraduate students to
develop an oral history project to document Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath.
For several months, these students worked to set the parameters and scope of
the project, while at the same time studying the work of oral history and preparing themselves to go into the field to recruit participants and conduct interviews.
For a number of these students, themselves impacted by the storm, the project
took them into their own communities to capture the stories of their neighbors
and friends.The students gained new insights into their own agency in the world;
they turned their own feelings of victimization after the storm into a sense of
ownership and control during the recovery process; and they felt empowered as
both historians and as historical actors to effect change in the world around
them. This essay traces the transformative impact of the Staring Out to Sea Oral
History Project on these undergraduates.
Keywords: Hurricane Sandy, natural disaster, project-based learning, transformation, undergraduate education
As Arij Syed concluded his remarks, he and his classmates took a breath and absorbed the sustained round of applause. The six undergraduates from Kean
University had traveled to the National Archives II in College Park, Maryland, to
I would like to thank Kean University, Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region, and the Tuckerton Seaport Museum
for their support of this project; Linda Shopes, Don Ritchie, Stephen Sloan, D’Ann Penner, Jennifer Block-Lerner,
Lindsay Liotta, Christina Cooke, David Caruso, and Kate Scott, for their guidance in developing this course; Dan
Royles and his Digital Humanities students at Stockton College, for adding new depth to this work; and OHR editor
Kathy Nasstrom, for inviting me to write this piece and for her critical and constructive eye in guiding it toward publication. Most importantly, my thanks to Alicia Hill, Trudi-Ann Lawrence, Brittany Le Strange, Mary Piasecki, Abdelfatth
Rasheed, and Arij Syed, for their commitment to this work, and for the transformative impact they have had on me.
doi: 10.1093/ohr/ohw049. Advance Access publication 28 June 2016
The Oral History Review 2016, Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 392–407
C The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oral History Association.
V
All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected]
Staring Out to Sea | 393
present Staring Out to Sea, a community-based oral history project on the relief
and recovery efforts following Hurricane Sandy, on which the students had spent
the previous three months working. At the joint conference of Oral History in
the Mid-Atlantic Region (OHMAR) and the Society for History in the Federal
Government (SHFG) on April 5, 2013, the group offered reflection and analysis
of the process by which they had developed the project and the results they
had found to that point.
As oral historians, we often discuss the potential for oral history to
empower narrators, giving marginalized groups and individuals an opportunity
to feel heard, a chance to make sense of their experiences.1 While the interviewees in Staring Out to Sea certainly experienced those sentiments, this
project also demonstrates the transformative potential of the oral history work
on the interviewers themselves, in this case on a group of six undergraduates
from a regional state university in New Jersey. Doing oral history not only offered these students a way to reframe their own experiences with the most
destructive storm ever to hit the mid-Atlantic coast, it also allowed them to
see themselves as scholars and expand their own professional aspirations and
goals. Staring Out to Sea became a lens through which these six students
reevaluated their postcollegiate plans and reconceived of their place in the
world around them.
An Origins Story
On October 29, 2012, the New Jersey coastline was struck by a devastating
storm. With Hurricane Katrina echoing through the public imagination, residents, business owners, and public officials braced for destruction. Hurricane
Sandy bore down on the state for two days, leaving extensive and long-lasting damage in its wake. Ultimately, Sandy resulted in 147 deaths in the
Caribbean and the United States (12 in the state of New Jersey), tens of
thousands displaced, and, as of 2013, an estimated $71.4 billion in damage
across the country.2
1
For works on oral history and empowerment, see, for example, Steven High, ed., Beyond Testimony and
Trauma: Oral History in the Aftermath of Mass Violence (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015); Daniel
Kerr, Derelict Paradise: Homelessness and Urban Development in Cleveland, Ohio (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 2011); Patricia Robin Herbst, “From Helpless Victim to Empowered Survivor: Oral History
as a Treatment for Survivors of Torture,” Women & Therapy 13 no. 1-2 (1992): 141-154; Michael Frisch, A
Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1990); Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes, Oral History and Public Memories (Philadelphia, PA:
Temple University Press, 2008); Valerie Janesick, “Oral History as a Social Justice Project: Issues for the
Qualitative Researcher,” The Qualitative Report 12, no. 1 (March 2007): 111-121.
