CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Undergraduate students have been conducting research at U.S. universities for years, but what happens when they are encouraged to do research on universities, particularly on their own?
Students and faculty members at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are well on their way to discovering the answer - or answers - to that intriguing question, thanks to a new research and teaching effort, the Ethnography of the University (EOTU).
Last fall, EOTU faculty members began inviting undergraduate students, especially those in the social sciences and the humanities, to design university-related projects and to take part in a study of the university, giving them credit for their work and making their findings Web-accessible for other students, faculty and staff - now and in the future. The initiative draws on ethnography - the primary research method used in sociocultural anthropology wherein qualitative fieldwork explores the common-sense assumptions and categories that make up the everyday life and social relations of human groups.
Nancy Abelmann, one of two anthropology professors who have joined an English professor in organizing the research and teaching effort, believes that undergraduates, "as the university's primary consumers, are ideally positioned to study both how and how well the university is doing its job."
"They live and breathe it every day," she said.
Nicole Ortegón, now a newly graduated anthropology major, responded to EOTU's invitation and challenge last semester as a senior. For her project, she considered how the recent elimination of small discussion sections - which had just become casualties of state budget cuts -affected the interaction between students and their professors at Illinois.
More broadly, Ortegón asked "how students and faculty perceived the
student-to-faculty ratio and how the ratio was 'experienced' and/or 'felt' in everyday university encounters."
All of Ortegón's research - from interviews and notes to final conclusions - has been archived on a Web site, as is the research of all other willing students participating in EOTU-affiliated courses. The Web site is intended to be a "living archive," open to all university constituents.
"What is special about this initiative," Abelmann said, "is that students will be able to build on material from other students and from earlier research." Also noteworthy is the idea that students and professors "become their own learning community, committed to thinking about the university together." Indeed, the initiative is organized to bring to undergraduates "a real benefit" of attending a large research university: the chance to do research that can be evaluated by faculty and peers and used by others.
The directors of the Ethnography of the University say they want student participants to understand that they, like students everywhere, have entered a university that has been "presenting and representing itself, telling stories or narratives about what it is, what it is doing and what it is meant to do for a very long time." The students are being asked to analyze how their findings "relate to these many, often competing, narratives." In this way, students learn to think about the university as an institution with an organizational history worthy of serious inquiry, Abelmann said.
Abelmann and the other directors, William Kelleher, a professor of anthropology, and Peter Mortensen, a professor of English, said that while they are immediately focused on "securing EOTU across the undergraduate curriculum" at Illinois, they intend to develop the project so that "its essential elements are readily adaptable to a range of higher education environments."
According to the directors, EOTU directly addresses the findings of the 1998 Boyer Commission, funded by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which reported that research-based learning has yet to flourish in the humanities and social sciences.
Active learning and faculty-student interaction are key to greatly enhancing students' sense of engagement in college life, the directors said. Engaged students "arguably learn more and learn better" and, in the context of research universities, they "cultivate a lifelong habit of critical inquiry that is as important to responsible citizenship as it is to career success," the directors said.
For Ortegón, EOTU already has paid big dividends, having opened a new way of thinking about her college experience - and beyond.
"EOTU has profoundly impacted my future educational, career and life ambitions," she said. "My past year's work with EOTU has inspired me to pursue a course of graduate study that seeks to explore the interface between anthropology and education, investigating such topics as educational technologies and learning and teaching policies and practices."
In the fall of 2003, the pilot program supported 13 undergraduate research interns and operated through six classes: one anthropology course, four freshman rhetoric classes and one upper-level English class. The rhetoric classes, like all EOTU courses, focused on developing research and writing skills, but in this case, the subject matter was the university.
While EOTU is open to all research that addresses the university as an institution, it has delineated seven areas of "focused inquiry": globalization and the university; learning communities; race and the university; student writing; technology and student life; the university and the surrounding community; and university archival practices.
Recently, the Ethnography of the University was named the 11th cross-campus initiative to be underwritten with seed money from the office of Chancellor Nancy Cantor.
The project also was recently commissioned to study the campus's ongoing Brown v. Board of Education Jubilee Commemoration. For this project, the group assembled a team of paid researchers - four undergraduate researchers and two graduate research advisers - who are looking "beyond the events to the conversations that encircle them," hoping to capture both "the campus dialogue and silence on race and diversity," Abelmann said.
The Brown Commemoration Ethnography project offers seasoned student researchers the unique opportunity to make a difference with their expertise and analysis. Indeed, the Ethnography of the University at large is committed to just this, Abelmann said: "student researchers making a difference."