the real stuff

So Caitlin and I spent the first 6 weeks or so figuring out where to live, figuring out what we were doing, meeting with the team, learning what we planned on doing is already going to happen from someone else, planning something new to do, writing many IRBs and revisions--all in preparation for our qualitative workshops. The point of the workshops (which are kind of like focus groups, but with activities like servicing mapping and disease mapping) was to give us an idea of community's perceptions around certain topics (community space, basic services, health and disease, and violence and safety) to serve as a kind of baseline of what is going on right now, but also to serve as kind of a guide/list of priorities from the voices of the community members for future researchers. Our workshops are meant to specifically complement the work of two architects working the area and a doctor who got a fellowship to do some big health status study of the students at the school.

Anyway, we finished the workshops! And now, we have to analyze the results to present to the school, the parents group, and the university here before we leave in 10 days. I feel like I am back in school and not wanting to write that last big final paper. Although it is actually interesting to go through it all. It's just a lot of information! We keep finding stuff and saying, wow, someone could write a whole article on just that!

Our workshops were only done with a group of teachers and a group of parents. We were originally supposed to do it with high schoolers, but due to delays in the IRB world, we're sticking with just these two groups, sadly.

The interesting theme I keep noticing comparing the two groups (we had the groups happen separately) is that the teachers seem to keep blaming the parents for various societal problems like violence and lack of good schools.  Caitlin has this book from the 1970s that talks about how the government is only responsible for putting in the infrastructure for a school and a certain number of teachers and directors depending on how many students there are. The parents in the community are responsible for the rest--the custodial staff, repairs, etc. We assumed that by now this would have changed, but in reality the parents association is still responsible for all those details. The government comes in once a year to do cleaning and some repairs. But if there aren't enough desks, the parents association has to buy them. Needless to say, it was hard to hear the teachers blaming the parents for not caring enough. The important factor though is that the of teachers who participated in our workshops, none of them were from this neighborhood. So there definitely might be some classism going on here. Also it's easier to blame it on someone else when it's not in your own neighborhood or part of your civic responsibilities.

Anyway, back to the reviewing through all the data....