2
Eric Blake, et al, “Tropical Storm Report,” National Hurricane Center, February 12, 2013, http://www.nhc.
noaa.gov/data/tcr/AL182012_Sandy.pdf, (accessed May 11, 2016), as cited by Diane Bates’ Superstorm
Sandy: The Inevitable Destruction and Recosntruction of the Jersey Shore (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 2016), 7.
394 | PERKISS
Two months later, I received a phone call from Dr. Katherine Scott, at the
time Assistant Historian, US Senate, and then-secretary of OHMAR. The organization was interested in partnering with a New Jersey oral historian to support
the development of an oral history project to document the storm and its aftermath in the state. A close friend from graduate school, Scott had thought of me
and wondered whether I might know of anyone who was interested in pursuing
such a project. As it happens, I said, I would welcome the chance to do it myself.
Although I had substantial experience and training in interviewing and had used
oral history methods in my own research, I had never directed a large-scale project myself. The prospect of doing so on such a timely and important topic and
with the support and guidance of OHMAR sounded like the perfect entry.
As an assistant professor at Kean University, a regional state school in
northeastern New Jersey, I knew that resources for such an undertaking would
be limited. And, with a heavy teaching load and substantial service responsibilities, not to mention a four-hour round-trip commute up and down the Jersey
Turnpike from Philadelphia, I wondered how I would be able to conduct such
time-sensitive interviews efficiently. Following a conversation with my department chair and a number of e-mail exchanges with my dean and provost, however, it was settled: I would develop the project in the classroom. We would use
the existing Public History II course and turn it into a special topics class on advanced oral history methods. Although we were in the midst of finals and students had already confirmed their class schedules for the following semester, we
sent e-mails advertising the class, and by late January when the new semester
began, there were six undergraduates registered.
In the intervening weeks, I connected with a number of longtime oral
historians—Linda Shopes, Don Ritchie, Stephen Sloan, and D’Ann Penner—who
offered guidance on how to develop such a project. We spoke about the timesensitive nature of the research, the need for clarity in the goals and objectives
of the work, and the importance of creating a longitudinal framework in order
to chart the relief and recovery efforts of the storm beyond the immediate crisis.
The willingness of these scholars to provide counsel was instrumental to my own
development as an oral historian, and it was critical to the success of the student
researchers.
The Students
When I showed up on the first day of class that January, I encountered a group
of students who were eager to begin developing an oral history project about an
issue still rapidly unfolding, both around them and within their own lives. Some
of the students had experienced only minor damage to their homes; for others,
however, the storm had wreaked havoc on their families and communities, and
they were still in the early stages of rebuilding. This was true not only for the
Staring Out to Sea | 395
students in the class, but for Kean University more broadly. Kean University is
home to a diverse student body and a significant commuter population. As of
2012, 67 percent of Kean students were first-generation college students and,
according to 2014 data, 51.6 percent were racial and ethnic minorities.3 Those
enrolled at Kean balance heavy course loads with substantial out-of-class work
and family responsibilities. For many, the storm threw that precarious stability
into upheaval.
The school, located in Union, New Jersey, just fifteen miles from New York
City, experienced significant damage in the aftermath of Sandy. On campus, the
infrastructure of the university’s electrical system was compromised, resulting in
all students being sent home and the school shutting down for ten days. More
significantly, members of the Kean community, which reaches across the state
east to west (and, to a lesser extent, north to south), suffered significant destruction to their homes and communities. Students experienced lengthy power
outages, substantial property damage, and the inability to travel to campus
(once operations did resume) because of statewide gas shortages. This was the
reality that some of my students had been living with during the previous three
months, and the reality that we would have to make sense of in the months to
come.
During our first class session, we sat in a circle and recounted our own experiences with Sandy. I told the group of the ten-hour power outage in my
Philadelphia neighborhood, followed by nearly two weeks of sitting in a local
Barnes and Nobles café, working on revisions of a forthcoming book manuscript
and feeling guilty that my students were struggling to stabilize their lives. Four
of the students in the class spoke of downed power lines and uprooted trees, of
brief disruptions in service, of a storm that passed through and left few lingering
effects. For two students, however, Sandy had brought terror to their homes
and families. Living in New Jersey’s Bayshore community, directly across the
Sandy Hook Bay from New York’s Staten Island, Brittany Le Strange and Mary
Piasecki had seen their streets flood, their houses fill with water, and many of
their possessions destroyed. Le Strange cried as she recounted sitting on the
stairs in her home and watching the water levels rise through the first floor of
the house.
