Stories from Deep in the Heart
Texas Folklife continues an exciting program that teaches high school students and teachers how to document their favorite family and community traditions.
Visit our PRX page to hear audio samples or search for "Stories from Deep in the Heart" on the iTunes store to subcribe to free podcasts! Also "Stories" is on Facebook and Twitter. Please follow our pages!
Stories from Deep in the Heart Summer Institute
July 25-29, 2011
Stories from Day 5: Deep in the Heart
Then came the community. And they taught us.
First, the professional radio journalists and folklorists. For five days, they mentored us into new ways of making and doing: collecting oral histories, recording, selecting, adjusting, trimming, narrating, editing.
And on Friday, then came the honored guests and parents and community members and young people from all around. On a perfect summer evening, they came to sit beneath the arches of the stunning Mexican American Cultural Center – and they were listening, celebrating, and then starting new conversations in response to our radio stories.
How did we get to this place?
Friday, 8:45 a.m. Editorial Meeting.
NPR producer Elisabeth Perez Luna sits conferring with each production team of teachers. How will our narration proceed? Whose story are we trying to tell? Whose story is yet missing?
11:45 a.m. Production.
Production teams of teachers finalize narration and edit selects (a.k.a. our favorite audio bites).
We are learning how to write for radio, and it’s different from writing in books and print. How do we make it sound like a conversation between two people? How do we invest the narration with a feeling of intimacy? How do we tame the unwieldy sentences we write for readers, so they are clean and clear to an audience of listeners? (See, there’s no rewind in radio unless it’s a podcast).
At our sides are partners from KUT and the RTF department at the University of Texas at Austin. Our teams is a picture of collaborative composition: one reading the narration, one timing it, one playing the audio clips on cue, one editing. We lean on each other. We stop and start simultaneously. We are replaying and revising, in sync and (just) in time.
2:00 p.m. On Air.
Producers at our local NPR station, KUT, are waiting for us at the station to record. On the University of Texas campus, we enter a room with a glowing ON AIR sign at the door. Our producer friends await us here at a giant mixing board, the likes of which I’ve only seen on television. Elisabeth Perez Luna coaches each of us through recoding our narration. We get nervous, dry mouths. And we laugh (a lot) at our tongue-tied false starts. As it turns out, teachers have radio voices too.
With just hours to go before our premiere, our experts
model how to make the final mix sound professional. Here are the trade secrets, shared in the open for the teachers.
7:00 p.m. Celebration.
I stop taking notes and just listen to the voices take over. It is bliss.
Even across our very different audio stories (a Fajita King, a Texas DJ, a Palace Theatre, and a Festival), it is easy to notice some of the things we share in common: empathy, diversity, artistry, humanity.
Today, I think of how these guiding principles are in themselves a kind of living tradition. This tradition is a way of being and doing that we as a community can hold open for the next generations of storytellers. This is storytelling, from deep in the heart.
Many thanks to Texas Folklife, Nancy Bless, Cristina Balli, Elisabeth Perez Luna, Andrew Garrison, KUT, the teachers and students, the Mexican American Cultural Center, AISD, and all who made this Summer Institute possible. We won’t forget these stories…
~ Audra Roach
Previous Days' Blogs
Audra Roach has lived the past decade as an educator in diverse Central Texas communities. Currently, she is a teacher educator and doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin where she researches writing in the age of new media.
Texas Folklife continues an exciting program that teaches high school students and teachers how to document their favorite family and community traditions.
Visit our PRX page to hear audio samples or search for "Stories from Deep in the Heart" on the iTunes store to subcribe to free podcasts! Also "Stories" is on Facebook and Twitter. Please follow our pages!
Stories from Deep in the Heart Summer Institute
July 25-29, 2011
Stories from Day 5: Deep in the Heart
Then came the community. And they taught us.
First, the professional radio journalists and folklorists. For five days, they mentored us into new ways of making and doing: collecting oral histories, recording, selecting, adjusting, trimming, narrating, editing.
And on Friday, then came the honored guests and parents and community members and young people from all around. On a perfect summer evening, they came to sit beneath the arches of the stunning Mexican American Cultural Center – and they were listening, celebrating, and then starting new conversations in response to our radio stories.
How did we get to this place?
Friday, 8:45 a.m. Editorial Meeting.
NPR producer Elisabeth Perez Luna sits conferring with each production team of teachers. How will our narration proceed? Whose story are we trying to tell? Whose story is yet missing?
11:45 a.m. Production.Production teams of teachers finalize narration and edit selects (a.k.a. our favorite audio bites).
We are learning how to write for radio, and it’s different from writing in books and print. How do we make it sound like a conversation between two people? How do we invest the narration with a feeling of intimacy? How do we tame the unwieldy sentences we write for readers, so they are clean and clear to an audience of listeners? (See, there’s no rewind in radio unless it’s a podcast).
At our sides are partners from KUT and the RTF department at the University of Texas at Austin. Our teams is a picture of collaborative composition: one reading the narration, one timing it, one playing the audio clips on cue, one editing. We lean on each other. We stop and start simultaneously. We are replaying and revising, in sync and (just) in time.
2:00 p.m. On Air.
Producers at our local NPR station, KUT, are waiting for us at the station to record. On the University of Texas campus, we enter a room with a glowing ON AIR sign at the door. Our producer friends await us here at a giant mixing board, the likes of which I’ve only seen on television. Elisabeth Perez Luna coaches each of us through recoding our narration. We get nervous, dry mouths. And we laugh (a lot) at our tongue-tied false starts. As it turns out, teachers have radio voices too.
With just hours to go before our premiere, our experts
model how to make the final mix sound professional. Here are the trade secrets, shared in the open for the teachers. 7:00 p.m. Celebration.
I stop taking notes and just listen to the voices take over. It is bliss.
Even across our very different audio stories (a Fajita King, a Texas DJ, a Palace Theatre, and a Festival), it is easy to notice some of the things we share in common: empathy, diversity, artistry, humanity.
Today, I think of how these guiding principles are in themselves a kind of living tradition. This tradition is a way of being and doing that we as a community can hold open for the next generations of storytellers. This is storytelling, from deep in the heart.
Many thanks to Texas Folklife, Nancy Bless, Cristina Balli, Elisabeth Perez Luna, Andrew Garrison, KUT, the teachers and students, the Mexican American Cultural Center, AISD, and all who made this Summer Institute possible. We won’t forget these stories…
~ Audra Roach
Previous Days' Blogs
Audra Roach has lived the past decade as an educator in diverse Central Texas communities. Currently, she is a teacher educator and doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin where she researches writing in the age of new media.