We all have personal stories, but if you were asked to open up and share one would you? What story would you choose? And how would you tell it?

For this project we told and shared other people’s stories. Over the past few months, before winter break, we have been creating a series of podcasts based on StoryCorps.

Story Corps is public radio show that also makes podcast.

Story Corps mission is to preserves and share peoples stories aswell as building connections between people.

Learning about Story Corps taught me the value of having someone share there story and experience. If we don’t tell our story it will vanish and we will never be able to learn from it.

 

My Mission

My mission was to affectively and efficiently tell the stories of 3 people.

1. My grade 12 partner Brianna, this episode is called “Seycove Stories”.
2. A family member, “Family Identity”
3. A stranger whom I will meet and record during the Winter Exhibition! This last episode is called “Everyone Has a Story”

Before we jumped right into interviewing people we learned how to affectively do an interview with Steve Inskeep.

5 steps to success

1. Ask what question, stay away from yes or no question
2. Listen, let your interviewee finish there thought
3. Follow up in your own words
4. Repeat events back
5. Use silence

Next we listened to short Story Corps podcasts. It was amazing how only 3 minuets stories can be so powerful. We listened to three podcasts and talked about them in this activity:

 

Seycove Stories

 My first interview was very successful. The hardest part was probably coming up with a theme because my grade 12 student, Brianna, didn’t have a specific story. We decided to focus on how her confidence changed through high school. I thought this topic was great because everyone can relate to this.

To help us out Story Corps has a bunch of sample questions that was easy to change to fit our topic.

Now that Brianna and I were ready to record, we looked for a quite place in Seycove. We recorded all the interviews on ferrite recording studio. I was very happy to see that the recording didn’t echo because I have found that can happen in parts of the school. I really enjoyed interviewing Brianna because we were both very relaxed which made it easy to talk. We had a couple days to edit which also was done on ferrite. The app was challenging at first but once I got the hang of it, it was very useful.

My favourite part of this interview is when Brianna told me about how she remembers her grandma telling her when she was little, “dance like nobodies watching”, because it’s a really sweet story and made me think of my grandparents.

Family identity

I decided to interview my Mom about why we aren’t a religious family. My Mom, James and I have always believed in god and followed Christian believes, but only a few years ago my mom and I went to a church. This interview was probably the hardest. Though, this was a interesting story, I found myself having to ask a lot of follow up questions because my mom wasn’t as comfortable doing a interview as Brianna was.

I found it inspiring to to hear how my mom stood up for what she believed because she could have chosen different god parents for James but she didn’t. This interview really taught me that you always can learn from the people around you.

Everyone Has a Story!

This final podcast was a little different then the rest. Not only did we get out of our comfort zone and interview almost strangers who came to the Winter Exhibition. We also looked at a different aspect of an interview. Instead of interviewing people in empty classrooms we made them comfy!

Its very important that your interviewee is comfortable while you do an interview because, they are much more likely to want to talk and share personal stories. Sydney and I shared the foods room together. We moved all but one desk and put a nice table cloth on it. We also put a couch and a couple lamps in our room. Finally we had snacks ice tea and our recording equipment.

Our grade 12 parntner found people who wanted to share their story and brought them to our interview room.

To get prepared for doing multiple interviews I had a list of questions to look back on in case I got stuck.

The best Interview I had was actually with Brianna’s mom, Susan Teegen. She was very comfortable and had a great story about traveling and her experience scuba diving for the first time.

I think this interview went well because I was interested in her story and was able to ask a lot of questions. My favourite part of this interview, is when she told me to not wait till I’m done all my schooling to travel because life gets busy and if not now, when?

For my first draft of this podcast, I got a peer critique from Brianna.

The audio was very choppy because there was a lot of background noise and when I cut the clips you could hear it. Brianna also suggested to change the ending and add a conclusion to wrap it up.

I really enjoyed this unit and learned first hand that everyones story is is worth telling and if you take time to hear it you never know what you might come across