Bret Harte students listen to living history

Wearing their pressed uniforms, veterans representing World War II, Korea, Vietnam and the Cold War era filed into the Bret Harte High School gym to participate in Bret Harte’s annual Veteran Oral History Project.
The project was started in 1997 by Bret Harte High School history teacher Jennifer Truman with the desire to teach outside the box.

“The old school way of teaching, opening a book and simply reading,” was not engaging her students, said Truman. As she brainstormed how to connect young people to history, to make it real, she realized that she herself remembered the many stories her grandfather had told her as a young girl and how those stories were still fresh in her mind. It was then that she knew oral history would bring history alive for her students.

To read full Calaveras Enterprise story by Charity Maness CLICK HERE