Appalachian Foodways

In the summer of 2018, PAGE launched a new digital learning opportunity for 7th grade girls: a community-based Oral History Project. Historian Maia Surdam and scholar-activist Danielle Dulken trained our PAGE teaching team on the methods of oral history, using guidelines from the Southern Oral History Program.

For the first year, we decided to focus our project on Appalachian Foodways. PAGE girls consulted books such as Ronni Lundy’s Victuals: An Appalachian Journey with Recipes. They interviewed local women about making and growing food. And they honed new audio and video editing skills needed to transform interviews and photographs into multi-media oral histories that can be shared within their community and beyond.

Watch this video that the PAGE girls and their college intern mentors created as an overview of our project, Appalachian Foodways.