One more month til La Paz

One more month until I'm off to La Paz. I'm starting to get a little bit nervous/excited and I'm remembering all of the details involved in traveling abroad. I realized the other day that my family had no idea why I was going to the poorest country in South America, so I thought I might give you all little explanation.

I was approached by a professor of mine to travel with a classmate to Bolivia, where we will be observing public school classrooms and pre-service teacher schools. We received a grant of approximately $3,000 for the following project (sorry about the wordiness):

PRIMARY INVESTIGATORS
Dr. Carol Bryant, Rebecca Brazzale and Brian Brisko

ABSTRACT
The present research endeavors to investigate the role of Project Citizen in helping students effectuate change in their schools and communities. In order to investigate the research question: What is the potential for Project Citizen to provide an authentic venue for student voice in cross-cultural settings vis à vis community justice and human rights?, the issues of bullying and community justice as perceived by Project Citizen student participants will be explored. In Bolivia, community justice is a tradition that reflects the lack of trust in the government, an established system of justice specific to indigenous communities, and an absence of resources.

The co-primary investigators, Rebecca Brazzale and Brian Brisko, will visit and interview Bolivian secondary students who have completed Project Citizen portfolios related to these issues. The interviews seek to discern how students define these issues and gauge their severity. Moreover, the interviews will elicit students’ perceptions of the impact of community justice and bullying in their own lives and whether or not they perceive it as a problem to be addressed through public policy. Data collections will include interviews, observations, focus groups, and reflections from all the participants.

After returning to Laramie, Brian and I will be presenting with two Bolivian pre-service teaschers at the Shepard's Symposium on Social Justice on our travels and observations. Hopefully our Bolivian friends will also be able to spend some time in our classrooms talking with our own students. Then, later this summer, we will be writing our experiences along with those of our two professors, who traveled to Bolivia last summer, for some sort of academic publication.

Overall, I'm really excited for my first trip to South America, and I'm also looking forward to meeting kids and talking with them, as well as staying with host families. While I'm also a bit nervous, I'm glad my friend Brian has spent considerable time in Guatemala and is used to the standard of living. I'm all pumped full of Yellow and Typhoid Fevers for the trip, and I'm reading up on the culture in my Lonely Planet Book. When I get the itinerary for our stay, I'll let you know what more we'll be doing down there.