By Valerie Mendoza, The Other Roads Historical Consulting
The last thing I expected to encounter as I prepared for my first AASLH conference was a hurricane. I attended the 2024 conference as a recipient of the Douglas Evelyn Diversity Fellowship. Luckily, my flights went smoothly and the rain delayed itself until well after nightfall with little to no damage in Mobile.
My conference experience began soon after I touched down on Wednesday with a pre-conference workshop on oral histories and podcasting. This was an excellent way to begin the conference as I have been recording a lot of oral histories in my work as a public historian. I started a community archive and excerpting these stories into a podcast has been my goal this year. During the workshop. we practiced interviewing partners with equipment provided to us as part of the session and received thorough instructions on the steps needed to proceed.
Safely tucked away from that evening’s rain in my hotel room I eagerly plotted my next day’s events. One thing I really appreciated about the sessions I attended throughout the conference was the fact they engaged attendees through interactive elements, and they without a doubt inspired me. Most of my work centers on the stories of communities of color in Kansas where I am from. Over the last several months I decided that the histories that storytellers share with me need to be told to a broad audience. Recovering them and donating to local archives is not enough.
I intend to create lesson plans for local and regional secondary school teachers to use based on these oral histories. Therefore I was pleased to see several sessions about engaging teachers through professional development and primary sources and eagerly attended sessions that covered this topic over the next two days. I learned about funding from the Library of Congress, professional development for educators being conducted by the Alabama Department of Archives and History, and was able to solve a murder mystery in the latter session which gave me all sorts of ideas for future lesson plans.
The other piece of the AASLH conference that I will carry forward occurred during the mixers and tour of coastal Alabama that I took. Everyone proved to be exceptionally kind and engaging. I learned about the name origins of fellow attendees at the Diversity and Inclusion mixer and participated in delightful conversation with my bus companions as we journeyed from Civil War battlefield to Fort Morgan and everything in between.
My sincerest thanks to the Douglas Evelyn Fellowship committee for providing the means for me to partake in such a delightful event.
