On September 21, 2019, I went on my first mentor team outing. It ended up being the only in-person outing I attended with Team Z. (I did, however, subsequently engage with team members briefly at the 2019 holiday party. We also worked together extensively on Zoom during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, i.e., from June 6, 2020 to September 12, 2020, to produce one of the principal artifacts of this study.) I recorded this voice memo in two parts at the outing location before the team arrived.
This audio was created outdoors with a smartphone—which is to say that it doesn’t sound very good. I Include it mostly to register in a human way just how nervous I was before this meeting. The specter of a difficult “launch day” during my pilot study was definitely looming large in my consciousness.
Annotated Transcript
Well, it’s about 1:35 on September 21, and I’m standing outside of the cafe where I’m going to meet, uh, [Zoe] and her mentors. This is the first time that we’re gonna meet as a team. I’ve met her before as part of All Tapestry events, but, uh, but this is the first time we’re actually going to be like talking about the project and, um, you know, trying to get on board.
In short, I didn’t have much relational credibility last time, and only a few people, the people who already knew me, agreed to participate in the storytelling project for my pilot study. It was embarrassing, and frankly scary.
And that was such a challenge last time that I, uh, I’m a little bit, a little bit nervous, although a little less so than last time. I think we’ve got a better plan [laughs] this time around. The goal for today is basically introduce ourselves to each other, get to know each other a little bit.
I’m going to talk about, you know, my role, which is, you know, as, as an education researcher who’s interested in how people learn to make media outside of school kinds of settings. I’m going to talk about how I’m a classmate of [Hannah] and she knew about the kind of work that I did and was really interested in partnering so that we could start to, or continue to, tell some of the stories about what [bus pulls up] what Tapestry teams do and what their relationships are like and what they do together [sound of bus announcement necessitated cutting here] and what they mean to each other. Yeah, that’s—I have to edit out that, uh, public transit always gets me, there’s always identifying information, being spoken by loudspeakers.
Anyway, I am a little nervous and a little excited, and I think it’s gonna be great and we’ll see how things go. I’ll probably have another voice memo afterward, uh, definitely lots of, lots of notes and we’ll start charting a way forward about how this group makes sense of their experience of being a little community together. [cut]
I’m still waiting, so I thought I’d do a couple of observations. There’s lots of beautiful city-specific art on the wall. Looks like probably done by local artists with little write-ups. There’s a sign inside that says “eat and love” and another one says “happiness is homemade.”
Yeah, there’s a sort of range of folks here. In fact, now I’m wishing I had reserved a table. There is one high-top table in the corner that has four stools, so we might have to sit there. The other tables all look like they take him. So we’ll see how that goes.
It looks like a youngish clientele on average. A couple other folks as well. Looks like a mixed race and ethnicity group. It’s incredibly warm here today. People are in shorts and t-shirts and listening to headphones and, you know, doing all the stuff people do in coffee shops, it looks like.
Image credit: “The Espresso Station” by Bex Walton via Flickr (CC BY 2.0). For illustration only—not a research artifact.