The Great Thanksgiving Listen
What Is The Great Thanksgiving Listen?
The Great Thanksgiving Listen encourages young people—and people of all ages—to create an oral history of our times by recording an interview with an elder, mentor, friend, or someone they admire.
With permission, interviews become part of the StoryCorps Archive at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. More than 650,000 people have participated in StoryCorps to date, making it the largest single collection of voices ever gathered.
While anyone can participate in the Great Thanksgiving Listen, it is largely educator driven. Since the first Great Listen in 2015, thousands of educators from all 50 states have encouraged their students to record and preserve interviews, providing families with a priceless piece of personal history.
Raise Your Hand and Participate
Our Tools For Recording Your Story
Before starting a new class, students and teachers make sure they have the right notebooks and pencils. The same is true for anyone who wants to be a part of The Great Listen. Pick which tools works best for you; we can support lots of different situations.
StoryCorps in Your Classroom
If you have been with us before and are simply looking for our updated Educator Toolkit with multimedia resources, lesson plans, and a guide to support you in bringing this assignment to your students, visit our Great Listen Library of Materials.
Connect directly with other educators and StoryCorps staff in our StoryCorps in the Classroom Facebook group, and find answers to your technical support questions in our Help Center.
StoryCorps in your Home
The Great Thanksgiving Listen was developed for students to interview an elder and contribute their voices to the Library of Congress, but anyone with an interest in storytelling can participate. We actively encourage people of all ages to create your own unique oral history with an elder or loved one in your life, and help transform the holidays into a time of intergenerational sharing.
Any Questions?
Sponsors and Partners
2020 Sponsors
Gruber Family Foundation
2020 Partners
American Federation of Teachers
Chalkbeat
Digital Promise
Facing History and Ourselves
Google
Journalism Education Association
Museum of the City of New York
National Council for the Social Studies
National Education Association
National Educational Telecommunications Association
Share My Lesson
Teach For America
Teachers Pay Teachers
With Groundbreaking Support for the StoryCorps App from
Partners and Supporters of StoryCorps Connect