It was at that moment that I began to understand the transformative potential of this project. This work would reach far beyond a pedagogical exercise
for these students. It would be an opportunity for them to give voice to their
own experiences and the experiences of their friends and neighbors as they
recalibrated their lives.
3
“Kean University,” Kean Autism Research and Education Center, accessed March 5, 2014: http://www.
kean.edu/kare/about_us.htm; “Kean University Institutional Profile,” Kean University, 2015, last accessed May
24, 2016: http://ir.kean.edu/irhome/PDF/EXACCT15.pdf.
396 | PERKISS
The Project
During the first several weeks of the semester, we read about the history of oral
history and disaster. Through the work of Studs Terkel, Mary Marshall Clark, and
Stephen Sloan, the students began to get a sense of the challenges that come
with conducting interviews in the midst of catastrophe. We talked at length
about what narrators could teach us about disaster response, the recovery process, and the relationships between government and communities. We discussed
how we would reach people who had been displaced by the storm and how we
could responsibly bring them back into their experiences of Sandy without subjecting them to further trauma.
By late February, after lengthy conversations about the stories we hoped to
capture and the tone we sought to evoke with the project, we had arrived at
the project title—Staring Out to Sea—and we determined that we wanted to
focus the project around questions of power, access, and representation in the
wake of the storm. How do we respond to such devastation? What is the role of
government in providing relief? What is the role of civil society? Of individuals?
How do issues of race and socioeconomic status impact recovery efforts? Whose
voices matter? Who feels heard?
After studying maps of New Jersey, we decided that the Bayshore—the
area where Le Strange and Piasecki had themselves watched their homes fill
with water—would give us the best access to answering these questions.
Keansburg, Union Beach, and Port Monmouth, three contiguous neighborhoods
along the Sandy Hook Bay, offer substantial demographic diversity, giving us a
unique opportunity to consider issues of power, access, and justice in the wake
of the storm. The diversity among and within them, we decided, would allow us
to consider the impact of social difference on both immediate relief and cleanup
and longer-term rebuilding, and on the ways in which those affected by the
storm perceived such efforts.
We also wanted to put the story of Sandy in conversation with other disaster relief efforts in the United States. Like 9/11 and Katrina before it, Sandy required local, state, and federal resources for both immediate and long-term
rehabilitation. How could our findings contribute to a growing body of literature
on twenty-first-century disaster testimonies, during a time of rapidly evolving
governmental systems and procedures, a new global age of terror, and the increasing ferocity of storms? What could we learn from the response to Sandy?
How could we use Sandy as a model for disaster relief in the future? It was a
lofty undertaking for six New Jersey undergraduates.
And so we set to work. We developed themes and questions. We worked
on narrator recruitment, relying heavily on the local knowledge of Le Strange
and Piasecki to build a list of interviewees. As a group, the students made presentations at community meetings and used the process of snowball sampling to
Staring Out to Sea | 397
expand the network and foster relationships with subjects. We brought in experts on the Institutional Review Board (IRB) process, interviewing, and fieldwork, and, for one particularly powerful session, oral history and trauma. Kean
associate professor of psychology Dr. Jennifer Lerner and doctoral student
Lindsay Liotta discussed the risks of trauma in postdisaster situations, the distinctions between counseling and oral history, and the need to recognize the impact of trauma on both interviewee and interviewer.4 At the same time, the
students practiced their interview skills, pairing off and recording interviews with
each other, which we then analyzed collectively in class.
Throughout the entire process, students were assigned the task of blogging
about their experience of developing the project.5 The blog was meant to offer
them a space for reflection about both the process of learning oral history and
their experiences with the project. The students were required to post at least
three times during the semester, in order both to chronicle and capture their individual and collective experiences and, because the blog was open to public
readership, in order for the students to develop a consciousness surrounding
digital literacy about the public function of the project. The blog was conceived
ultimately to become a part of the permanent Staring Out to Sea website, which
would include a special section on pedagogy and process. Although we routinely
discussed the work we were undertaking in class, the blog also became a space
for me to gain insights into the way they were experiencing the class, the work
they were doing, and their relationship with the storm.
