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The Ethnography of the University (EOTU) initiative
sponsors undergraduate research on the university and archives it in web-accessible
form for the UIUC community. EOTU also functions as a learning group for
students, staff, and faculty interested in what it means to conduct research
on universities as institutions.
NARRATIVES AND ETHNOGRAPHY
EOTU appreciates that universities and colleges—as institutions,
organizations, maps, and histories—are composites of diverse prose,
statistical, and visual narratives that communicate complex and often
conflicting institutional values, commitments, and identities, and directs
students’ attention to the complexity and conflicts. EOTU
ethnographic research includes face-to-face participant observation and
interviews, as well as historical, discursive, visual, numerical, and
web-based analyses.
UNDERGRADUATE
RESEARCH
As a pedagogical initiative, EOTU heeds the call to infuse
research into the undergraduate curriculum, a call issued by numerous
higher education associations, postsecondary education policy centers,
charitable foundations, and the higher education press. Please see
our methods
page for details of our pedagogical commitments and practices.
THE UNIVERSITY
AS SUBJECT
EOTU is foremost committed to research on the University of
Illinois as a particular institution of higher education with a particular
history and a specific set of contemporary social relations. EOTU-affiliated
courses ask students to connect the university to a broad array of social
and political institutions as well as national and global social forces.
Foundational to EOTU is the understanding that students are at once learners
and producers of knowledge. Because EOTU is creating a living archive
of students' research, they produce knowledge with the understanding that
their work could become the basis for future student inquiry. We hope
this perception will enable students to see the value of the knowledge
they produce, and energize their contributions to an enduring university
repository.
DIRECTIONS
In its short life, the EOTU initiative has taken many unanticipated and
salutary turns, prompted often by the interest of various campus units.
For example, we have come to realize the relevance of EOTU to the assessment
of student learning. Thanks to the interest of campus proponents of the
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), we recognize that the EOTU
archive can be viewed as an enduring portfolio that showcases both the
processes and products of student learning. Other campus units have tapped
EOTU’s ability to coordinate student documentation of activities
across campus: in January 2006, we will publish an ethnographic study
of the 2003-04 Brown v. Board of Education Jubilee Commemoration
commissioned by the Office of the Chancellor. We are currently meeting
with other groups on campus who are interested in having EOTU students
conduct research on their activities. This is a very exciting direction
for EOTU, one that will certainly help students think of themselves as
important university citizens with skills that are in demand and can make
a difference.
Finally, as EOTU progresses, we have come to see that
it both joins and promotes a critical campus commitment to self-examination.
Just as EOTU makes the intricate process of student research available
to public scrutiny, so it opens university programs, units, and constituencies
to examination, consideration, and debate. We have grown increasingly
committed to institutional self-examination as an ongoing venture in which
the university’s primary constituents—its undergraduates—participate
at the heart of its research mission.
(Read EOTU's white
paper and progress
report for the Chancellor's
Cross-Campus Initiative program.)
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