Looking the clear communication, this feels like Hannah and Sam’s good habits rubbing off on me.
I arrived at Sweet Brew Café at about 1:35. Lucy, the team facilitator, had sent me the location, not far from my house, earlier that morning. I scoped out the café and then stood outside to wait. It was unusually hot. The café was about two-thirds full, with most of the tables occupied. I recorded a couple voice memos about my plan for the outing and the café occupancy and regretted not grabbing a table. Then a table opened up so I came in and snagged it. I wasn’t sure about how strict this place might be about customers, so I told them I was going to wait to order until my group arrived. The barista said that was fine. I jotted my plan down on paper and was just finishing that up when the team arrived.
Notice the material and mutualistic factors in the food negotiation. For the mentors, the question here is not just “Zoe wants a milkshake, should we buy her one?” Yesenia’s physical circumstances matter too.
I introduced myself to the group. Yesenia didn’t seem to remember me from having sat next to me at dinner—or if she did, she didn’t signal as much. We conferred about who was ordering things. Zoe got excited about smoothies at first but then asked if she could have a milk shake. Yesenia agreed and ordered both the milkshake and a sandwich for herself. She said she was coming from Krav Maga class and was hungry.
I heard Liz ask Zoe about how school was going, and she said her grades were some good and some bad (two A’s, two F’s). Liz then said, “Oooh, tell me about the A’s.” I ordered an iced coffee and came back to the table. I listened as the group chatted for a bit, then Yesenia asked me to introduce the project. I pretty much stuck to my plan: I mentioned that I was doing education research, was classmate of Hannah’s, study media making outside of school, and was interested in helping teams make some videos about what Tapestry teams do. They seemed interested and engaged as I shared details. I didn’t notice major signs of suspicion or resistance. I mentioned that today we could just chat and maybe next time we could go on a photo tour. I asked if there were places in this neighborhood they had been.
They talked about the rec center right away. It’s near Zoe’s house. And there are also “woods” nearby. The group talked about when it’s open. Zoe said you can climb the fence, and they can’t arrest you because it’s public space. She mentioned that “people sleep there sometimes.” We agreed it would be nice to go there if it were open. They also said that at the rec center there’s a garden, where they usually play games.
Fashion shows figure prominently in the story we would make together.
We talked about the team’s favorite past outings. Fashion came up a lot. One of the events they went to was some kind of fashion show. And then once they went to Macy’s and had a fashion contest, where they picked a theme and then tried on different clothes and whoever won got “bragging rights.” They talked also about going to the ballet one time (Cinderella), which they agreed was really fun.
See reflection below regarding hope.
I noticed that the group gives Zoe lots of compliments, about her hair and her clothes and her style. When she engages in negative self-talk, they tend not to say anything. It was unclear to me if perhaps I was disrupting a typical script here, although they didn’t seem fazed to be talking to me about “girly stuff”: butterfly clips, various kinds of clothes and outfits, etc.
Over the course of these vignettes they mentioned a bunch of names, which created an occasion for me to ask about the history of the group. Yesenia has been a part since the beginning January 2015, but she mentioned that she also sent a Christmas card to Zoe shortly before that, telling her they’d meet soon. Zoe was just starting high school at the time of this meeting, from which fact the group calculates that she was in fifth grade when the team formed. Originally, the team had Peg and Leslie as mentors, but Leslie left for grad school in 2017 and was replaced by Liz, then Peg died in 2018 and was replaced by Ellie.
In this paragraph and the next, we have examples of Liz and I doing what Yesenia identifies as appropriate self-disclosure in her story, I think largely for the purposes of modeling growth and self-acceptance. This is another place where I’ve coded “communion” but where “hope” might also be applicable.
Sometime during the conversation about fashion, we talked about skater boys. Zoe said that’s a hot trend: wearing baggy clothes, etc. I mentioned that was cool when I was in middle and high school but that I wasn’t. Sometime during this stretch we transitioned to talking about Zoe’s Instagram presence. She told me to guess how many followers. I hesitated and she said if I went over she would cry. Liz said “1.” I played it safe and said 300. It turned out to be about 900. And she’s only following 100+. She only has one post. She explained that this way was “more aesthetic.” Her one post is a video montage, which included someone smoking, dollar bills, maybe a fancy necklace.
