Bitácora: Assessment as Conversation
By Tamera Marko, assistant director and faculty
in first-year writing at Emerson College and cofounder
of DukeEngage Medellín, Colombia
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Tamera Marko |
In summer 2008, five undergraduate students from Duke
University/DukeEngage traveled with me and project codirector
Jota Samper to Medellín, Colombia, to teach workshops
at the city's five Parques Bibliotecas. These "Library
Parks" are not typical libraries: they are state-of-the-art
spaces with Internet rooms, reading lounges, theaters,
and open-air plazas with 360-degree views of the Andes
mountains. Built in the last five years in the city's
most impoverished communities as part of a disarmament
and peace process, the Parques Bibliotecas are spaces
for people to learn, socialize, and be. We also piloted
a memory project with communities not traditionally
represented in official histories. Did our program change
the world? Of course not. Did we contribute to Medellin's
peace process? This is what we sought to explore with
our Bitácora project.
Bitácora roughly translates as "ship's log."
It is the ship captain's record of a voyage: observations
about constellations and weather, crew members' daily
lives, discoveries, fears, hopes, dreams. We borrowed
this concept as a reflection tool. But we modified one
key element. Our Bitácora was not just from "the
captain." We sought a Bitácora from all members
of "the crew," as well as those left "on land": DukeEngage
students, homestay families, community partners, community
members in the middle-class neighborhood where we lived
and the impoverished neighborhoods where we worked,
the café cook, our driver, Colombian university professors
and students, and students' families and friends.
Assessment of study abroad programs is often initiated and evaluated by the U.S. academy, and the results are published by and for the U.S. academy. This typically renders invisible the labor and critical perspectives of dozens of actors our programs are built with and profess to be about: community partners in the host countries. This one-directional focus reflects the larger pedagogical, research, and programmatic focus of many U.S. universities and of much U.S. international policy, mainstream media, and cultural production. For fifteen years, I have struggled to negotiate this one-directional focus as student, journalist, scholar, and teacher.
By inviting all actors to participate, our assessment
moved from the format of report (one-directional and
static) to conversation (multidirectional and ongoing).
This conversational approach is especially necessary
in Medellín, known until a few years ago as the
most violent city in the world. Our very presence there
was no small feat. Many of our homestay families had
never met anyone from the United States, and ours was
among the first cultural programming in the Parques
Bibliotecas. This was an historic moment, an opportunity
to record a kind of "first encounter" between people
choosing to move beyond stereotypes of violence, racism,
imperialism, and indifference to instead live and work
together. Our collective engagement was a small but
significant contribution to the city's ongoing peace
process. We wanted to know: What changed? Who did it
impact? Why does it matter? For whom?
We conducted qualitative assessments with all participants:
one-page reflections, e-mails, weekly meetings with
community partners, conversations with homestay families.
DukeEngage students recorded daily reflections in the
medium of their choice and responded to one weekly Bitácora
question, selecting which private reflections to make
public. Among other participants, we hoped for some
interest. The response shocked us. People brought more
than three hundred contributions: video, photograph,
song, and written word, including a documentary and
interviews with five local and national newspaper and
television stations. From these materials, we crafted
a multimedia volume ("The Directors' Cut") that we are
translating into a published multimedia book-map.
This constellation of traditional and nontraditional assessments fulfilled
the very real requirements of early, mid, final and
postprogram reporting. The Bitácoras' unscripted
anecdotal accounts answered questions we never would
have known to ask, located solutions we might never
had imagined, and indicated results we would never have
seen using a traditional approach. The project has helped
keep our community partners at the center of evaluating
our Medellín program's complex dimensions. It
also is part of the pedagogy and scholarship I call
history engaged. To learn more, visit dukeparquebibliotecascolombia.blogspot.com.
