3/24/17 (1st AOK - History)

This is the first AOK Badge Project I worked on. We took the quiz about how history becomes part of AOK, and from study I learned that history is made based on the current-existing evidence. Our group read “Jewish Deportee on Persecution, Past and Present,” a biography of one of the living Jewish from Holocaust Marceline Loridan-Ivens.

3/28/17 (1st AOK - History: Planning)

Write about your group’s question: What is the relationship between history and memory?

What point do you want to make?

• As addressed from Memory as WOK, memory is unreliable to a certain extent under various circumstances.
• There should be a strong consensus among memories that seem to be relative.
• Such agreements can make the combination of memory to become a public history.
• Memory and history are more connected in oral history yet less in written history.

What are you going to do?

• Today I learned that oral history has both advantages and disadvantages in terms of how it’s made. The advantage is the involvement of the eye-witness or experienced people in recording history, whereas the disadvantage is the existence of miscommunications among them and the recorders. Also, the factors that make memory unreliable apply to history as well.

3/30/17 (1st AOK - History: Presentation)

What is the main point you want to make in your presentation?

• I want to explain that memory is connective to history to a certain extent. It is not very related to written history because written passages allow people not to use their cognitive skills to convey history. However, it is extremely related to oral history because speaking is done from the brain process, and in other words, people’s memory. People’s thoughts can be more influenced throughout interviewing.

What are your goals (personal) for this presentation?

• My goal for this presentation is to establish the ways of how knowing is involved, used, or can affect history.

What is the relationship between history and memory?

• The relationship between history and memory is more adequate for oral history due to the lack of visible sources while delivering history.

4/3/17 (1st AOK - History: Redo Outline)

We made an outline for the presentation over history, so it is closer to the TOK presentation style. I learned that the outline for the presentation is similar to that of writing, topic, evidence, and reasoning.

Below is the new outline of the presentation in TOK presentation style.

What is the relationship between memory and history?

Real Life Situation

• An Interview was conducted with holocaust survivor Marceline Loridan-Ivens about her perspective on the Charlie Hebdo attacks and other terrorist activities in France
• She compares this tragedy to the attacks on French Jews in 2012, which she remembers as bringing “little reaction from the French public”. She made it seem as though no one cared about her minority because there was a lot of public reaction to the Charlie Hebdo shooting. Online sources, however, recount how there was a day of national tragedy dedicated to the victims of the 2012 attacks and how thousands of people marched through Paris in remembrance.

Knowledge Issue

• A person’s memory defines his or her oral history. A person’s perspective is greatly influenced by their memory, and so to know what they remember is to know their perspective.

Knowledge Issue Developed

• The interview with Mrs. Ivens is oral history because she tells the interviewer what she remembers and how she feels about its connection to the current landscape of problems
• Her emotion shapes her memory; she was a victim of religious persecution herself and is most likely traumatized by the experience
• Although the online source vs her memory shows the fallibility of memory and how emotion can distort it, oral history, like this, provides another element to history besides numbers and dates: it provides perspective and emotion.

Other Real Life Examples

• During World War II women from the Japanese-ruled nations were sexually harassed by soldiers from Imperial Japanese Army (this is called comfort women)
• Some surviving women were interviewed by the press, while the Japanese government defended against the accusation placed on them.
• Constructive Memory/Schemas: The Rumor Chain
• One person (1) tells a story from their perspective to another person (2). Person (2) then tells the story they heard from person (1) to a new person (3) and so on and so on.
• The original story tends to get fabricated because with oral history the parts that are told and remembered more accurately are what matters to each storyteller, and the rest tends to be forgotten, leading to each person having to fill in the unknowns with something “close enough”

https://wbphillipskhs.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/87908803/rumor_chain.pdf