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.

Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Meet & Greet Day

Learning the Stories

If you could sit down to chat with anyone whoever lived, who would you choose? You could ask questions about their childhood, their favorite memories, and their biggest achievements.

FCHS and RU mentors meet Floyd County residents
This comes true with our opportunity to sit down with local residents of Floyd County in the Roots with Wings project. Our Community and Neighborhood oral history project theme continues our appreciation of the stories told by generations.

FCHS and RU mentors meet Floyd County residents
On March 15th we had Meet and Greet Day! The Media and Technology class from Floyd County High School (FCHS) had the opportunity to sit down with four local residents this past Thursday. The class of 12 split into groups so they could rotate and talk to each guest.

The day is especially important for our interview process because we get to know our four interviewees. By getting to meet with them prior to the interview date, we prepare our students and guests for interview day. 

FCHS and RU mentors meet Floyd County residents
Since we have our scheduled interviews coming soon, we want to prepare our guests with possible questions and topics of conversation. Our guests are sharing their decision to live off the land and move into Floyd County, specifically into their own intentional community.

We are listening to the community stories of our guests and will learn how they discovered and then decided to move to Floyd County.

Next Thursday, Interview Day, at Hotel Floyd, our FCHS students will apply the skills and techniques learned this semester to interview our guests. We will use our Audio Recorders - Marantz and Video Cameras - Canon AX30 to record our interviews.  Then the transcribing begins!

Wish our RU mentors and FCHS students luck throughout this process!  
- Eileen Lagos 


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