The Importance of Studying Disasters: Ideas and Advice for the Classroom

I was sitting in Algebra when I heard the news that an incident had occurred in New York City. My history teacher, Mr. Turner, appeared suddenly at the door—interrupting the Pythagorean theorem lesson—to say that something was happening, but no one knew the full details. As the bell rang, I walked down the hall to my next class (History) with that same teacher. The TV was on in his classroom, and the students from his previous class had yet to move away from it. When I finally caught a glimpse of what they were watching, I saw the World Trade Center’s first tower on fire, with smoke billowing out the side. A few minutes later, we all watched in horror as a plane entered the second tower, followed by another explosion and quick collapse. I can remember the television announcer gasping at the same time that students screamed in our classroom, all of us at a loss of what to say about the events that were unfolding before our eyes. The next day, I again went to my second period (History), where my teacher had us skip our usual study to write a reflective essay on our memory of the day before. As I sat writing my essay, I tried to capture the details of the events and my thoughts about what had happened, as well as the conversations I had had with my family as we sat glued to the TV the day before. When we began sharing our memories in class after reflecting on them, I was amazed at how many people felt similarly about the day’s events: We all knew we had experienced “history,” even though the outcome of it was still unknown. And, surprisingly, even though we all watched it together, everyone remembered slightly different details of the day’s events.

I think about this experience regularly when I teach my American Disasters course at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and try to explain to my own students not only what happened on September 11, 2001, but how we, as historians, should reflect on the history of recent disasters. Much of what we know about disasters is shaped by the documentation of them. This documentation can take the form of recorded impacts such as the number of fatalities or injuries, financial losses, environmental or infrastructural changes, and even the known increased risk of future incidents. While this data provides quantitative insight into the magnitude of an incident, it lacks the qualitative value that helps us understand how communities recover or build resiliency after these incidents. For this, it is vital to collect qualitative data (or individual memories) of a disaster.

But how do historians collect qualitative data on disasters today? Well, we have a variety of methods to do so. In terms of newer methods, we can turn to the efforts to collect and preserve commentary produced on social media platforms. With the invention of the modern World Wide Web, new ways to connect globally have shaped our understanding of recent disasters. These new forms of social communication have also grown due to their links to catastrophe. For example, the launch of YouTube emerged in large part from the desire to share videos of disaster, specifically the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. This event contributed to the launch of a sharing platform that now includes millions of videos shot by individuals worldwide of their experiences with events (such as first-hand coverage of hazards and disasters). Meanwhile, blogs and vlogs became critical places of discussion over Hurricane Katrina in fall 2005, providing keen insight into the collective and individual reaction to the complexities of disaster recovery.[1] And Facebook and Twitter have recently become significant places people frequent during and after disasters to share information and connect resources.[2] These social media platforms provide unparalleled data on the human experience with disasters, as their accessibility and use spans generations, socioeconomic classes, and political and educational backgrounds.

For these reasons, I often have my students look through social media platforms for posts related to the latest disaster in our area to see what content is available and decipher its meaning and potential usefulness as a source that represents a perspective on that incident. YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter are excellent places to do this type of initial search, primarily because they provide open spaces for people to discuss and connect. This activity also fits nicely into a discussion of how social media is influencing new forms of disaster response and recovery efforts today through its ability to serve as both a resource for response teams (official—like posts by news stations and the National Weather Service, and unofficial—such as groups like the “Cajun Navy” in the 2016 Louisiana Floods or Houston-based CrowdSource Rescue during Hurricane Harvey in 2017) and a repository of a multitude of perspectives within moments of a disaster’s occurrence.[3] A social media study also provides students a window into the negative aspects of disaster reaction such as the production and circulation of false information, perpetuation of biases and stereotypes in coverage of victims, and even the politicization of disasters, all of which can be found in a typical study of the latest incident in your community.[4]

For older methods of historical data collection, we can rely on archival repositories (including material items such as memorabilia produced after a disaster for fundraising efforts, music and songs related to the incident, and even donated records of relief organizations and government officials), recorded coverage of events (from news footage or even home videos), and written material (like letters, memoirs, diaries, and newspaper articles). But most importantly, we can use one of the oldest forms of history to study disaster: oral history.

