Ethical considerations of oral history from the educational approach

Abstract

The use of oral sources is an excellent resource for approaching history of contemporary education. The biographical-narrative methodology not only helps to recover themes forgotten by official historiography, but also opens up a new way of feeling, thinking and acting for the researcher. Admitting that the person who narrates his or her story is a subject capable of producing knowledge that the researcher is unaware of, transforms the traditional relationships between the researcher and the subject who participates in the research and, at the same time, allows the questioning of how knowledge should be constructed. The aim of this paper is to analyze some ethical dilemmas that we have had to face in the development of a doctoral thesis that deals with the education of the popular classes in Franco's regime through oral sources. Through an exercise of reflection on the methodology of the study, based on oral sources, we discuss five decisions that arose in the development of the research and that led us to modify our own research identity. We discuss the issue of representativeness, informed consent, anonymity of the participants, the autonomy of the oral source with respect to other archival sources, and the analysis of the data and the writing of the final report. The study reveals the limitations of traditional historical research with oral sources and presents a debate on the value of a social research model that takes into account the participants, their identity and their contributions as subjects producing historical knowledge. The use of living testimonies calls for an ethical commitment on the part of the researcher for the true production of democratic knowledge.