The Beauty Turner Academy
of Oral History

The Beauty Turner Academy of Oral History (BTA) is our intergenerational PAID training program for current and former public housing residents and other close community members.  The Beauty Turner Academy teaches a values-based approach to narrative history. We center marginalized people from all interests and backgrounds—not just those who see themselves as historians.

BTA is a Zoom-based program with a national cohort. Given the nature of a national cohort, the broader BTA community stays connected through their burgeoning Discord server. Chicago-based Oral History Collective members are encouraged to engage with other NPHM programs. We encourage all BTA participants and Oral History Collective members to connect with each other in their area.

The 10-week summer training is the entry point into becoming an Oral History Collective Member. Graduates of the training can refine their skills through the Beauty Turner Academy Apprenticeships through the rest of the year.

An ideal candidate for Beauty Turner Academy Training is…

• Interested in public history, narrative, and storytelling as methods of resistance.
• Active in your own neighborhoods and communities.
• Willing and able to work collaboratively and build generative relationships with people different from you.
• Committed to long-term engagement with oral history.
• Believes that housing is a human right.
• 16 years of age and older. Younger people with a strong interest may also reach out to discuss their eligibility.
• Has a meaningful connection to public housing. We prioritize folks with lived experience in traditional public housing, Section 8 housing, or residents of a mixed-income housing site.
  • Those with family or community ties to public housing will also be considered.

These are the values that Ms. Beauty Turner embodied through her organizing, journalism, community work, and more. These are the values that guide our decision-making as educators, memory workers, and community members. 

• The vision and the process must be actively equitable, accessible, and anti-elitist. 
• Move with radical care, responsive to the needs and wishes of those involved and impacted.
• Center the specific histories, identities, cultures, and lived experiences of public housing residents. 
• Root every lesson, story, and action in the everyday lives and passions of those involved and impacted.

During the 10 week Summer Training, participants will…

• Connect their lived experiences and collective geniuses to the practices and ethics of oral history.
  • Situate oral history practice within the legacy of public housing in Chicago.
  • Understand the role of relationships, identities, and power in oral/narrative history.
  • Consider who they are as oral historians, given their identities, lived experiences, and values.

• Conduct their first oral history interview.
  • Demonstrate key oral history skills such as deep listening, follow-up questions, continuous consent, and sharing authority with the narrator. 

• Care for, preserve, and envision creative usage of oral history interviews.
  • Transfer, back up, and manage digital files.
  • Make basic audio edits and transcripts using software systems respectively. 
  • Understand the versatility of oral history methods, ethics, and values for historical, creative, and organizing projects.

Over the course of six weeks, interview apprentices will…

• Conduct outreach with potential narrators to build trust, prepare a narrator through a pre-interview, and schedule an interview.
• Confidently conduct an oral history interview to include in the NPHM Archive. 
• Conduct oral history post-production tasks, such as transcribing the interview and writing a finding aid entry. 
• Develop their understanding of who they are as an oral historian.

After completing the deliverables for the Interview Apprenticeship, graduates have the opportunity to become a part of NPHM’s Oral History Collective.

Active Oral History Collective members with an interest in archives may be invited to participate in the Archive & Activate Apprenticeship. Over the course of 10 weeks, interview apprentices will… 

1. Confidently and consistently conduct oral history outreach, an interview, and archival post-production. 
2. Discuss the technical, ethical, and creative considerations that go into creating a community-based archive. 
3. Learn and practice the technical and creative aspects of curating full-length oral history interviews into clips for programming and exhibitions. 
4. Utilize their oral history training to collectively pitch a creative curation project using oral history (ex, a podcast, creative writing project, visual arts project, action research plan, etc).
5. Deepen and further develop their understanding of who they are as an oral historian and memory worker.

Each interview that is submitted to the NPHM oral history archive must have:

• signed narrator release form
• finding aid
• transcript

obtained or produced before it can be made available to the narrator’s desired audience. A completed biographical form is also ideal.

Over the course of each apprenticeship, participants conduct 1 oral history interview and then practice the steps of post-production by learning how to generate a finding aid and transcript for the interview.

For more about the archive, see “About the Oral History Archive.”

Check out our full 2023 and 2022 syllabi for more information about the Beauty Turner Academy.

• Syllabus: 2023 BTA Training_2023.08.23.pdf
• Syllabus: 2022 BTA Training_2022.09.01.pdf

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The Beauty Turner Academy is in a chrysalis year due to the development and opening of the physical National Public Housing Museum. If you are a BTA graduate and wish to participate in an apprenticeship or ongoing interview collection, email Oral History Programs Manager Liú at [email protected].