WVU honors World War II veterans

In order to further his students' education in citizenship, Dr. Robert Watterson, professor and director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship Education, gave his students a unique assignment.

Students were asked to find World War II veterans from West Virginia to interview and create a video presentation on them.

Their projects were displayed Tuesday at the Erickson Alumni Center during the "Salute to West Virginia in World War II" awards ceremony.

"I wanted my students to take the most meaningful moments from their interviews, and then place them into a new lesson plan for a new generation," Watterson said.

Watterson's students are education majors who are student teaching at area high schools. They took what they learned in their interviews and molded it into a lesson plan for their own students.

"It went pretty well, the students were interested," said Beth Durst, a senior interdepartmental studies and secondary education major who used her lesson plan Tuesday at Morgantown High School.

The interview was a bit unnerving due to the sensitive subject matter, Durst said.

"The students had to be very tactful, and that was part of the idea. It gets them to develop the skills necessary to conduct the interview," Watterson said.

An oral history is a good way to compile facts about World War II and primary sources are a great source of information, Watterson said.

"Who better to go to if you want the truth?" he said.

"I mean, we have a lieutenant here who served in the Battle of the Bulge."

Versions of the interviews with the veterans were available to view at the ceremony.

A documentary on African-American soldiers in World War II by Joel Beeson, associate professor and head of WVU's Visual Journalism Program, was also shown.

Beeson's students nominated him to the position of director of the West Virginia Veterans Project in 2003, and the idea for the documentary came from interviews conducted during that period, Beeson said.

The documentary, which aired Monday on PBS, has been in the works since 2003 in one form or another, after receiving a grant from the Humanities Council, Beeson said.

"What we found was that a lot of African-American veterans didn't want to speak because it was a segregated military," he said. "And a lot of their experiences were bittersweet."