As Arij Syed later wrote of the process:
A certain level of responsibility comes along with the task of documenting
history. To ensure the validity of this documentation, it is important to follow standards that maintain credibility. Working with actual real people
adds another level responsibility. When you relive events, especially traumatic events, you also relive how you felt at that time. This brings forth
the question, how do you ethically deal with emotional people? Our task
as oral historians is to most accurately capture an event in history through
transcribing interviews with people who lived through the event. Strong
emotional reactions however can change how someone may retell that
event. . . . Our project especially has to focus on this as Hurricane Sandy
4
For works on oral history and trauma, see, for example, Stephen Sloan, “Oral History and Hurricane Katrina:
Reflections on Shouts and Silences, Oral History Review 35, no. 2 (2008): 176-86; Mary Marshall Clark, “Case
Study: Field Notes on Catastrophe: Reflections on the September 11, 2001, Oral History Memory and Narrative
Project,” in Donald Ritchie, ed., Oxford Handbook of Oral History (2010), 255-64; Caitlin Tyler Richards, “Oral
History in Disaster Zones,” Oxford University Press Blog, December 14, 2012, http://blog.oup.com/2012/12/
oral-history-in-disaster-zones/; Mark Cave and Stephen Sloan, eds., Listening on the Edge: Oral History in the
Aftermath of Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
5
The project website is http://www.staringouttosea.com. Student reflections on the course and the process
of developing the project are available there.
398 | PERKISS
victims have [been] through severe trauma. It has been a truly enlightening experience learning how to balance creating an accurate primary historical source, while at the same time doing justice to the stories of
Sandy’s disaster victims.6
Syed’s comments reflect the students’ experience in going through this intensive training; in learning the process and practice of oral history, they began to appreciate both the challenge and responsibility of doing oral history
work.
Finally, they were ready to go into the field. Each student was assigned the
task of conducting and transcribing one nonpeer interview. For most of them,
these interviews offered the first opportunity to travel to the Bayshore area since
the storm. This exposure proved critical in shaping their experience, as they were
able to connect the stories with the destruction they were seeing in the neighborhoods. These early interviews also became important beta tests; several of
the students came back with ideas for new questions and new lines of inquiry
for future interviews.7 The six interviews they conducted became the foundation
for the project, which ultimately expanded to nearly fifty narrators.
Rethinking the Storm
Through this project, in ways both subtle and quite obvious, I began to notice
that my students were approaching their own experience with the storm differently. Particularly for the two women who had lived through the more devastating impacts of Sandy, being able to go into their communities and collect stories
transformed the way they understood their own experiences of the storm.
Piasecki, in particular, embraced the role of community liaison, reaching out to
residents and business owners and linking them with her classmates. She felt
proud of the work that they were doing and found power in the connections
she was able to foster.8
On March 21, 2013, Piasecki stood in front of two hundred Port
Monmouth residents at a contentious community meeting, during which people
expressed deep frustrations over the lack of response from local officials and demanded greater planning and infrastructure before the next storm. Piasecki was,
6
Arij Syed, “Preparing for the Interview Process,” Staring Out to Sea Course Blog, March 5, 2013, accessed
January 28, 2015, http://staringouttosea.com/.
7
One of the more noteworthy insights to come out of these original interviews was the need to ask directly
about the narrator’s race. We knew we wanted to look at socioeconomic indicators in evaluating storm response,
but not until the students began their interviews did we realize that the audio format would be limiting unless
we added specific questions about identity politics.
8
Mary Piasecki, “Getting their Voices Heard,” Staring Out to Sea Course Blog, March 22, 2013, accessed
January 28, 2015, http://staringouttosea.com/.
Staring Out to Sea | 399
for many, a welcome break in the yelling, and attendees were appreciative and
supportive when she told them about the project and invited them to participate. During her presentation, she shed the language of victimization that had
become a common refrain in the class, and instead spoke of those who had lived
through the storm as survivors. She counted herself among them.9 Later that
evening, Piasecki reflected on the responsibility she felt in making the
presentation:
It is quite hard to capture the emotion I was feeling as these residents approached me and knowing that I had the power to make their voices
heard. I intend to include all of these residents, and whoever else wishes
to be involved in our project. While we have merely started down this
road, my classmates and I are committed to our project and will work to
make our interviewees heard.10
At the end of the meeting, the students collected names and information from
several homeowners and made a plan to contact them in the coming days.
