Roots with Wings Internship

Bijou Williams,
Class Photographer

Dear Roots with Wings Friend, 

Our Radford University Roots with Wings Spring 2020 intern, Bijou Williams, created a short presentation about her experience with us.  

Here is a link to it.  Please enjoy watching.  It is 6 minutes long. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHXn0H--Zro

We have learned that RU’s Citizen Leader Program, that sponsored Bijou’s internship, is planning to highlight her video on their website.  That’s a nice kudos for Bijou and another avenue to teach about the Old Church Gallery, which Bijou really wanted her presentation to do.

Every Spring, our Radford University mentors and interns make presentations for the RU Student Engagement Forum.  During the Forum's three days in April, hundreds of RU students discuss their research and applied work.  This year, with the University shuttered, it seemed the Forum would be cancelled for the first time in its 29-year history.  But, always seeking ways to encourage students, Joe Wirgau and Margaret Pate, from the Office of Undergraduate Research and Scholarship that organizes the Forum, and our friends at the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning, Samantha Blevins, Charley Cosmato, and John Hildreth, developed a virtual/on-line Student Engagement Forum.   Bijou’s presentation was part of the virtual Forum.  We are proud of Bijou and the other students who stepped up to assure that this Highlander tradition would continue. 

How Do Y’all Talk?

Greetings everyone, hope you all have had a wonderful week!  A picture truly generates 1,000 words and we take that into careful consideration.  Physical things such as pictures or artifacts really help our team during the interview process. They can illuminate a story’s words.  They can generate stories of their own. 

Katie Thomas, Mary Dickerson, Alice Slusher, Melinda Wagner, and Jason Burgard
discuss saving photos and artifacts.  (Bijou Williams is our photographer.)

Our co-coordinator, Alice Slusher, showed our group
 how to properly use a scanning machine last

Thursday and it was very helpful!  The scanner will scan any photo with the click of a button. It's also adjustable so it gives us the ability to scan books, scrapbooks, or any type of item with a spine.  Sometimes details in pictures come to light once the photos from the scanner are uploaded on the computer and enlarged on the screen.  You don't know what will show up on an old photo until it's converted to a picture with high resolution.  I love this about the scanner; interviewees sometimes notice interesting things in the photos that they did not realize were there beforehand! 

We talked about linguistic dialects, since we will hear different styles of talk in the recorded interviews.  Our group took a dialect quiz from the New York Times.  It asked us a series of questions on how we pronounce certain words and it ended up teaching each of us something new.  At the end of the quiz, it shows a map of the patterns of your dialect which I found fascinating. 

Here's the link to the quiz, definitely check it out if you have some downtime! 

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/dialect-quiz-map.html?register=email&auth=register-email

When you see the results, you might want to – take them with a grain of salt – which is one of  many sayings (or “colloquialisms”) from Melinda Wagner’s mother’s dialect.  By the way, if you have difficulty seeing the quiz, from our experience, a Google account will open the quiz, (and of course a New York Times account will open it).  See you all next week.

Technology New and Old

Hello everyone! As we mentioned last week, we really appreciate holding our workshops in the high school library where we make good use of the computer display technology.  But last week we enjoyed a new venue.  We met in the heart space of our sponsor, the Old Church Gallery.  The Gallery motto, "We Remember, We Collect, We Protect," made perfect sense to me when I visited the Gallery.  The Gallery and the Floyd Story Center tell stories through artifacts and oral history.  The Gallery holds artifacts that allow our community to see the beautiful craftsmanship and hard work that many people dedicated their lives to.  I saw a display of beautifully hand woven baskets made by Charlie Hylton, Clovis D. Boyd, and many others.  We were able to see the “Sweet and Sassy” exhibit -- of feed sacks turned into functional art -- before it is replaced by a new exhibit for the seasonal opening of the Gallery. The exhibit filled the main room with beautiful pillowcases, aprons, boys’ shirts, and quilts, to name a few. They are all handmade with care and love. The colors on these quilts are so vibrant.  I even learned that onion skins were used as dye to project a beautiful yellow color.  Visiting the Gallery really made me realize how rich the cultural history is in Floyd County and how many families have ties in the County. 

Baskets, quilts, and the dancing dolls made by R.O. Slusher, Jr. 

After Catherine Pauley gave us our Gallery tour and Alice Slusher provided a tea break, we got down to business learning how to use professional audio recorders and microphones.  We want to know how to use the recording devices properly so that we will have successful interviews with no lost audio.

Mary Dickerson, Katie Thomas, and Jason Burgard 

learn about recording equipment in the 

Gallery’s newly renovated work room.

A sign of the times arose when Floyd Elementary fourth grader, Claire Burgard, sat in with us to learn about the recording equipment and readily absorbed the how-to’s.  Then after class, Claire was puzzled by an item on the Gallery wall.  What IS that?  Catherine demonstrated the use of a telephone switchboard and party-line telephone – where everyone’s phones rang when anyone’s phone rang.  

"Granny, are you there?  Aunt Dorie, are you there?  

Aunt Idie, are you there?" 

Catherine Pauley demonstrates for Claire Burgard 

how several people on a party-line could learn the latest news

 simultaneously (like E-mail Reply All or a Facebook post).

Crucial Question Creation

        Interviewing is a science and an art.  Thought and heart go into creating questions that encourage our elders to tell their stories in the ways they want to tell them.  Our group agreed that it is crucial to ask heartfelt questions about, for example, relationships to places or family history.  In this way, family by family, resident by resident, the history of Floyd County is watched over and archived at the Floyd Story Center in the Old Church Gallery.  Part of this semester’s question developing process was captured in this photo by RU intern Bijou Williams at our last Thursday’s workshop.

         Check Elementary Teachers, Katie Thomas and Mary Dickerson, reviewed their potential interview questions on the big screen while Alice Slusher, Catherine Pauley, Melinda Wagner, and Floyd County High School teacher, Jason Burgard, made recommendations.  

We very much appreciate meeting in the Floyd County High School Library and using the big screen computer technology.

Thank you Mr. Hollandsworth and Ms. Cox!