This is the beginning of an interview with my mom, who’s a middle school French teacher. Prior to the interview, I asked if there was an object she’d be interesting in talking about, and she chose a bowl in her room: a colorful, handmade ceramic bowl with a large hole on the bottom.

T: So where did you get this bowl?

M: A student gave it to me some years after she was my student, so she gave it to me last year. She was in ninth grade.

T: She was in ninth grade last year?

M: Last year. But I had her as a student in fifth and sixth grade. But she stayed in the same school—I’m in the middle school but in ninth grade, obviously she’s in the upper school. But she came to visit me one day and she brought me this bowl and told me that she made it in pottery class and made it for me.

T: And had you been talking to her—had you talked in the time between?

M: Yes. So I teach fifth and sixth grade, so I have most of my students for two years. At the end of sixth grade, I always tell them that I hope we keep talking to each other, and that they can always come ask me for help, and that I love it when I maintain contact with the students and help them if they need to. And not many students come to ask for help after—a lot of them keep saying hi—but she came to ask me for help in seventh and eighth grade on some projects, so sometimes I helped her a little bit, and then I basically kept seeing her in the hallway and she would always… we had a good rapport. So yes, I kept talking with her. But the day she came to give me that bowl I was actually really surprised. I had no idea she was planning to do that, and I was very touched because when that happens a few years after you have a student it means that your relationship means something to them.

T: What’s the… so there’s a hole on the bottom. Do you know anything about what the function of the bowl is supposed to be?

M: Yes. It’s actually confusing to me. She gave it to me telling me that it was to hold plants. But I never exactly understood how it would work because to have plants, you need to put water in, and that would leak. So I think it’s beautiful, but I never used it as she intended for me to use it because I never figured out how to use that.

T: Right. Have you used it for anything else?

M: No, I really just use it for decoration. It’s often on the buffet in the living room. Sometimes it’s been on my desk, so I really just use it for that. And I have something else from her.

T: Oh, you have- is that in here too?

She stands and picks up a drawing of a face to show me.

M: It’s in here too. So in fifth grade, I teach about adjectives and descriptions, and at some point, I ask them to draw a face. And really they don’t have to draw a nice face. It’s to take notes and things like that, but then she actually drew an amazing face. And she spent some time outside of class, cause that took her a long time. And then she gave that to me.

I did a practice cultural artifact interview with my mom. I was surprised to find that, despite our relationship and comfort talking to each other, there was an extent to which I felt that we had to newly develop rapport. Because I had framed the conversation as an interview, and was recording it, my mom’s conversational style felt subtly different than usual—she would explain things that she knew I already knew, such as which grades she teaches, and had a bit more caution in her voice. I think my tone also adjusted given the interview context, as I was more intentional in what I chose to ask and focused on letting my mom speak more than I did. While this precise observation likely wouldn’t come up outside of an autoethnographic situation, I think it’s more generally important to recognize how people change their demeanor given an interview setting, or given the knowledge of being researched and recorded. I wonder how the interaction would have been different if I had just asked my mom about the object, without recording or explicitly labelling it an interview.

Xue’s feedback helped me identify areas that could have been expanded in the interview. One particular section that stood out was when my mom talked about her relationship with her student, and then I quickly switched topics to ask about the function of the bowl. That could have been a place to ask for more details or stories rather than moving on, particularly in order to think about where the trust with this particular student came from, and what their relationship was like while the student was actually in her class. Another question Xue brought up that I think would be interesting to explore further was why it was that my mom used the bowl for decoration rather than function, and whether that was related to what it meant to her as a gift—later in the interview, she said that this was true of other gifts given by students as well. Xue’s articulation of that question was helpful: I think that’s what I was trying to get at in asking about the function of the bowl, but I definitely could be more explicit with the question and with what I was looking to understand.