Interviews with volunteers: a contribution to an Open University course
We were recently asked to contribute to an Open University course being prepared for student social workers. The request was for descriptions of research carried out by people who were not academics or oral historians. The aim was to encourage social workers to do their own research, and give confidence to those who had not undertaken such projects before. In particular, those planning the course were interested that we had recruited volunteers to carry out quite specific and on occasions complicated and difficult pieces of historical research; and that it had been a pioneering and very successful research method.
Two of the volunteers from the project were happy to take part. Nick Balneaves, the producer, had been asked by The Open University to make a recording of their stories, finding out from them what it was like to do the research and what they had found, but above all, what they had got out of it themselves. The volunteers, Liz Tavner and Ali Pendleton, met Nick who asked them relevant questions, carefully setting the context. Liz took him for a walk around the area she had researched, and background sounds of traffic, bird song and passersby can be heard on the recording. Both volunteers said that they had gained different things from doing the research. Ali gained an insight into daily life for an older person still living at home and dependent on carers; while Liz said that she had gained confidence in approaching strangers for information – a skill she did not know she had.
Julia Johnson introduced the recording and said a few words about the project. Nick’s skill was to make the recording into a cliff-hanger: by moving from one interview to the other and back again, he kept us wondering until the end, whether Liz had in fact ever been able to find anything out about the elusive history of her home.
This recording will be issued as an Open University disc, accompanying the Social Work course.
You can hear the recording by clicking on the link below.
Interviews with volunteers audio clip
Ali Pendleton 
Liz Tavner