This wasn’t a history class. It wasn’t even meant to be a history project. It started in an honors colloquium about Carl Jung’s Red Book, a course that was supposed to be about depth psychology, personal transformation, and the nature of memory and the unconscious.
And somehow—and I’m still not entirely sure how—that turned into an oral history project.
The students decided. I am a fully democratic teacher. If that is the will of the people, and it aligns with the course objectives (which, oddly, it did), then we go there.
The honors students took the lead, and the other psychology courses played supporting roles—conducting interviews, gathering research, piecing together a narrative that, at the time, felt bigger than any of us.
At the end of that semester, we had something tangible. Tyrone, one of the students involved, put together the first documentary version of our work. It was shown only on campus, only to current students. We were not allowed to advertise it off campus or to alumni, even though their voices and images were in it. But we did it. And we knew it wasn’t over.
The following semester, I recruited Tyrone to come back and take the applied psychology course because I wanted him on the research team. I also recruited Talisa, because she had built a beautiful connection with an interviewee named Carolyn. She stayed in touch, she cared, and she wanted to continue the work.
Michael happened to join the class, though I might have nudged him there. He’s brilliant—good with video, sharp with questions, someone who could push the project forward. In the end, it was Michael, Talisa, Tyrone, and two other students who carried the research into the next semester.
And the thing about this applied psychology course was that they had a choice.
They could have taken on a completely different project—something like a virtual exchange, working with Kurdish students in Iraq to build a business plan, applying psychology to international collaboration. They could have studied conflict resolution in organizational settings, or group decision-making in corporate environments. But they didn’t.
They chose this.
They chose to track down alumni, sit with them, ask questions, and try to understand how people make sense of their pasts.
That semester, they were reading Think Again by Adam Grant, a book about rethinking what we think we know and staying open to changing our minds. They didn’t realize it at the time, but this project was going to make them do exactly that.
At first, they thought they were just collecting interviews—documenting people’s memories like facts in a textbook. But that’s not how memory works. That’s not how people work.
Two alumni could have been in the same room, in the same class, at the same time, and walk away with completely different versions of reality.
One person remembered camaraderie. Another remembered isolation. One said Gordon was the best time of their life. Another said they never looked back.
For the students, that realization was unsettling.
It’s easy to think of history as something objective—something we can simply record. But history isn’t just what happened. It’s what gets remembered. And what gets remembered depends on who is telling the story.
Ryla, a high school senior at the time and also a dual-enrolled Gordon honors student, realized something early on: this project wasn’t just about history—it was about perspective. Some of the alumni loved reminiscing. Even the difficult parts were softened by time. Others hesitated, choosing their words carefully, knowing that some memories hit different when they’re said out loud.
One of the students later reflected that this project forced them to listen in a way they never had before—not just waiting for their turn to speak, not listening for the “right” answers, but sitting with what someone else was telling them, even when it complicated what they thought they knew.
It was exactly what Think Again was about.
Most of us move through life as preachers, prosecutors, or politicians—defending what we already believe, poking holes in what we don’t agree with, or trying to “win” people over to our side. But real learning happens when we think like scientists—curious, open, willing to test our own beliefs instead of just defending them.
This project made students think like scientists.
It made them confront their own assumptions—about history, about memory, about the way people make sense of their lives. It made them realize that the story we expect to hear isn’t always the story that’s being told.
And in the end, it changed them.
They walked away better at being wrong, better at listening, and better at questioning what they thought they already knew.
Not because someone told them to.
But because they lived it.
