The Ethnography of the University
The Ethnography of the University (EOTU) is a Cross-Campus Initiative involves undergraduates in the research mission of the University of Illinois by engaging them—along with faculty and staff—in rigorous ethnographic study of the university as an institution. This is a project that I began with anthropology colleague Bill Kelleher and now co-organize with English colleague Peter Mortensen.
We think of EOTU as 4 things in one:
1. a dynamic, digital archive of student research on the University of Illinois’ Urbana-Champaign and Chicago campuses that is publicly accessible and assessable;
2. a thriving community of faculty who are committed to the conceptual and technological dimensions of a curriculum that grounds research on the university as an institution in diverse disciplines across the humanities and social sciences;
3. a growing community of students who have acquired a theoretical understanding of the university as a complex institution with diverse interests, values, and daily practices; who have been trained in various research methods well suited to the study of the institution; and who are able to apply their conceptual understanding and research insights in their institutional lives beyond the university as they become citizens, professionals, parents, etc.
4. a working group of faculty, staff, and students that sponsors public seminars and takes on special ethnographic research projects focused on the university as an institution, all with the intention of driving campus and scholarly conversations on subjects of vital interest.
What follows reports on what we have accomplished in each of these capacities.
Digital Archive
As a digital archive of student research on the university, EOTU showcases not only the products of student inquiry, but also the processes by which students conduct research and craft arguments. (See http://www.eotu.uiuc.edu/pedagogy/archive.htm for examples of archived student research.) As the archive builds, students in EOTU-affiliated classes are increasingly able to review, critique, and amplify lines of inquiry initiated by previous EOTU students. What is more, this enables students to cross disciplinary boundaries: last semester, for example, an Educational Policy student extended research begun a year before by an Anthropology student.
Our digital archive is the result of a fruitful partnership with the Inquiry Page project, a collaborative authoring environment developed in and administered through the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. The Inquiry Page structures reflective inquiry in the tradition of Deweyan pragmatism—an excellent fit with EOTU’s ethnographic orientation. Remarkably, EOTU has become the Inquiry Page’s largest user and we now play an active role in directing the conceptual and technological development of the project. EOTU representatives attend weekly Inquiry Page technical review and user services meetings.
In Spring 2005 we were selected to participate in the National Coalition on Electronic Portfolio Research, coordinated by the American Association of Higher Education. EOTU’s use of the Inquiry Page and other web-based resources makes it a cutting-edge example of electronic portfolios.
Finally, EOTU recognizes that maintaining a viable digital archive over time presents ethical and technological problems that are best addressed sooner rather than later. For this reason, EOTU has worked with Beth Sandore, Associate University Librarian for Information Technology Planning and Policy, to think about EOTU as an innovative instance of an institutional repository.
Community of Faculty
EOTU has established a presence on campus by forming a community of faculty committed both to EOTU’s digital archive and its pedagogy of reflective inquiry. To date, EOTU has sponsored 32 courses taught by 21 faculty, graduate students, and administrators. We built this community by devoting a portion of our budget to formal faculty training, periodic faculty meetings, and EOTU-related seminars.
In 2003-04, EOTU was piloted in 13 sections of Anthropology, English, and Rhetoric courses. This pilot year was critical for both the conceptual and technical maturation of the project and we learned a great deal about the challenges of introducing the project to new teachers. In Spring 2004, we issued an RFP aimed at identifying faculty, administrators, and academic professionals willing to develop or modify courses for affiliation with EOTU in Fall 2004, Spring 2005, or Fall 2005. In early Summer 2004, we offered a week-long training session for five UIUC faculty members and administrators, two UIC faculty members and administrators, and one University High School teacher. These EOTU newcomers represented Educational Policy Studies, English, Gender and Women’s Studies, History, Institute of Communications Research, Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, the Office of Minority Student Affairs (McNair Scholars Program), the UIC Department of Communication, and the UIC College of Education. We are delighted that a number of faculty who have already taught their EOTU-affiliated course have indicated their intention to continue their teaching with EOTU and their commitment to the archive.
In May 2005 we trained a second cohort of faculty, including professors from Parkland Community College and Illinois State University so as to add institutional diversity to the project. In Spring 2006, EOTU will offer a course in the Intersections Living and Learning Community, where students are involved in ongoing inter-group dialogues on race and diversity. The instructional costs of this course will be funded by a portion of the “Documenting the Difference that Diversity Makes” initiative funded by the Ford Foundation and administered by the Center on Demoracy in a Multiracial Democracy.
