Here I am in beautiful Costa Rica on a Sunday afternoon in the common room of the INBioparqué where Kate Regan is teaching a Spanish immersion class to 19 University of Portland students. We’re here because of the WiFi. Or rather the lack of it in other places. While we started out with a plan, added a backup plan, revised, and tweaked until we thought we covered most of the bases, there is still no substitute for guerrilla project development. It’s the thing that works in the reality of your situation, not the thing you hope will work when you’re 5,000 miles away.
We’ve had to deal with spotty WiFi and no WiFi, lack of cellphone coverage, and video uploads that bottleneck after a few megabytes. We’re out of our element here. Comfortable with high speed connections and easy communication tools, we’re in an alien landscape now. But when you have to find a way to do what you came here to do that is exactly what you do.
Be flexible. Find a workaround. Keep on going.
Kate’s cross-cultural bilingual project aims to build bridges and community by engaging students with their new environments. Students will be blogging and composing digital stories about the food, culture, music, lifestyle, family, community, and places of Costa Rica that will serve as more than a record of the 5-week study abroad program. It will be a valuable resource for educators, students, travelers, and others wanting to learn more about this incredible country. As students reflect on their experiences and tell us about them, we get to engage with them on their journey and be participants in this transformational experience. Kate is capturing so much of the richness of being here in the short videos she is composing. It’s a powerful medium in good hands with a skilled practitioner.
And me? I’m making sure we do what we came here to do. I’ll leave in a few days knowing that Kate has the tools she needs to complete this project and that the students have the resources they need to feel confident about sharing their digital projects. It is guerrilla development at it’s best — kind of stressful, a little bit crazy, but quick, purposeful, and on target. And it works.