Several of the people they met that evening were later interviewed for the
project.
Similarly, when Le Strange, the student who had cried during our first meeting, found herself able to connect her classmates to people within her Union
Beach community, she welcomed the opportunity to make meaning of her own
experience. As she later reflected:
It was hard to go into the process two-sided. I played the part of both victim and interviewer. It was not an easy job to balance, but I was not alone
in it. Mary and I are both balancing the two roles and because of this we
were able to help our classmates and each other. We helped them understand the communities and get connected with the residents. With our
personal devastations and connections we were able to bring our classmates from the outside in.11
During the semester, Le Strange routinely discussed the overwhelming feelings
of helplessness that she had experienced since the storm. In reaching out to
members of her community and involving them in the project, she was able to
reclaim a sense of power and control in her own life, after months of feeling as
though she could do little more than react and respond.
9
Mary Piasecki, Speech, Port Monmouth American Legion, Port Monmouth, NJ, March 21, 2013.
Mary Piasecki, “Getting their Voices Heard,” Staring Out to Sea Course Blog, March 22, 2013, accessed
January 28, 2015, http://staringouttosea.com/.
11
Brittany Le Strange, “Staring Out to Sea: The Story of Superstorm Sandy in Three Bayshore Communities”
(presentation, Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region, College Park, MD, April 2013).
10
400 | PERKISS
Students as Scholars
At the end of the semester, I traveled with the students to College Park,
Maryland, to present at the 2013 OHMAR/SHFG Conference. We spent the first
day attending other panels, and in listening to the presentations of more established scholars, the students at first expressed anxiety about their own panel the
following day. They worried that they would come across as amateurs, that they
would get flustered, that they would not measure up. As they moved through
the day, however, and were able to connect with other attendees, and as those
other attendees treated them as members of the OHMAR community, the students began to see themselves as similarly situated professionals.
That evening, the group continued preparations for their own presentation.
Although it quickly became apparent that they had not appreciated the professional nature of the conference and the differences between speaking to their
classmates and speaking before a professional community, the long night proved
to be an opportunity for growth for the students. After a tense conversation
about the nature of the next day’s panel and an honest critique of the state of
their remarks, they retreated to their hotel rooms, rewriting and revising for
hours. The following morning, we gathered in the hotel breakfast room for one
last run-through of their remarks. As they rehearsed over bagels and Belgian
waffles, their commitment to improvement became clear. Through a combination
of peer pressure and tough love from me, they had developed a measured, nuanced, and sophisticated presentation that would lead their audience through
the process of developing the project.
When they took the stage of the large auditorium on Friday morning—the
premiere panel of the time slot—they spoke eloquently about their experience,
first describing the origins of the project, then taking the attendees through the
early phases of implementation.
They divided the various parts of the presentation among them. Piasecki
and Alicia Hill discussed the oral history boot camp that they had undertaken
early in the semester and the process through which we had crafted the Staring
Out to Sea project. Abdelfatth Rasheed addressed the trauma training they had
undertaken and the extent to which it prepared them for conducting their own
interviews. Rasheed, the only second-semester senior in the group, had at times
been less connected to the project, as he focused on what was to come after
graduation. But he found the discussions of trauma to be particularly compelling, and he spoke eloquently about the need to pay attention to the rhetorical
and visual cues that the narrator might offer in displaying early signs of retraumatization during the interview. Le Strange and Trudi-Ann Lawrence spoke of
their roles as both insiders and outsiders in the project, outlining the different
experiences among the students: those who lived through the storm on the
Bayshore and those who bore witness to the destruction through their
Staring Out to Sea | 401
Fig. 1. Presentation at 2013 OHMAR Conference. (Photograph by Katherine Scott;
used with permission.)
interviews. Finally, Syed offered a preliminary analysis of the interview findings:
the sense of abandonment by the federal government that many who had been
impacted by Sandy felt, the overwhelming strength and interconnectedness of
their communities, the generosity of the volunteers, the sensationalized media
coverage, the challenges of participating in the political process (particularly the
2012 presidential election, which took place just days after the storm), and the
near-universal support for New Jersey governor Chris Christie. In synthesizing
their early interviews, Syed spoke deliberately, careful to reflect the limited time
that they had had for analysis and interpretation and the limited scope of the
project to that point.
