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.

Sunday, March 19, 2017

New Acquaintances

A Meet and Greet Day

For the first time ever, the Roots With Wings Project hosted a Meet and Greet day for the students and interviewees to get acquainted. This quite literally put faces and stories to the names and biographies of our interviewees. 
Frank Hancock shows where he lives in Floyd County
Each of our 2017 interviewees were seated with a large map of Floyd County with students gathered around. The interviewees indicated the place they are from in the county, and the students responded about their own neighborhoods.  It surprised some students to find that they were neighbors with the interviewees or knew something of each other's families.

 Each interviewee brought a few photographs and artifacts with them to help to tell a little bit about themselves. 
Getting to know you smiles

 These artifacts included a split oak egg-carrying basket, a shop-worn cherry pitter, photographs of a home-made rock crusher, a string for making finger patterns such as "Jacob's Ladder," and a large collection of beautiful hand-turned wooden pieces.

It was wonderful to get to know the interviewees a little bit and a great ice breaker for our interviews which we'll be conducting next Thursday.  Our work today succeeded in getting students, mentors, and interviewees ever more excited about the upcoming week! 


Students listen to the interviewees tell a little about themselves
Blogpost: Cara Myrtle
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