The Process

The process for creating our website started with brainstorming general questions that could be asked to any one of the Parker workers who kindly sacrificed time in their day for us to interview them. (To prepare for the interviews, we read several interviews included in Studs Terkel's groundbreaking oral history Working.) Every section took about two classes to come up with their own list, and then Mr. Leo combined all of them into one. He gave printed copies to every student. The next step was Mr. Drury splitting all of us up into groups of four or five, and assigning every group an interview subject. The small groups then had to come up with questions specific to the person they were going to interview. There were four jobs for us to do in the discussion, and each student would take one of them. We had to take notes, record the meeting, ask questions, and take photos. After everyone had worked out which job they were going to do, we got to the exciting part: the interviewing. Our English classes were moved to the Collab Lab, and Mr. Leo drew a huge graph on the whiteboard. The graph contained the names of all the interview subjects, which groups were interviewing them, and where and at what time the conversation would take place. We met with sixteen workers. Once a group had finished with their exchange, Mr. Leo would put a check mark on the board next to their names. Whenever an opportunity opened up for an interview, Mr. Drury would send a group to go and get it started, whether the members of the group had been assigned to the person or not. All the meetings went smoothly, and passed within the blink of an eye. Now, all that had to be done was edit the notes we took and write an article based on the answers and information we got out of the discussions. We sorted our notes, and then we edited them as a class. We added our photos, and transferred everything to the website that Mr. Leo created to show our work. In conclusion, this has been a really fun experience, and all of us learned things about our people working at Parker that we didn’t know before!