Audience members responded enthusiastically, asking challenging questions
and offering high praise for the student presenters. The presentation was notable for many reasons, commenters remarked, but particularly impressive was the
amount of work the students had accomplished in such a short amount of time.
Attendees noted that in just a few months, the undergraduates had turned into
experienced project developers, and they had been able to convey that process
to a group of practiced professionals and scholars.
Outsiders interacted with the students as professionals, but even more important was the fact that the students began to see themselves in this way. In
their postsemester reflections and again in recorded interviews two years later,
each student flagged the conference as one of the highlights of the semester.
More than the process of developing the project, it was the opportunity to analyze, reflect upon, and present their findings to an audience of scholars and
practitioners that became the greatest marker of success for the students.
402 | PERKISS
For Le Strange, the presentation provided the affirmation of the intensive
work that had been done over the previous three months. As she reflected:
Having the opportunity to present at the OHMAR conference is an experience that I will never forget. I was so excited to go to College Park and
the closer it got the more scared I became. It was amazing to sit there and
present and see these historians excited about our project and the work
we had accomplished. I do not know how any of us could have made it
better.12
The conference brought with it a sense of profound satisfaction, she implied, in
large part because the stakes had been so high. Unlike a traditional classroom
experience, where the semester culminates in a final paper or exam, here, the
students were required to present publicly this body of work that had become
so intensely personal for them. In sharing the project and receiving such a warm
response, Le Strange received more than a high grade; she found renewed value
in the work they were doing.
For Lawrence, the OHMAR conference was the time when the entire project
came together, when she was finally able to see and make sense of the disparate
pieces they had been working with all semester. She noted:
I would say the highlight of the project was the presentation at OHMAR. I
got to meet so many wonderful, amazing people. I learned more about
oral history and [may] even be persuaded to make oral history a profession. I always emphasize the fact that I was able to meet the author of
our textbook, Don Ritchie, which in itself is such a tremendous experience.
. . . Meeting people who worked for the FBI or CIA got me even more
enthused about [the] work oral historians do. . . . After this project, I felt
compelled to work further with oral history.13
She described it as a sort of lightning rod; after spending the semester in the
weeds, she was beginning to see the bigger picture, and with that came a sense
of clarity about her professional plans and goals.
Perhaps more than the other students, Syed appreciated the scholarly opportunity that the conference afforded. For him, to be able to present their
work before a room of established historians, and for them to find value in that
work, was deeply affirming.
12
Brittany Le Strange, Class Reflection, May 2013, document in Perkiss’s possession.
Trudi-Ann Lawrence, Class Reflection, May 2013, document in Perkiss’s possession; Trudi-Ann Lawrence,
“Institutional Collaboration: Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region, Kean University, and a Hurricane Sandy Oral
History Project,” (presentation, 47th Annual Meeting of the Oral History Association, Oklahoma City, OK,
October 11, 2013).
13
Staring Out to Sea | 403
The conference was one of the best, if not the best, intellectual experience I have had during my college career. . . . To be able to go the conference and listen and talk to all those successful historians was such an
enlightening and resourceful experience. To actually speak at this conference, and in the auditorium no less, was an incredible honor. To top it all
off, all the most impressive speakers from the conference were all in attendance. Everyone was so supportive of us and genuinely interested in our
project. To hear these successful scholars clap and congratulate us was the
most rewarding feeling in the world. We all worked together as a team
and created something amazing.14
As these reflections demonstrate, in preparing for the panel, presenting the project, and seeing the response, these students developed a broader worldview
and a dual consciousness—as both professional historian and historical actor,
with the capacity to interact with and shape the world around them.
