Student Trapito Analyses (STAs)

The core purpose of the Nuestra Casa Initiative exhibition is to create an interdisciplinary scholar, research, and service learning initiative of faculty, staff, students and persons affected by tuberculosis and HIV.

Together Nuestra Casa Initiative partners and participants advocate, communicate, and socially mobilize the community to create awareness and raise consciousness on the importance of addressing determinants of health in the U.S-Mexico Border and beyond. Nuestra Casa is a tool to educate and motivate attitudinal change within the general public and promote prevention, control, and cure.

Eighteen University of Texas at El Paso students participated in the Nuestra Casa service-learning experience that resulted in the creation of the tendederos (“clothslines”) of trapitos (small napkin size pieces of cloth with messages written on them by visitors to the 2009-10 tour of Nuestra Casa).

In early September 2011, the students received orientation from UTEP facilitators that included faculty, staff and community partners. The first session was lead by Dr. Eva Moya and Raquel del Consuelo Orduño, MSW student and TB activist. The session consisted of a presentation on the aims of the original Nuestra Casa Project; the definition of health disparities and social determinants; and perspectives on how tuberculosis affects one’s life. Students were assigned to teams of 3 and to one 2009-10 exhibit tour location. With the aid of a “Casapedia” report about each of the cities prepared by Josias Castorena, each student group researched the location of their trapitos and identified health disparities in tuberculosis and HIV in their location.

At the next session, the students participated in a series of liberating structure exercises in which they learned from Drs. Guillermina Nuñez-Mchiri and Eva Moya how to code data and conduct qualitative analysis of the trapitos. During this session students learned how to identify key themes in the trapitos and how to code the trapitos by key topics or themes. The following questions were used to help the students guide data coding and the analysis process.

• What did people respond to?
• How did they express this?
• What assumptions can you make about these comments?
• What may you learn from these notes?
• What particular themes seem to be re-occurring?
• Which quotes were most moving?

The student groups worked independently and after they coded their trapitos, they wrote an abstract describing the key themes expressed in the location and provided examples of key quotes from the trapitos. Later they selected quotes for several tendederos of trapitos for “Nuestra Casa, The Exhibition” including one tendedero with the ten most compelling trapitos. Those abstracts and quotes from trapitos are available here.

In the final session Drs. Arvind Singhal and Lucia Dura facilitated a session using liberating structures to discuss the student’s findings, reflections and next steps including sharing their thoughts about their experience and reflections on the trapitos on the “Nuestra Blog” and a Facebook site for the Initiative created by students Jesus Zambrano and Josias Castorena.