DePaul’s Oral History Workshop for CPS International Baccalaureate Students

Oral History Workshop Papers

Each summer since 2006, about 25 International Baccalaureate students from Chicago Public Schools spend a week at DePaul University in a workshop exploring issues of immigration, migration and education through oral history.

A goal of the workshop is to help students draw connections between the linguistic, geographic and cultural dimensions of the immigrant experience and what it means, particularly as college-bound International Baccalaureate students, to be globally competent in the twenty-first century. The workshop, a project of DePaul's Center for Access and Attainment, is taught by faculty from the Department of Modern Languages.

Almost all of the students are from immigrant families and most will be the first in their family to attend college. The students work on their own oral history project and interview their parents about what it was like to move from one country to another. At the end of the six-day workshop, students present their stories to an audience of workshop participants and their families.

The workshop was initially supported by a grant from the Vincentian Endowment Fund. In 2014, the workshop was also supported by funding from the William G. McGowan Charitable Fund.