Roots with Wings, a Floyd County Place-Based Education Project:: Intergenerational Connections

Floyd Story Center

Since 1998, a community oral history collection partnership of the Old Church Gallery, Ltd., Radford University’s Center for Social and Cultural Research, Honors Program, Scholar-Citizen Initiative, Appalachian Regional and Rural Studies Center, and Floyd County High School. Our archives now hold over 100 interviews.

In our Roots with Wings project, college mentors, high school staff, and community volunteers meet weekly during the school year to teach the discipline of oral history collection.


Students learn ethical, methodologically sound interview techniques, practice and complete several interviews, transcribe the audiotapes, create searchable content logs, archive interviewee resources and period photographs, learn the technology of audio and video recording, research historical backgrounds, acquire proficiency in iMovie and storytelling, and finally extract a theme from an hour long interview to create a seven minute movie production.

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Focus, Theme Team, Focus

WHAT'S YOUR STORY?

Remember at the beginning of spring semester when we talked about theme and story?  Well we are at that stage now!  Last week RU mentors led their film crews in a focus group session to begin weaving together a story from the footage shot on Interview Day.  

FCHS and RU students gathered around computers to playback footage and audio of interviewees in order to brainstorm a theme and construct a story.

Each four-person crew will further divide into a two-person editing crew -- so that each interviewee will receive two films (two new and different perspectives of their lives).  During focus groups, with lots of probing questions from the RU mentors, each team produced a preliminary theme statement and discussed possible ways to illustrate that statement.


This focus group created their own little sound booth to better review footage and discuss theme.

 The RU students' semester is quickly drawing to a close (sooner than the FCHS semester.  Stay tuned for the final fun days and word of our film celebration in May, gathering everyone together for the students' film debuts. 
Posted by

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)