You’ve found Becoming Tapestry, a multimodal ethnography and documentary podcast submitted by the Rev. Kyle Matthew Oliver in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Education in the Communication, Media, and Learning Technologies Design Program at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Since late 2018, I have been engaged as a participant-observer in Tapestry, a faith-adjacent foster youth mentoring network in a West Coast metropolitan area. This website weaves together the various layers of that dissertation project: descriptive representations of my empathetic engagements on-site and online, a network of artifacts I have collected or (co-)created with research participants and advisors, transparent discussion of the various analytic activities my inquiry has prompted, and an assortment of deliverables for a variety of researcher and/or practitioner audiences.
Part of the point of representing the project as a website in addition to its “canonical” form as a podcast and corresponding manuscript is that you can choose your pathways through the material in a way that the linear and lengthy treatments make more difficult.
Every dimension of this research aims to center the experience and insight of members of Tapestry—and also St. Sebastian’s Summer Camp, where I conducted my pilot study—to the extent that academic conventions and participant protection protocols allow. Getting to know and to hear from them with as little preamble as possible is the joy of engaging research according to narrative and interactive formats.
So might I suggest that you press play on the podcast, peruse the project timeline, or just follow the links available here as your spirit moves you. Thanks for your interest in Becoming Tapestry!
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