Conducting Interviews:

Interviews are a way for students to collect primary resources and connect directly with the history of their family and community. This video follows two girls from the Kensington Intermediate School as they prepare cameras and lists of questions and set out to interview elderly family members about their experiences of life at the turn of the century. The interview subjects speak about the contrasts between the world they grew up in and the world of the girls today, and they emphasize the importance for young people of what came before them. The girls, after concluding their interviews, discuss what goes into preparing, recording, and editing an interview, as well as the sorts of difficulties one can encounter (a tight-lipped great-grandmother, for instance) and strategies for dealing with them.