WW2 Stories
On Friday, May 19, 2006, VOICES and City High School unveiled the World War 2 Stories website—ww2stories.org. Approximately 140 students, veterans, and their family members attended the multimedia presentation at 48 East Pennington Street, the downtown Tucson building that VOICES and City High School share.
The ww2stories.org website chronicles the stories of 19 Tucson vets who served in World War 2’s Pacific Theater of Operations. During school year 2005-2006, VOICES mentored 80 students from City High’s four “Division II Humanities: American Studies” courses to document the photos and stories of these veterans.
 City High School student Stephen Wheeler talks about his interview with WWII veteran Warren Eyer at the release party of the World War 2 Stories website, May 2006. |
VOICES Executive Director Regina Kelly and Projects Director Rachel Villarreal worked with the City High youth to teach them how to conduct an oral history interview, how to elicit trust during an interview, and how to get specific details through the art of the follow-up question. VOICES Guest Artist Therese Perrault worked with the students to teach them photography basics, editing, and aesthetics to enable the youth to select photographs from the veterans’ personal collections as well as to take their photo portraits. City High teachers Brett Goble and Sarah Bromer oversaw the entire unfolding of the project in their classrooms and helped the students polish creative nonfiction, expository sidebars, and illustrations that were inspired by the interviews with the WW2 vets. Curriculum Consultant Deb Dimmett helped document the best practices of the whole process.
As usual, the key members of the project team were the teenagers and the elders they interviewed. As 11th grader Claudia Garcia put it, “When we met with our veteran, Bill [Ersthaler], I found myself really thinking about and understanding his stories. In some situations, I would even put myself in his place. I really enjoyed listening to him. It was amazing how involved all of the students were. And it was an opportunity for the veterans to talk about their experiences and express feelings they had never shared before.”
VOICES’ very own Adam Cooper (one of our 110o Youth Leaders last year) was the graphic designer for the website and the Moia Group’s Ian Johnson was the mastermind who programmed it all together.