Oral history provides an unparalleled ability to study the longitudinal impact of a disaster and its recovery as it allows for a way to measure the effects of intergenerational and transgenerational experience with traumatic events that might shape the perspective on the recovery from the current disaster. As people share their recent disaster stories, they almost always compare them to previous disasters or those they had heard about from others. In drawing conclusions, they point out the successes and failures of response, recovery, and resiliency related to that moment’s disaster. In this way, this act of comparison illustrates the historical memory of disaster for not only that person, but their community, country, and world.

Oral histories also provide invaluable insight into the recovery processes of a community after a crisis. Recovery processes are frequently measured by physical reconstruction of affected spaces, repopulation of regions after an evacuation, and even economic recovery, which might show us that a community has returned to an area, but not that it thinks of itself as recovered from an incident. Oral history can help uncover what psychological or socio-psychological changes are needed for a community to feel like it has fully “recovered” from an incident. These histories unveil larger truths about ideas of “resilience” as part of this process, as a community whose residents feel that it is recovered usually indicate that they have built up new or built back aspects of their lives that will assist them in mitigating the next incident. And oral histories can often provide a forum for individuals to reflect on the changes (positive or negative) that have resulted from both the disaster and the recovery process. Simply put, by recording an oral history of a person’s experience with a disaster, we document the event, the recovery, and the current perception of resilience or vulnerability to the next major event. For this reason, collecting as many oral histories of people experiencing disaster as possible is critical to our understanding of disaster and how we can best respond to it today.

This belief drives my research and teaching as I introduce students to the process of oral history. I teach students that various platforms can assist them in collecting oral histories, such as free mobile apps like PixStori and voice recorders and the Oral History Association’s website on best practices for oral history.[5] I also encourage them to think about how they would want to best preserve these stories so that future historians and interested people could review them. While this type of activity might initially seem daunting to implement in your own classroom, it is an important one. As I explain to my students, part of the recovery from every disaster is remembrance and commemoration. By sharing one’s own story or preserving others, students are assisting in this process of recovery and documenting what happened so that others can make decisions that will assist in efforts that may impact their communities in the future. On a small scale, the recording of these stories will help your students understand their own view of an incident’s impact, as well as compare it to the views of others around them, much in the same manner of that activity I did after September 11 in my own high school history class.

If you are interested in implementing your own oral history project in a classroom, I recommend starting with one of two activities. First, have students record their own story of a disaster that has impacted them using mobile phones, telework platforms like Zoom, or cheap recorders (you can provide them with a list of simple questions to respond to such as where they were, what they remembered, and how they felt about it). Then have them record the story of someone they know who was impacted by a disaster. After both are completed, have them compare the answers given in each interview to sources they can find about the disaster online. This could be as simple as newspaper articles from your local newspaper (you can call them for help in accessing these) or a study of information available on social media (as described above). Ask them to note what is missing in either account or what they found out that added to the official narrative. If you want to do an advanced study of a recent disaster in your area with your students, have them complete pre-research on the disaster, constructing question sets that you might all use together to get at specific themes your class is collectively interested in studying together. After your class’s study, ask them to develop a way to display or publicize their findings, sharing the history with a local institution or newspaper, or even designing posters for display in your school.

As disasters are a frequent occurrence, this exercise can be used yearly, but will likely have a lasting impact on your students. For many, it will help them rethink how disasters like hurricanes, pandemics, tornadoes, and wildfires shape their lives and how communities (including your students) react and respond to them. The knowledge gained by completing this activity also helps your students build resilience by learning how disasters continue to impact our lives as we adjust disaster response and mitigation practices following their impact in preparation for the next major incident. And it will help them understand what I discovered in high school when recounting my own memories of an experience I had witnessed (September 11). Each person’s perspective on what they saw and what they thought was significant was unique. These differences are critical when examining the entirety of disaster experience as they must be accounted for when planning for the next incidents.

The author would like to thank her history teachers through the years, notably Keith Turner, of Nashua-Plainfield High School.

Liz Skilton is an associate professor of history and director of public history at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She is co-author of the textbook The Louisiana Experience (2016) and of the new book Tempest: Hurricane Naming & American Culture (2019).