As students head back to school, here comes a big homework assignment: StoryCorps wants tens of thousands of teenagers across America to interview a grandparent or elder this Thanksgiving and upload their recordings to the Library of Congress.
The nonprofit oral history organization is asking high school history teachers to have their students record the interviews with StoryCorps’ free smartphone application. Recordings sent to the library will become part of a publicly accessible archive at the American Folklife Center.
“The Great Thanksgiving Listen” is an assignment that will last for generations, StoryCorps founder Dave Isay said.
“When young people do these interviews and they hit ‘send’ at end of the interview to the library, they know that their great-great-great-great-great-grandkids are going to get to eavesdrop on this conversation someday and get to understand where they come from, who their ancestors were,” Isay said in a telephone interview.
He hopes it becomes an annual tradition that brings families closer together by using modern technology to preserve the wisdom of elders.