The paper is yet another output of the research project called Everyday life of basic schools in the normalization period as seen by teachers. Applying oral history to research in history of contemporary education (the project has been supported by the Czech Science Foundation, no. 14-05926S).

Research focusing on contemporary history (including this project) involves both work with traditional sources and history research methods (e.g. of Ranke school) and searching for new resources and methodological approaches (Le Goff, 1983). Methodological issues in contemporary history research arehowever close to non-existent in Czech educational sciences. One example may be the failure to use oral history. This method is, nevertheless, an important resource for getting to know events of the past and represents a topic to be discussed in the context of developing methodology of history research in education and school education. Oral history is a method of key importance to the project whose first results we presented at the ECER conference in Porto (2014). We focused on partial results of a pilot study focusing on exploring everyday lives of basic school teachers (ISCED 1 and 2) during in the Czech Republic during the normalization period.

Although oral history is the method central to our research, we do draw on traditional methods and resources for understanding the past. Resources as such (including oral-history resources) are the main topic of this paper. We have asked the question what resources are available to a historian researching the contemporary history of school education in former Czechoslovakia. At the first glance it may seem that the availability (and the information value) of resources on socialist formal education is must be uncompromised because the period is a recent one. The resources have not long been exposed to ravages of time for long and there have not been many reasons to destroy the materials (on purpose). But as the partial results of our project suggest, the reality is relatively complicated and researching the contemporary history of formal education may be far from easy. Availability of resources mediating knowledge of history of contemporary formal education and their informative value thus become of crucial importance. We believe these issues may pose a challenge even to researchers working in other European countries.

The main objective of this paper is to describe and explain availability and information value of resources mediating understanding the history of primary school education in the Czech Republic in 1969-1989, in the region of the former South Moravia region (one of the largest regions of former Czechoslovakia). The other objectives include exploring acquisition and analysis of selected types of resources including oral-history resources.

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