From College to Career
The students’ work in developing Staring Out to Sea opened new professional
doors and prompted them to reconsider their own postundergraduate plans and
goals. In the months that followed our semester together, three of the original
six students took on internships at the Tuckerton Seaport Museum in southern
New Jersey. At Tuckerton, they were responsible for creating a public exhibit
about Sandy recovery, which included a StoryCorps-like interview booth for visitors to share their own experiences with the storm. At the same time, the three
conducted interviews in and around Tuckerton, expanding the original geographic scope of Staring Out to Sea to the southern New Jersey coastline. In
October, we traveled together to Oklahoma City to present with Katherine Scott
at the 2013 Oral History Association annual meeting. Our session focused on
the institutional partnerships that both fostered and were fostered by the project. Scott and I were struck by the poise with which Lawrence, Le Strange, and
Piasecki spoke and their nuanced reflection of the process. Their experience at
OHMAR the previous April had clearly bolstered their confidence and given
them new tools with which to navigate this professional scholarly world.
That same month, the students saw their work featured in the American
Historical Association’s Perspectives on History magazine. An article by Jennifer
Reut described the development of Staring Out to Sea and highlighted the intensive work that the students had done. “In April,” Reut wrote, “the class presented at the OHMAR conference in College Park, Maryland, and students
wrote candidly [on the class blog] about the difficulty in balancing their own
14
Arij Syed, Class Reflection, May 2013, document in Perkiss’s possession.
404 | PERKISS
emotional response to the trauma with their purpose of communicating professionally about their project. Others were excited to be presenting their original
research at an academic conference among experts, a first for many, if not all,
the undergraduates.”15
Her piece reflected the growth that the students themselves experienced
through the project. It also confirmed for them the value of the work they were
doing, outside of the walls of their own classroom. In the weeks that followed,
Kean University promoted the project, heralding them as scholarly and community ambassadors for the school.
It has been more than three years since our presentation at OHMAR, and in
that time all of the students from the Staring Out to Sea team have graduated.
Syed is now a third-year law student at Rutgers University-Newark. He has served
as president of the law school’s chapter of the National Lawyers Guild and interned with the ACLU. Prior to Staring Out to Sea, he had intended to go into
business law, but the project, he says, inspired him to work in public interest law:
It showed me the effect that we had on the people there. They really
thought we were doing something good for them, too. Their stories were
able to be heard. I liken it to why I’m interested in working in civil rights
and civil liberties . . . law. There are people out there whose stories never
get heard or they never get justice. There needs to be people . . . who can
go forward and help them with that. I talked about [the project] in my interviews, how it taught me how to be a good speaker, to care about people and be sensitive, but at the same time, to be professional as well.16
In September 2015, he returned to Kean for a National Constitution Day program to share his experiences in the field of constitutional law. While Syed spoke
eloquently of his work with the ACLU and some of the civil liberties cases he
had worked on, he credited his participation in the Staring Out to Sea project
with teaching him how to talk to people about the deeply personal things in
their lives and how to position himself as an advocate for those who feel
voiceless.
In 2015, Piasecki spent nine months in FEMA Corps, a division of
Americorps that focuses specifically on disaster preparedness, response, recovery,
or mitigation. Piasecki reflected:
[When I started at Kean, I thought] I wanted to help people by being a
teacher. This project showed me that there are other ways to make change
15
Jennifer Reut, “Oral History Projects Document Hurricane Sandy,” Perspectives on History, October 2013,
10-11; accessible online at https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/
october-2013/oral-history-projects-document-hurricane-sandy.
16
Arij Syed, interviewed by Abigail Perkiss, Staring Out to Sea, May 8, 2015.
Staring Out to Sea | 405
in the world. [It] really gave me a different sense of my community. . . . It
helped me grow as a person and realize the expanse of the storm and
how that could have affected a community so badly but also brought
a community together so well. . . . When I thought about FEMA Corps, I
thought, now I can get on the other side of it and see what FEMA really
does, and not just from a survivor or an oral history interview, but a full
picture.17
During her service, Piasecki traveled to twelve states during five different disaster deployments. In each instance, she told me, she thought about the people
that she had interviewed for Staring Out to Sea and used the stories they shared
with her to guide her own interactions with residents and business owners
around the country.
