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Gateways
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Globalization
and the University |
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This project
examines the influence of globalization on the university and the university's
place in a burgeoning world market for higher education. What impact, for
example, do the half-million foreign students studying in the United States
have on the nation's universities? At the same time, this project considers
domestic students' engagement with international education, including foreign
language study and study abroad. How will the globalization of the university
affect U.S. undergraduates' much-lamented ambivalence about study extending
beyond the nation's borders?
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Learning
Communities |
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Both in and
beyond educational institutions, people forge human ties that allow them
to learn more effectively and with greater results. Through these collaborations
- be they in workplaces, sports clubs, or on the Web - people construct
something more powerful and meaningful than they would have alone. Research
in this project aims to document and learn from these communities and in
so doing to consider how we might better foster collaborative learning.
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Race
and the University |
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Whether spoken
of in the context of "diversity" or "multiculturalism,"
race is at the heart of the American university--its history, its contemporary
challenges, and its futures. This project examines ways in which the U.S.
university and the American college experience are indelibly racialized.
In particular, this project examines longstanding U.S. debates and decisions
on affirmative action.
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Student
Writing |
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Students write
their way through the undergraduate curriculum, in part simply to demonstrate
what they know about a subject, but also to rehearse and demonstrate disciplinary
modes of knowing and expression. This project examines how students use
writing to make sense of the university's research mission as they themselves
engage in academic inquiry. It also investigates students' extracurricular
writing and attempts to discern how students compose a coherent "writing
life" that draws from their identities during their undergraduate years.
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Technology
and Student Life |
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The lives of
U.S. students are day by day becoming more enmeshed in digital technologies,
from e-mail to Internet messaging, and from web-logs to cellular phones.
Less clear, however, are the meanings and impact of these technologies on
students' social lives, learning, and group formation. This project appreciates
that the media ecology of student life is transforming quickly. Technology
in student life thus offers a rich ethnographic site.
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The
University and the Community |
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EOTU appreciates
that the boundaries between the university, the local community, and the
wider world are porous. Many campus units and constituencies interact with
the community and world in diverse ways, from service programs to research
projects. EOTU is interested in documenting this interaction in the interest
of thinking about how more truly collaborative university-community projects
might be developed.
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University
Archival Practices |
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This project
appreciates that university units and constituencies are archivists: they
make decisions about the records and memories they preserve, be they students'
scrap books or web logs; departments' faculty meeting notes; or administrators'
e-mail correspondence. This project is also interested in the vision and
decision-making of those diverse campus units charged with archiving the
university, including the University Archives, the Student Life and Culture
Archive, and an emerging project to establish an electronic institutional
repository. The durable memory of a university-its digital and print records-offer
a telling window on university identities and values. |
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