[In this video, six people are having a conversation. The people’s names are Chelsea Jordan-Makely, Charissa Brammer, Amy Bahlenhorst, Sara Wicen, Carol Peeples, and Renee Barnes.]

Chelsea Jordan-Makely: We wanted to share what would you do when people would get off topic and did you have any advice for keeping people on track?

Charissa Brammer: This is essentially classroom management, right? Like it’s just making sure, and I think it varies so much from group to group, what you need to do, and it’s just like being very conscious that everybody needs to participate as much as they want to. And so sometimes you would have to come in and, like, ask more questions or kind of move away. The way that we structured it was super helpful because I could be like “that is a library question. We will have answers for you after the fact. After we’re done with the Research, we’ll be able to answer that question, but right now we need to move into our questions,” and that worked really well because then we were really careful, I say “we,” I mean, Renee’s team, were really careful to answer all of those questions at the end. And so that was a tool that we used a ton.

Carol Peeples: I love your response Charissa. That’s it. Classroom management because I know that was…I taught 3rd grade through adults at one point in my life.

Charissa Brammer: Yep.

Carol Peeples: And it’s like, yeah, it’s just I could just redirect people and sometimes shut him off a little bit.

Charissa Brammer: Yeah.

Carol Peeples: Shut them down a little bit, but like, let’s get back on. You know what was the question? But you know what? I don’t know. I don’t know what my staff did when I wasn’t there, so that’s what I would love to know. Is, how that went?

Charissa Brammer: Yeah.

Carol Peeples: That’s a great question.

Sara Wicen: I think it was also sometimes a bit of a balancing act between off topic to the point of like we need to wrap this back around and get back on topic and then other times you’d ask a question and not necessarily get a direct answer to the question you asked. But the conversation that they’re having is all still around the prison barriers inside the prison or the library in general.

Carol Peeples: Yeah.

Sara Wicen: Or it wraps around and you learn a lot from those conversations as well.
And so yeah, just identifying when we did need to redirect and when it was very valuable to let the conversation flow even if the question got a little lost in there.

Charissa Brammer: Yeah, I think we had a as a group. We had a pretty deep respect for people telling their stories, and sometimes, you know, we may be the first group that had listened to them in a long time. And so I think that there are some like off topic things that you kind of just let play out because this is a person that needs to be listened to…and yeah those we can just not use in the transcripts. You can always clip that out later.

Amy Bahlenhorst: I totally agree, and I also think that there were moments where as much as you want to stay to your script that you kind of have a conversation starts and you think to yourself, “actually this is really interesting and could be really useful for our research.” And so being willing to kind of think on your feet a little bit and add in new questions that you think could be relevant and not necessarily always sticking perfectly to the script that you have can be really helpful.