There was no comment from the group on the content and general puzzlement about the “one post” thing. She said lots of people have no posts. Liz: “Why?” Zoe: “It shows they don’t really care.” Kyle: “Is that still cool?” Zoe: “Oh yeah.” She said she only knows a few of her followers. She used to have lots of photos, but she took the rest down. Liz expressed puzzlement about so many strangers following her. At one point, Liz got out a sixth grade picture. Zoe: “OMG you look exactly the same!” Her mom wasn’t there that day so she did her hair herself, which explained it, she said.
We talked more fashion and aesthetics. Zoe did a voice search for pink dress. She wanted to show us what she was trying to get her hair to look like (long and wavy, like in a particular Debby Ryan photo). We asked if she liked her and Zoe said she used to be “so hot” but she was on some show (Insatiable on Netflix) and I think what she was saying is that after that she wasn’t hot any more. They talked briefly about another star she likes but she said she doesn’t like her any more either. Lots of hair compliments in here, e.g., “lots of people pay lots of money to have your hair.” It’s really pretty how it is, they said, but also really cute back when it used to be short (she found picture of this somewhere on her phones, I think as an avatar for an app). This may have been where someone identified that Zoe’s room has a nice “soft pastel aesthetic. It came up in this context that she was (or soon would be) sharing that space with her brother (“He’s a 19-year-old man”).
Somehow we got talking about TikToks, and I did my usual interlocutory thing of showing that I knew a little but wanted to know more. She showed us a lot videos she had made: sing alongs, dance routines, etc. Yesenia and Liz were impressed but obviously didn’t know anything about TikTok. She said she was in a really famous one and asked us to guess how many views it had. I guessed first low and then high (20K then 500K), and it turned out to be maybe 100K. It was her and her friend in vertical striped shirts (Liz: “kind of a Clueless look”) and then her friend’s mom came in. Later: “her mom is so hot.” “Really?” someone asked. She shrugged it off, not really.
We talked about other games the group plays: Would You Rather, Two Truths and a Lie, sometimes having to write down a certain number of things in some category.
In general, I think the small amount of “guidance” the mentors share is oriented toward things to do rather than things to avoid.
They asked about Zoe’s relationship with one of her friends. In a previous outing Zoe had mentioned a particular friend and they had encouraged her to reach out and she did. It turns out later the two didn’t get together. The mentors encouraged her again and she said maybe she would reach out. Yesenia said something like “We keep saying, ‘You gotta water the friendships.’” This was one of the moments that felt explicitly mentor-y/advice-y rather than love & inclusion-y.
Zoe mentioned something about a body suit she was wearing recently, which she got at Forever 21. She got Taco Bell grease on it when boyfriend had bought her a chalupa or gordita. (She also said most of the rest of her clothes are hand-me-downs from her grandma. Liz replied “But you always have great clothes that fit you so well.”) She went on a whole discourse about how it didn’t have sour cream, and why would anyone want a greasy taco without that? We mostly agreed, and a discussion ensured about Taco Bell.
Sometime around this point Zoe suggested we make a TikTok. She tried to teach us one of the complicated dances, but we were a bit scared off. She picked a simple one, she taught us, and we dove right in. She put the phone on top of the adjoining refrigerator, turning it from profile to landscape when we didn’t all fit in profile. Liz made a joke about me not expecting this is what we would be doing, and I said I was a media educator and was always thrilled to be making videos. We did one take and she said it was “cute” or something like that. Yesenia asked her to send it to her—not sure if she did.
I asked if she had heard of my friend the priest who was making TikToks. She hadn’t, but I showed the #hotpriestsummer one with 3.2M views. She expressed some recognition, I think at the song.
Sometime in here we had some conversation about friends at school. Zoe got sad and maybe a bit teary and said she hadn’t made any yet. They pointed out that it was still the first month, but she said no, it had already been six weeks. I think I chimed in with new school being tough.
At another time she said she’d try to connect with her friend soon. “We’re going to ….” [makes mischievous face] “… well, I think it’s legal.” Liz: “Legal!” with playfulness but also force.
At some point one of them, or maybe it was me, steered the conversation back to the project. We talked a bit more about outings they had been on in the past. They said they had done a bunch of cooking, including at Church of the Resurrection and a church that I think was St. Luke’s. They said some of the cooking was back when there were more All Tapestry outings. They rattled off a lot of things they had made, including pizzas.