In April 2005 we hosted a joint UIUC-UIC (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Chicago) meeting at the UIC Great Cities Institute. At that day long session we examined documents from both universities on our respective campus identities and futures. We look forward to joint student research and collaboration in the future.
Community of Students
Obviously, it is impossible to sustain a community of students with long-term continuity of membership. Still, EOTU has been able to bring together several student cohorts whose participants have extended research beyond class requirements, or have seen it extended by others. Two recent examples illustrate the coherence EOTU can bring to the undergraduate experience.
In December 2004, EOTU sponsored its first student conference, at which nine students presented their ethnographic research on the university in a public forum. Perhaps in part because of EOTU’s sustained interest in issues of race and the univesity, all nine presenters were students of color. An opportunity for these students to continue their research this semester is discussed in the next section. In May 2005, 10 students participated in the second public forum.
In August 2004, EOTU released EOTU Live, a web-based art installation by Anna Callahan, who was an MFA student in visual arts while completing the project. EOTU Live draws from student research that was posted to Inquiry Pages during EOTU’s inaugural year. A rich array of images and sound creates novel, synergistic pathways into student researchers’ textual contributions to the archive.
Working Group
At EOTU, we envision the research-pedagogy nexus this way: as EOTU produces communities of faculty and students engaged in research on the university, faculty-student research collaborations will emerge—and will take any number of forms. We detail several collaborations here, and discuss the prospect for more.
To promote faculty and student research on the university, the EOTU Working Group began organizing a public seminar series—even before it was designated a CCI. In 2002-03 the theme was “The Future of the University: Knowledge, Networks, Pedagogy” (supported by the Center for Advanced Study). The 2003-04 theme was “Globalization and the University” (supported by the Humanities in a Globalizing World CCI). Our current theme is “Race and the University” (supported by the CDMS Ford Foundation grant). Visiting speakers in the first two series contributed in part to the development of “gateways” on the EOTU website that introduce students to important contextual readings and research resources in a variety of areas, including Globalization and the University (coordinated with International Programs and Studies), the University and the Community, and College Writing (for more, see http://www.eotu.uiuc.edu/pedagogy/projects.htm). Faculty and students together also worked with Central Reference Services in the University Library to create a wide-ranging online research guide, “Where Is the University in the University Library?”.
Additional Related Projects
Subsets of the EOTU Working Group have taken on three special projects in the last 18 months as yet another way broaden EOTU’s utility to the campus community:
The first project, the Ethnography of the Brown v. Board of Education Jubilee Commemoration, was commissioned by the campus committee charged with organizing events to observe the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision’s fiftieth anniversary. Fieldwork and analysis for the project have focused on the committee’s intention to foster (with the Chancellor’s and Provost’s encouragement) campus-wide dialogues on race and diversity at the university. A ten-person research team—four undergraduates, two graduate students, and four faculty—submitted their 170-page report to the organizing committee’s chairs in November 2004. The EBC research group is now expanding the report into a book manuscript, tentative titled, A Hard Year Downstate: A Student Ethnography of Race and the University. In January 2005, the EBC group met with the EBC Steering Committee for feedback on the report; that steering committee includes representatives from a range of academic departments, from all of the ethnic studies programs and cultural houses, and from several Student Affairs divisions, including Housing. We are working hard to respond seriously to this feedback as we write the book. This project allowed us to explore the complicated university-community relationship around issues of race. EOTU appreciates that the boundaries of the university are in fact blurred, and that the study of university-community relations is a fruitful way to explore university identities and values.
The second project is the aforementioned partner project with CDMS and the Intersections Living and Learning Community, “Documenting the Difference that Diversity Makes.” EOTU is contributing to the partnership by studying students’ research processes on race-related topics in EOTU-affiliated courses that foreground race and diversity as categories of critical analysis. In Fall 2004, three graduate research assistants each conducted ethnographies of one EOTU-affiliated course; in Spring 2005 this team of graduate students will join EOTU’s faculty co-organizers in writing a journal article on the delicate work of engaging undergraduates in such inquiry. Other aspects of the partnership with CDMS include the opportunity in Spring 2005 for three or four students to continue the race- and diversity-related projects they began in EOTU-affiliated courses in Fall 2004. The partnership also supports a project that will engage visual artists in interpreting and re-presenting student research on race and diversity developed in EOTU-affiliated courses in 2004-05.
EOTU’s third partner project is a self-study of the challenges posed to EOTU’s use of networked computing technologies, especially the software applications that students must negotiate as they contribute to our digital archive. This study is supported by the Provost’s Initiative on Teaching Advancement.