Participation Type
Panel
Session Title
From the Front Porch to the Front Lines: Stories from Floyd County, Virginia’s WWII Era
Session Abstract or Summary
The panel will highlight an innovative effort to share knowledge of Appalachian experiences during World War II, both at home and in the theaters of war overseas. Since 1998, the Floyd County, Virginia, Floyd Story Center and Old Church Gallery have preserved the recorded oral history of the community through programs such as the “Roots with Wings: Place-based Education Oral History Project.” The “Roots with Wings” project brought Radford University student mentors, Floyd County Public School staff, and community non-profit volunteers together to teach the discipline of oral history collection to Floyd County High School students. Nine years of the Project focused on interviewing World War II veterans and their families, and creating short movies from the videotaped, audio recorded, and transcribed interviews. The Old Church Gallery and the Floyd Story Center recently received a $5000 matching grant from Virginia Humanities for “From the Front Porch to the Front Lines: Rural Virginia on a Threshold of Change,” a multi-faceted effort to promote and facilitate public access to this trove of collected oral history interviews and primary documents. The panel will describe the Roots with Wings Project and discuss its benefits for the multi-generational constituents. A representative movie will be shown. The process of preparing and publicly sharing 39 movies with aid from grant funding will be described. Each of the panel members has played an essential and interconnected role in the Project.
Presentation #1 Title
Roots with Wings: Floyd County, Virginia Place-based Education Oral History Project
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
The Roots with Wings: Floyd County Place-based Education Oral History Project has continually worked toward the goal of capturing stories from our past and our community. Roots with Wings is dedicated to the partnership between high school students, college mentors, and community members. These groups work together to collect stories from our past and ensure they are heard by future generations. High school students are taught to appropriately interview, record, video, transcribe and movie make, creating a historical treasure for families and the community. Roots with Wings seeks to embody the ideals of place-based education in which education is rooted within the community and fosters the development of a sense of place. Place-based education draws upon the local history, culture, and environment of a place as a curriculum source that seeks to connect students to their community. Our high school students use resources and individuals within our community to supplement the educational curriculum and create student-guided learning opportunities. Within Roots with Wings, students are asked to become creators of knowledge and exercise their own voices through inquiry and action. Our teachers, college mentors, and community members serve as support systems and co-learners throughout the entire interview and moviemaking process. The partnerships among the Old Church Gallery, Floyd County High School, and Radford University have created a successful collaboration that allows students an opportunity to appreciate and highly regard the place in which they live through our Roots with Wings project.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Mary Dickerson received her Masters of Science degree in Education from Radford University. She is a sixth grade math and history teacher at Check Elementary School in Floyd County, Virginia. She works with students in a multitude of ways in and out of the classroom and community. While receiving her Bachelor's degree in Sociology from Radford University, Mary was a mentor and community liaison in the Roots with Wings Project.
Presentation #2 Title
Saving Stories: Stepping Through the Digital Door
Presentation #2 Abstract or Summary
For our 2019 ASA Panel, Kathleen Ingoldsby presents a behind-the-scenes guide for producing a place-based oral history media project. She describes the steps her team used for community engagement to bring the collected material to the public eye. She also highlights the all-important preparatory work necessary to sustain a fully archived collection, including extensive organizational review and innovative web access. Her panel presentation recounts efforts to corral twenty years of oral history collections in Floyd County, Virginia, by the Floyd Story Center at the Old Church Gallery. To this end, the group received a grant from Virginia Humanities for “From the Front Porch to the Front Lines: Rural Virginia on a Threshold of Change,” a multi-faceted effort to promote and facilitate public access to a trove of oral history interviews and primary documents. Kathleen explains the steps required to produce and archive interview media, and to create a two-DVD set with a twelve-page biographical booklet. Goals for the DVD project included community distribution, web access, placement in regional library holdings, and public presentations at each of three Montgomery-Floyd Regional Library branches. The DVD set is the result of a decade’s collaboration with high school and college classes to collect the stories of Floyd County residents who came of age during the Great Depression and World War II. Early Roots With Wings oral history interviews, 2007-2015, focused on Floyd County residents’ WWII-era experiences. The project’s current interview series explores “Community and Neighborhood” themes.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #2
Kathleen Ingoldsby, a graduate of Massachusetts College of Art, Hollins University, and the Modern Archives Institute, oversees the archives at the Floyd Story Center at the Old Church Gallery in Floyd, Virginia. She has documented soapstone artifacts, completed an architectural survey of the Town of Floyd, archived historic images for the Floyd County Historical Society, recorded county life in video and audio, and presented at TEDx Floyd, “Patterns in Place, Evidencing Ingenuity.” During 2017-18, Kathleen was Project Director and Producer for "From the Front Porch to the Front Lines,” a DVD oral history film project funded in part by Virginia Humanities.
Presentation #3 Title
Elders’ Stories Foster Youth Resilience
Presentation #3 Abstract or Summary
Research identifying resilience as a major factor in leading a satisfying life laid a foundation for the Roots with Wings: Place-based Education Oral History Project. Fostering resilience in young people can be accomplished by familiarizing them with the experiences of elders in their own community. In interviews elders from the World War II era described experiences that occurred when they were the same age as the listening students. The keynote speech for the public presentations of the “From the Front Porch to the Front Lines” World War II movie series wove together each veteran’s story with the history of World War II, and underscored what the student moviemakers gained from these encounters with their elders. Samples of what the students heard in each of the interviewee’s stories in the context of World War II history and geography will be presented. The student interviewers and moviemakers absorbed lessons of coping, resilience, and survival. When the veterans described innovations to overcome dangers and discomforts, the students learned coping and survival skills that signal resilience. When the students heard that the veterans had at times used common sense instead of following orders (and gone unpunished because their common sense led to the better outcome), and when they heard of veterans using the skills they had learned when they came back to their home town, they were shown raw and poignant examples of coping, survival, and resilience.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #3
Melinda Bollar Wagner received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Michigan. She is professor emerita of anthropology and Appalachian Studies at Radford University in Radford, Virginia, and past president of the Appalachian Studies Association. Her research has included work on religion in America and sense of place in Appalachia. Melinda has received awards in recognition of innovative undergraduate teaching, having led groups of students in collaborative projects with communities since 1983. Melinda was humanities scholar and keynote speaker for the “From the Front Porch to the Front Lines” Project.
Roots with Wings: Floyd County, Virginia Place-based Education Oral History Project
The Roots with Wings: Floyd County Place-based Education Oral History Project has continually worked toward the goal of capturing stories from our past and our community. Roots with Wings is dedicated to the partnership between high school students, college mentors, and community members. These groups work together to collect stories from our past and ensure they are heard by future generations. High school students are taught to appropriately interview, record, video, transcribe and movie make, creating a historical treasure for families and the community. Roots with Wings seeks to embody the ideals of place-based education in which education is rooted within the community and fosters the development of a sense of place. Place-based education draws upon the local history, culture, and environment of a place as a curriculum source that seeks to connect students to their community. Our high school students use resources and individuals within our community to supplement the educational curriculum and create student-guided learning opportunities. Within Roots with Wings, students are asked to become creators of knowledge and exercise their own voices through inquiry and action. Our teachers, college mentors, and community members serve as support systems and co-learners throughout the entire interview and moviemaking process. The partnerships among the Old Church Gallery, Floyd County High School, and Radford University have created a successful collaboration that allows students an opportunity to appreciate and highly regard the place in which they live through our Roots with Wings project.