At this point Zoe disengaged a bit, which Liz seemed visibly uncomfortable with. I think I saw her and Yesenia make eye contact, and then Liz asked her to “pay attention to the prompt” I was offering, which was a bunch of riffs on questions like “What was your favorite outing?” “What is a Tapestry team?” “What’s your group’s identity?” “What does the team mean to you?” Yesenia and Liz seemed to make a signal to each other and the meeting wrapped up. I told them I was going to stay and make some notes.
They left, and I emailed Lucy to let her know that things had gone well and that we’d try for a neighborhood tour next time. I gave my availability several weeks out, since Yesenia suggested that she had to go to a shower of some sort, and they had discovered that Ellie couldn’t sub for Yesenia because she would be subbing for Liz. Point being: they said there might not be a meeting the following week. I erased this part from my email draft with Lucy, since I decided I didn’t want her to hear this news from me rather than the mentors themselves. I just said I was looking forward to the next time we could get together.
Turns out the window had closed for me to register.
I also emailed Sam and Hannah to let them know if had gone well and that I would still like to walk with them at the run-walk the following next week if they were game. Then I took these notes.
Data collection
- Field notes?: Yes
- Audio recording?: Yes (voice memo)
- Photographs?: No
Read annotated voice memo transcript.
Significant observations
- At the end of my notes I wrote, “Really nice rapport, non-judgemental enthusiasm for her youthful female interests, especially fashion. They were encouraging, didn’t indulge the negative self talk (pimples, etc.), and reaffirmed positives when they could. (“Tell me about what you got A’s in”, etc.) Yesenia is probably going to be leaving next year, ‘but they’d keep in touch’ with cards, social media etc. (I checked this out and they don’t regularly do SM together currently, so I’m not sure what that means).”
- Also from end of my notes: “Practices: compliments, interests in her interests, admitting their ignorance of things she knew about, ‘making do’ (inventing games, etc.). Some space for the negative, hearing but also also reassuring. Unclear if I might have been part of this.”
Interpretive insights
- I realized through the act of coding my account of the introduction I gave that my notes contained signals relevant to all four roles I’ve been coding for: researcher, pastor (connection to Hannah), teacher (out of school practices), and producer (making videos with team). I don’t know if these intersecting roles registered for the team, but I’m not surprised to see that my introduction at least implicitly sought to cover all those bases.
Implications / reflections
- I’ve noticed that the Tapestry guiding principle of hope is the hardest for me to associate in a clear and unambiguous way with concrete observations and practices. Certainly it’s the code I’ve applied the least so far in my major coding pass. But the distinctively mentor-like practice of engaging with and reinforcing the positive aspects of Zoe’s self-understanding and -expression—and of letting the negative aspects pass—may be one characteristic example. I’ve sometimes coded this practice as presence, as in Liz’s disciplined focus on and inquiry about the positive part of Zoe’s news about her grades above—a moment that struck me so significantly that I raised it as an example at the mentor training in October. In that case, this felt like an example of “presence” in that this principle reminds mentors that they are not here to try to change their youth. Mentors can hear or see something challenging and not go into “fix it” mode. In the case of the compliments and of ignoring the negative self-talk, hope felt more appropriate because we’re talking more directly about matters of self-regard, and perhaps of the mentors more actively trying to shape Zoe in some way. Ultimately, the choice to code these two observations differently surfaces the fact that the principles needn’t be mutually exclusively. From Tapestry’s perspective, we would expect the characterization of the principles to be holistic, woven together even. And from the perspective of the research, I’m much less interested in categorization or frequency than I am in identifying rich moments that underscore the integration of the principles within the organization’s work and that can prompt qualitative reflection about that work and the values that undergird it.
- Also from the end of my notes: “I wasn’t sure about how much priest stuff to get into. They might have been confused by my TikTok thing, but it seemed good to lean into a connection. Mentors were quite attentive to me and friendly/enthusiastic. Zoe was neutral but confidently engaged with me when there was something relevant. Times when she was ‘lost in her phone’ didn’t seem to correlate strictly to when I was holding floor.” Thus, my sense coming out of the meeting was that we’d started to make an OK connection and that Zoe was likely to be amenable to working with me on this project. I think that ended up being true—though it looked a lot different from what I was expecting.
Image credit: “The Espresso Station” by Bex Walton via Flickr (CC BY 2.0). For illustration only—not a research artifact.