After Lawrence graduated from Kean, she spent a year teaching special education in Newark, New Jersey. That spring, though, she felt a deep pull to return to the storytelling work she had done with Staring Out to Sea. Lawrence
said:
When working on the project, I loved it. . . . I was in college at the time to
be a teacher, but here I am . . . getting out in the field and communicating
with people. And it was nothing that I’ve ever considered myself doing. It
was nothing that I’ve ever considered myself loving and being so passionate about.18
In the summer of 2015, she began thinking about how to combine her interest
in oral history with her commitment to education. She reflected:
Every time I think about it, I think about when I was doing the project,
and I think about how we had to look at demographics and we had to
consider many things before just going ahead. And that’s how I see things
now. There is a different way to go about this; there are different things I
have to consider.19
Staring Out to Sea, she said, opened her eyes to the possibility of using storytelling in her teaching and in advocacy work related to education. She dreams of
returning to school to get a masters degree in oral history.
Hill credits Staring Out to Sea with opening her eyes to community development. She now speaks of wanting to open community-owned businesses
17
18
19
Mary Piasecki, interviewed by Abigail Perkiss, Staring Out to Sea, May 19, 2015.
Trudi-Ann Lawrence, interviewed by Abigail Perkiss, Staring Out to Sea, June 17, 2015.
Lawrence, interview.
406 | PERKISS
to bring new economic opportunities to her hometown of Irvington.20 Le
Strange says that the project made her realize that there are more ways to
learn than traditional writing and research. She hopes to integrate more
innovative pedagogies into her own classroom one day.21 Most of the
students view their work on this project as instrumental in their professional
development.
Conclusion
The Starting out to Sea Oral History Project was born out of an acute localized
moment of trauma, intensely personal and also deeply universal. The students
who participated were themselves affected by the storm, and their work became
both cathartic and empowering as they worked to navigate their own postSandy worlds. But even if this particular project is not easily or readily replicable
(indeed, I hope that it is not), the students’ experiences in Staring Out to Sea
offer insight into the power of oral history to profoundly impact the ways in
which students understand and interact with the world around them.
In developing the framework for a community oral history project about an
issue of widespread interest, in implementing the early phases of such a project,
and then in having the opportunity to report and reflect on that work in a professional setting, these six students experienced a level of agency, autonomy,
and affirmation that undergraduates (particularly those at regional state institutions) rarely get to experience. Especially for the five students who were in the
middle of their college careers (rather than approaching graduation), the project
had profound effects on the way they conceived of themselves and their place
in the world. During the near-universal period of transition that college represents, Staring Out to Sea became a critical waypoint in mapping their postcollegiate lives.
In October 2014, on the first anniversary of their trip to the OHA,
Lawrence posted on Facebook a screenshot of an e-mail that the group had received from Dr. Christopher Bellitto, then-chair of the Kean history department,
following their presentation in Oklahoma:
Let me congratulate you on the great work you did on the Sandy project.
To see your faces presenting at a professional conference in the latest issue of Perspectives on History, the newsmagazine of our field’s premiere
organization, is a great source of joy for us. This is quite an achievement.
We have no doubt that, as you progress in your careers, you will look
back at this article and these presentations as an important step toward
20
21
Alicia Hill, “Personal Biography,” Staring Out to Sea, www.staringouttosea.com.
Brittany Le Strange, interviewed by Abigail Perkiss, Staring Out to Sea, June 11, 2015.
Staring Out to Sea | 407
your goal. . . . I am very proud of you, as are my colleagues in the history
department.22
Bellitto’s e-mail is indicative of the ongoing praise the students received for the
work, but Lawrence’s remembrance of the e-mail and the acknowledgement
from her classmates that followed reflects the continuing impact of this project
on the students. Through the development of Staring Out to Sea and their
shared experiences in the Bayshore and Tuckerton communities and among professional oral historians, Lawrence and her classmates came to reimagine their
own senses of self.
Abigail Perkiss is an assistant professor of history at Kean University in Union, New Jersey. She
has been directing the Staring Out to Sea Oral History Project since spring 2013 and is currently
working on a book manuscript based on the project. In 2015, she won the New Jersey Studies
Academic Alliance’s annual teaching award for her work on the project. E-mail:
[email protected]
22
Christopher Bellitto, e-mail to Alicia Hill, Trudi-Ann Lawrence, Brittany Le Strange, Mary Piasecki,
Abdelfatth Rasheed, and Arij Syed, October 11, 2013, used with permission.