Premises
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Undergraduate students, no matter what their major, can--and should--participate
in the research mission of the university.
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The university itself constitutes an ideal topic of research for
undergraduate students.
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Such research is necessarily interdisciplinary. Students (and their
faculty instructors as well, in many cases) learn to use new methods
of analysis and inquiry as they investigate the lived experience of
university members and the structures and historical contingencies
shaping this experience.
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This research is always in process. In each new semester, students
in EOTU courses pick up prior inquiries to refashion, extend, and
build on the research of their predecessors.
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Student research is also a product--a breathing, composite document
of how students ask, see, hear, explore, think, and write at a given
moment about their immediate environment. This documentary record
merits archival preservation into the foreseeable future.
Practices
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We seek to sponsor courses in as many disciplines as possible. EOTU-affiliated
courses have been hosted not only by Anthropology, but also by Afro-American
Studies, Communications, Educational Organization and Leadership,
Educational Policy Studies, English, History, Kinesiology, Natural
Resources and Environmental Sciences, Rhetoric, Sociology, and Urban
Planning (see our course list).
We continue to broaden our disciplinary range. We provide training
for faculty members teaching EOTU courses for the first time, and
we support their work as they teach.
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We rely on Inquiry
Page (now iLabs)
software developed in the Graduate School of Library and Information
Sciences. While we appreciate the flexibility and wide-ranging applications
of this software, we rely primarily on the Dewey-derived recursive
formulation of its inquiry template. EOTU is grateful for the help
of Professor Bertram (Chip) Bruce, a founding member of the EOTU Study
Group, in bringing this pedagogical platform to our initiative.
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Through the calendar year of 2005, we direct visitors interested
in viewing EOTU student work to the original Inquiry Pages themselves.
By January, 2006, we will have archived all student work on this Web
site. Wary of our own fungibility, however, we plan to transfer this
work during 2006 to IDEALS
(Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship),
which promises "to preserve and provide persistent and reliable
access" to its holdings, and thus offers the most reliable of
digital archives for student work.
Programs and
Projects
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EOTU has developed a series of gateways--areas
of concentration for EOTU faculty and their students--addressing concerns
of the university. In the coming year, we will focus on the experience
of first-year students and, especially, on the experience of undergraduate
"articulation," addressing not only how students from different
schools articulate their sense of institutional identity, but also
on the statewide articulation of curriculum.
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As part of a project funded by the Ford Foundation, "Documenting
the Differences Diversity Makes," EOTU is currently developing
a visual project relying on the fieldnotes and photographs made by
undergraduate student ethnographers.
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In January 2006, EOTU will publish "Ethnography
of the Brown v Board Jubilee Commemoration," a study
of the year-long campus series of events addressing the famous Supreme
Court decision and its consequences.
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