EOTU project

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.

EOTU encourages students to interact with existing university narratives through qualitative research. Namely, by engaging the multiple stories that universities tell themselves and others, student researchers can understand the implications of their findings. From this perspective, 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. EOTU thus directs students’ attention to these complex and even conflicting narratives about the university. EOTU ethnographic research includes face-to-face participant observation and interviews, as well as historical, discursive, visual, numerical, and web-based analyses.

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. We distinguish research on the university from research in or at the university so as to underscore our interest in nesting student research within the university as an institution at a particular historical moment. In this way, students are asked to connect the university to a broad array of social and political institutions as well as national and global social forces. 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. Foundational to EOTU is the understanding that students are at once learners and producers of knowledge. They produce knowledge with the understanding that their research could become the basis for future student inquiry. We understand students as institutional persons who are both invested in and products of the organizations in which they participate. We hope this perception will enable students to see the value of the knowledge they produce and will energize their contributions to an enduring university repository.

EOTU is fast becoming a living archive of student ethnographic research on the university. The Inquiry Page, a dynamic virtual community developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, currently houses students’ ethnographies. The Inquiry Page offers a collaborative environment in which inquiry-based education can be discussed, resources and experiences shared, and innovative approaches explored. Both the processes and products of research are archived in readily accessible form, and are thereby made available to later generations of students who will build on the work of their predecessors.

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 are also tapping EOTU’s ability to coordinate student documentation of activities across campus. Recently, the Office of the Chancellor commissioned EOTU to conduct an ethnographic study of the 2003-04 Brown v. Board of Education Jubilee Commemoration on our campus, and 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, that of self-examination. Just as EOTU makes the intricate process of student research available to public scrutiny, so does EOTU make university programs, units, and constituencies subject to examination, consideration, and debate. We have grown increasingly committed to institutional self-examination as an ongoing venture in which the university’s primary consumers—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.)