Introducing ‘Becoming Tapestry’

I made it!

On April 13, 2022, after more than 1,100 hours of work on the project excluding coursework, a committee comprising education and communication scholars Lalitha Vasudevan, Ioana Literat, Detra Price-Dennis, and Patricia Martínez Álvarez accepted my dissertation as submitted.

I will receive my doctoral hood May 23 in a ceremony at the Louis Armstrong Tennis Stadium in Queens. But for all intents and purposes, I am now a doctoral graduate of the Communication, Media, and Learning Technologies Design Program at Teachers College, the oldest and largest graduate school of education in the U.S.

My degree is a Doctor of Education (EdD), Communication in Education. My dissertation, Becoming Tapestry: A Multimodal Ethnographic Podcast Exploring Storytelling and Belonging in a Faith-Adjacent Foster Youth Mentoring Network, is being delivered to Proquest Dissertations.

But more importantly, my dissertation is a podcast. And you can listen right now!

Here’s the trailer:

And here’s the elevator pitch:

Organized religion in the U.S. is changing. More people than ever before identify with no particular religious tradition. But this disaffiliative trend isn’t just about religion. Individuals are participating less or opting out entirely from institutions and communities.

Against the backdrop of my interest in media making and religious education in this environment, I found a spiritual community that was growing and thriving on the highly secular U.S. West Coast. Tapestry is a foster youth mentoring network run by religious leaders according to flexible, inclusive values inspired by religious principles. It’s a “church that doesn’t look like a church.” It’s a faith-adjacent space of healing and belonging where the participants themselves get to decide how to be together and what it all means.

I’ve been embedded for more than three years as a kind of unofficial member of this community, a religious education researcher and multimedia storytelling facilitator. My mission was to co-design ways for Tapestry mentor teams to make meaning of their experiences together by producing Digital Stories, very short videos that weave together voiceover, photographs, and a simple soundtrack.

Becoming Tapestry is my audio documentary of the journey, my own digital story of the Digital Stories. Along the way, I develop new ways of thinking about religious education amid social change, new ways of facilitating team-based self-reflective media production, and new ways of composing and disseminating ethnographic research.

Wanna learn more? Episode 1, in which I elaborate on this framing and position myself within my field site, is available now where you get your podcasts.

Can’t wait? The entire show is ready for your binge listen at becomingtapestry.net/podcast. I’m excited to tell you more in the coming weeks!