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, March 22, 2016

Ready, Set?

Personalizing Our Final Interview Questions


The mentors, Dr. Wagner, and the Floyd Story Center staff met with our high school students on St. Patrick’s Day, with the class learning a bit more personal history about each interviewee, discussing what we’d like to learn in our time with them, and finalizing our question lists. We reiterated the do’s and do-not’s of interviewing: to make our interview guests feel welcome and comfortable, give them our full attention, be an active listener, ask open-ended questions, and to make sure to use follow-up on questions to learn as much as possible in our precious time with our interviewee.   
 
Thursday, March 24th, is our big day—what we have been building up to. RU mentors and FCHS students will divide into two groups, and will spend the whole day working to capture four different interviews on film, video, and with audio for the Old Church Gallery community oral history archives.

Dr. Wagner explains the importance of building interview rapport.

blogpost: Fiona Mahar-Milani
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