Book spotlights history of Delta region through high school students’ perspective

East Arkansas high school students have helped turn the Delta’s oral history into a published book, with the help of the University of Arkansas.

“The Arkansas Delta Oral History Project: Culture, Place and Authenticity” is a culmination of five-year project where students, along with UA student mentors, interviewed Delta residents and wrote in-depth pieces based on those conversations, according to a UA press release.

The UA undergraduate and graduate students worked online and face-to-face as writing coaches and mentors for students who attended primarily small, poor, rural high schools in the Delta, according to the release.

“As the project progressed, three themes came to the forefront: race, religion and food,” David Jolliffe, project leader, co-author of the book and professor of English in the UA’s J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, said in the press release.

“We developed a literacy initiative that would help these young people in these areas understand their hometowns and home regions as places worth revering, places worth saving,” Jolliffe said.

The project began when the students were asked what they wanted to write about, and “the students became studiers of culture,” he said.

An unexpected benefit of the collaboration might be a transition to college for some of the students, Joliffe said. “For a great many of those high school students, their participation in this project became evidence that they could go to college, even to the University of Arkansas — all the way across the state.”

The other co-authors of the book are Christian Goehring, associate professor of English education; Krista Jones Oldham, special collections librarian at Haverford College in Pennsylvania; and James Anderson, assistant professor of English education at Lander University in South Carolina.

The “Arkansas Delta Oral History Project” was published by Syracuse University Press. The project was funded by the endowed Brown Chair in Literacy, established by The Brown Foundation Inc. of Houston, established in 2003.