The SIS Oral History Project
About the Program
A two-semester independent, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational learning experience open to students across all majors, the goal of SIS is to enhance students critical writing and thinking skills. It also allows students the opportunity to share research and grow in griot knowledge.
In addition to learning sessions with the SIS faculty mentor, students are exposed to lectures by guest scholars including gerontologists, oral historians, museum curators, and physician-researchers. Through one-on-one independent student relationships and class seminars, the unique yearlong program allows and entrusts students to solicit, understand and archive stories of African-American women elders. A global component of SIS has included oral history research in Accra, Ghana; Benin, West Africa; and Kingston, Jamaica.
Training Researchers and Developing Oral Historians
If our institutions are going to create critical thinkers, we must impress upon students the connections between the past, present and future,” Gloria Wade-Gayles, Ph.D., founding director of the SIS Oral History Project, said. Every present moment is influenced by past moments. The past gives us informed direction as we move to the future.
"You have asked me to talk about my life. You have given me joy." -- Judia Mae Ferrell to SIS
"When you see an older woman dancing, don't ask why. Dance, too." -- SIS Proverb
SIS VIDEOS: Connecting the Past With the Present
Newtown: A SIS Documentary
Women of Wisdom: Ann Nixon Cooper's Legacy
Four years before President Barack Obama mentioned 106-year old Ann Nixon Cooper as emobying the spirit of his victory, she had been dubbed by Spelman Independent Scholars as the "Wisest of the Wise."
Mrs. Cooper, the wife of the first Black dentist in Atlanta, was one of the dozens of African-American women elders whose stories were recorded and archived in the first 10 years of the SIS interdisciplinary independent study program at Spelman.
Other elder mentors include a woman who never got out of poverty after being one of 13 born to a sharecropper in Albany, Georgia. They have common stories said SIS founder, Gloria Wade Gayles, Ph.D. “We're trying to establish that there are common stories in the memories of African-American women across lines of class."