I have found it difficult to know how much research and facilitation process material to publish. One of my convictions in this project is that we shouldn’t overly and artificially separate unified experiences: process from product, narrative from analysis, and all the being and doing that accompanies research from the research itself.
One process milestone I’ve known since I reviewed the recording that I simply had to include were materials related to my proposal hearing—that is, the experience itself, not just the document and presentation slides. Indeed, I think it’s a big methodological mistake and no small act of academic dishonesty that we often try to so hard to remove from our final deliverables, rather than surface within them, the moments that especially shaped our thinking and changed our inquisitive trajectory.
I didn’t make this recording, my advisor, Lalitha Vasudevan, did. I am incredibly grateful, because it contains all sorts of seeds and tidbits I can trace to later interpretive and documentary decisions.
As with all recordings, I have edited this one for de-identification purposes (with respect to Tapestry, not the committee!). I have also edited this one for content in order to emphasize what seems especially important and to make the process of publishing recordings and transcripts a bit more manageable.
Teachers College protocols add an additional, school-assigned member for the final review and defense
Many thanks to my committee as it was constituted at the time:
- Dr. Lalitha Vasudevan (advisor) – Professor of Technology and Education, Vice Dean for Digital Innovation, and Director of the Media and Social Change Lab (MASCLab).
- Dr. Ioana Literat – Assistant Professor of Communication, Media, and Learning Technologies Design; Associate Director of MASCLab.
- Dr. Detra Price-Dennis – Associate Professor of Education, MASCLab Affiliate Faculty
Clip: Lalitha on attending to the adults in the lives of youth research participants
Lalitha: This reminds me of a conversation I had with myself 16 years ago. So obviously this is egocentric. And really, it was about the ways in which our pursuit of trying to understand something about the lives of young people always necessarily involve the adults in their lives.
And I think, especially in this case, given your personal connection to the people who have founded this site where you’re doing this work, I actually think it’s a real strength that you are both, you both have that access, but you have already an awareness of how you are attending to questions of access and ethics and relationship and credibility, that I think I would just encourage you to keep attending to and thinking about in terms of methodological practice.
Kyle’s Reflection: The primary mechanism I’ve tried to employ in this regard is transparent negotiations, both verbal and in writing, when we reach important transition point in the study. The majority of this activity has taken place in conversation with Sam and Hannah, but team facilitators and the teams themselves also frequently joined me in these negotiations.
Clip: Lalitha on materiality and movement in this study, as it relates to her experience of foster care research
Lalitha: I also was really aware, especially when you showed the map, just how important movement and geography is to this. And I think also in terms of the lives of young people in foster care, how, how permanency is not a given, right?
So, um, one of the things that, that strive to establish in the lives of young people in foster care was, safety, permanency, and wellbeing. And one of the things they talk about and, and various, foster care organizations and jurisdictions have attended to these differently, but they always talk about how they can sort of figure out what safety means, imperfectly. But they sort of say like, you know, we know it means, protecting kids from physical harm mostly.
We know permanency means. It’s not always easy to achieve, but we have a metric on stability of home and housing, right? And this is something that is not a given for young people in foster care.
And the thing that often ends up being the squishy piece is wellbeing. They’re like “We know we need it. We know it’s important. We have no idea how to get there.” And so here, like, you know, there’s all these models of wellbeing that are out there. This isn’t central to your study, but in a way it’s kind of in the air of your study, because it’s foster youth. And so that was my going to be my second point: To the extent that you can be aware of movement and geography, as you’re trying to attend to … in some ways digital storytelling is providing a kind of stability, right. And really thinking about how that attends to it. So that’s my second quick point.
Kyle’s Reflection: This point is incredibly resonant with subsequent observations and experiences in the project. My conversation with the co-directors on February 12, 2020, really focused on this issue from a research design perspective. We eventually made the move together of recognizing that perhaps digital storytelling activities needed to be designed with the disruptions of life (both youth and mentors) in mind. And as Lalitha intriguingly anticipated, I do believe that my work with Team Z represented a certain kind of stability during a critical phase of the pandemic.
Clip: Ethics, Storytelling, and Research Practice Partnerships
(I regret that in the time I had available, I was not able to clean up the transcript of this clip, or share any of the other rich exchanges from the event. However, some of those exchanges do appear in the documentary itself—see especially Chapter 3.)
Data collection
- Field notes: No
- Recording: Yes!
- Photographs: No