What UIC students added to the Public Housing Museum’s archives

Arel Wiggins, center, discusses the group audio project that will live as an oral history in the National Public Housing Museum. Teammate Zachari Siraj, left, listens during a presentation at the museum. (Photo: Martin Hernandez/UIC) Listen to story summary

The first- and second-year students in Matthew Furlong's honors course on affordable housing explored global approaches to housing justice and how they relate to U.S. policy. Then they took their exploration one step further to create a project with lasting impact.

The spring course focused on public housing and how it varies throughout the world. The students learned about housing in China and Brazil and the evolution of public housing in the U.S.

Furlong asked each student to step outside the classroom and meet with a person who has lived in public housing. They had to interview that person, aiming to shed light on the question: Should affordable housing be a human right?

"That this class was about affordable housing - and I'm very into politics, so I thought it would be about the politics of affordable housing - is why I signed up for this class," said Aubrie Camp, a first-year psychology and pre-med student. "This was so much better than learning from a textbook. Because you're listening to an actual person who has experienced it, it's impossible not to be intrigued."

Hearing lived experiences

Learning beyond the textbook was a new experience for most of the students in the class. So Furlong asked Liú Chen, senior program manager of oral history at the National Public Housing Museum, to help them prepare for the interviews.

Chen visited the class to teach them how to ask open-ended questions, conduct pre-interviews and gather the type of information the museum looks for in the oral histories it archives. Students also listened to other interviews the museum has collected and the museum's Out of the Archives podcast, which excerpts from its collection and puts interviews in conversation with each other.

"Personal narratives are the foundation of the museum," Chen said. "These projects add to the collection here for as long as the narrators want them to be."

First-year student Aubrie Camp, left, talks about her group's interview project. (Photo: Martin Hernandez/UIC) First-year student Ayah Jaber listens as an oral history interview is played during a class presentation at the National Public Housing Museum. (Photo: Martin Hernandez/UIC) Leonetta Dunn works at the National Public Housing Museum and was interviewed about her experiences for the Honors College course. (Photo: Martin Hernandez/UIC)

The museum also helped connect the students with narrators, the term used in oral history to emphasize the agency and power of those being interviewed. Several public housing residents work as ambassadors and educators at the museum, and many of them agreed to be part of the class project.

"It was really interesting to talk to someone who has lived the experience of what we're actually learning," said Ayah Jaber, a first-year health studies student. "It really made the concepts we were learning about more comprehensible and personal."

Permanent part of museum's collection

At the end of the project, the students, in groups of two or four, had interviewed six people for the museum's oral history archive. Each group chose a five-minute clip to play for the class at a reception at the museum in late April.

One interviewee was Leonetta Dunn. She said it's important for museum visitors to understand that not everyone has the same public-housing experience.

"This project speaks to the fight of people who are in public housing," Dunn said. "There's not one cookie-cutter-type situation for people who are in public housing, and it's important for everyone to understand that. Some people fell into hard times for one reason or another and needed to get some help for that. But not every situation is the same."

Zachari Siraj, a first-year neurobiology student, was in the group that interviewed Dunn. He said learning about Section 8 housing and its history was key to forming questions for the final interview.

"It definitely enlightens you a lot more when you get to talk to someone firsthand rather than watching a documentary or hearing a podcast and seeing people's perspectives secondhand," Siraj said. "When you engage with someone firsthand I think it makes you a lot more empathetic and aware of the issue."

Furlong's research focuses on housing in Mexico and Latin America. UIC's proximity to the museum on Taylor Street inspired him to incorporate it in his class.

"The museum is an untapped institutional collaboration for UIC," he said.

At the reception celebrating the completion of the class, Furlong reminded the students that their contributions are permanent.

"When you come back in one year, five years or 10 years, the museum will have something here with your voice in it," he said. "This is a unique thing as an undergrad, to have a classwork product be permanent and live on in a museum."