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, February 13, 2018

Introduction to Interviewing

Good Conversations Start with Good Listening

On Thursday, February 8th, Floyd County High School students worked on enhancing skill sets for interviews. Mentors demonstrated what to expect and gain from an interview. And for the RU mentors, this day meant hands-on experience in managing a classroom. RU mentors participated in role-play interview examples demonstrated by Dr. Melinda Wagner and a mentor, displaying qualities of a good and bad interview to the FCHS students.


The mentors divided the class into groups to label as many of the good and bad qualities of the interview process that they viewed in the role playing. The entertainment continued as the students split up for a friendly competition in the classroom. The students were told the group with the most on their list wins! One group of FCHS students had a record breaking 31 items on their list

What was the prize for this competition? An award that lasts a lifetime--the experience of teamwork, creativity, speaking and listening, writing, and critical-thinking.

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