Membership

Support, fund, and promote bottom-up historical research and training.

We advocate for sustained investment in bottom-up approaches to historical research that prioritize community knowledge, lived experience, and locally grounded sources of evidence. This includes providing training and consulting resources to educators, students, and community members so they can document, preserve, and analyze their own histories using rigorous and ethical research methods. By strengthening grassroots research capacity, history becomes not only something that is studied, but something that communities actively produce, interpret, and safeguard for future generations.

Facilitate the integration of oral history into school and academic curricula.

We support the systematic incorporation of oral history methods into primary, secondary, and higher education curricula as a core component of historical learning. Oral history projects allow students to engage directly with narrators, conduct interviews, evaluate testimony, and situate personal stories within broader social and political contexts. This approach deepens historical understanding by connecting abstract events to human experiences, while also cultivating skills in listening, documentation, ethical responsibility, and critical analysis.

Promote transparency in the production and teaching of history.

We affirm that transparency is essential to responsible historical scholarship and education. This means clearly communicating how historical narratives are assembled, which sources are used, and which perspectives may be missing or contested. Transparency also requires openness about the limitations of archives and the interpretive choices made by researchers and educators. When students are exposed to these processes, they learn that history is not a fixed set of facts but a disciplined practice of inquiry shaped by evidence, power, and perspective.

Prioritize historical understanding over rote memorization in education.

We oppose approaches to history education that reduce learning to the memorization of dates, names, and isolated events without meaningful context. Instead, we promote pedagogies that emphasize interpretation, causation, and the relationships between past and present. When students analyze primary sources, engage with oral histories, and compare multiple viewpoints, they develop a more nuanced and durable understanding of historical change. This method encourages curiosity, critical thinking, and empathy, enabling students to see history as relevant to their own lives and civic responsibilities rather than as a distant list of facts to be recalled for an exam.