Resize Text: For her sociocultural anthropology methods course, undergraduate Rachel Levine is asked to devise a project about some aspect of the university. Motivated by her own on-the-job frustrations as a former residence-hall assistant (RA), Rachel focuses on university housing. She begins with the hunch that there is a “disconnect” between RAs and the housing administration and eventually narrows her study to staff relationships with the senior housing administration in one residence hall. She consults the housing collection in the university archives, interviews an experienced RA, and asks housing staff at various levels to diagram their experience of employee relations. Rachel concludes that residence-hall directors play a pivotal role in the communication between the upper rung of the Housing Administration and RAs. She also concludes that her research is significant because improved communication could lead to greater RA job satisfaction and hence better services for thousands of students.
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Junaid Rana, assistant professor of Asian-American studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, teaches a course on Muslims in America. Given the scant extant literature on the Muslim-American student experience or even on Muslims in the state, Professor Rana sends students out to conduct research. He organizes the class into groups that select research projects from a list of topics configured around the course themes; among those chosen are hate crimes and Muslim-American feminism. He thinks of this research as material he could utilize for a possible museum exhibit on the Muslim-
American college experience.
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At a semi-annual student-research conference at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Illinois State University (ISU) students present research on campus commitment to environmental initiatives, services for non-traditional students, and campus safety at ISU. But after listening to their peers at the UIUC, they observe that there seems to be far more student activism and public discussion about race and diversity at UIUC than at ISU. They speculate about whether this difference is a consequence of UI‘s larger and more diverse student population or whether it reflects its recent history, which includes a long struggle over, and the eventual retirement of, a Native American mascot. But then they note that some of their own research revealed a history of tumultuous debate about race and diversity on the ISU campus as well.
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What connects these three recent examples of undergraduate research is that they were all completed in courses affiliated with the Ethnography of the University Initiative (EUI, www.eui.uiuc.edu), based at the University of Illinois (UI). The now six-year-old, cross-campus program offers students the opportunity to conduct original ethnographic and archival research on their own institutions and supports faculty who guide that research. It helps the researchers and faculty negotiate Institutional Review Board (IRB) clearances, coordinates the use of course-management software, organizes conferences, and maintains publicly accessible online archives of student research findings. EUI is at once research support infrastructure, faculty and student learning community, and broad-based research agenda.
Developmental theorists, student-affairs professionals, and teachers have all argued that students’ perspectives offer crucial starting points for learning and development that must be exploited in college classrooms. And indeed, in recent decades, universities have increasingly recognized the importance of engaging students in active learning, relating that learning to students’ lived experiences, and helping them recognize that they are creators of knowledge rather than mere
recipients of learned truths.
Organizations such as the Council on Undergraduate Research and the National Conferences on Undergraduate Research have spoken about the power and promise of integrating students into faculty members’ research, which is a way that many institutions and individuals have attempted to realize this learning potential. But undergraduate involvement in faculty research generally occurs outside traditional course structures and reaches only select students. Universities have yet to make inquiry-based learning standard classroom practice, as the Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University recommended over a decade ago.
Significant challenges remain in bringing the research discovery process into the classroom. How can faculty incorporate research projects into semester-long courses so that even novice students can ask significant questions and conduct meaningful studies? How can faculty give students the sense that their short-term projects are real contributions to the ongoing dialogue of a community of scholars? Where human subjects are involved, how do faculty secure compliance with increasingly stringent IRB guidelines so that student research can both proceed and be made public? Given the substantial time commitment that supervising student research requires and the lack of commensurate rewards for it in faculty merit and promotion decisions, how can we encourage faculty to routinely invest in guiding this work?
Having now sponsored over 60 courses in which students conduct and archive research, EUI has grappled with precisely these challenges. EUI research is autonomous but nested in a wide array of courses across many disciplines. It takes the university as its subject and builds on students’ expertise as both learners and university citizens. The students are encouraged to think beyond their own experience and understand the university as a complex institution with multiple goals, commitments, and stakeholders. EUI relies largely on qualitative and archival methods that develop students’ awareness of themselves as historically situated student-scholars whose research on the university, if taken seriously, could be mobilized to change the institution.
Gina Hunter is an associate professor of anthropology at Illinois State University. Nancy Abelmann is the Harry E. Preble Professor of Anthropology, Asian American Studies, East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Timothy Reese Cain is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Organization and Leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Tim McDonough, EUI project coordinator, holds a Ph.D. in educational policy studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Catherine Prendergast is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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