[Type text] [Type text] [Type text] Ethnography EUI Newsletter Spring 2014 of the http://www.eui.illinois.edu Email: eui-info@illinois.edu Tel: 217.244.7733 University Initiative EUI Celebrates Its 10th Anniversary This academic year, we celebrate a decade of activity as a pedagogical research community, with over 150 affiliated courses across six colleges and seventeen departments at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign (U of I) (and at five additional colleges and universities); more than 3,000 participating students; over 1,000 student projects and presentations archived in IDEALS; twenty-two (biannual) student conferences; one dissertation and a number of senior honors’ theses and capstone projects resulting from EUI courses; and over fifteen articles and presentations highlighting EUI. Please see our website for a full list of publications, presentations, and press coverage. Contents 1 EUI Celebrates Its 10th Anniversary 1-3 Changes in Program Administration 3-5 Annual Report for AY 2012/13 6 Faculty Spotlight: Siobhan Somerville, Associate Professor of English/Gender & Women’s Studies Through our many inter- and intra-university partnerships and projects, EUI showcases the commitments of the U of I to undergraduate student research. EUI’s achievements highlight the quality of the University of Illinois undergraduate research experience and contribute to campus leadership in innovative higher education with a particular focus on student research. Changes in Program Administration Co-Director Tim Cain -- Leaves for The University of Georgia We are sorry to say goodbye to Co-Director (2008-2013) Timothy Cain, who is now an Associate Professor with the Institute of Higher Education at the University of Georgia. Tim will continue to serve as our official Consultant in the History of Higher Education. Tim sent these reflections for inclusion here. In 2007, a year or two after I joined the faculty of the University of Illinois, Nancy Abelmann approached me about contributing to EUI. I was unsure what to expect or even, as an untenured faculty member being advised to avoid as many service commitments as possible, whether I should consider the possibility of affiliating with the project. But Nancy’s enthusiasm was contagious and I was intrigued. I was intrigued by the possibility of reaching out beyond the small office in the small corner of campus that I inhabited [In the College of Education]. And I was intrigued by the work that Nancy and her colleagues—EUI co-directors Gina Hunter and Catherine Prendergast, as well as graduate student coordinators, librarians, IRB liaisons, EUI instructors, and many other partners who make EUI possible—were doing to support and promote undergraduate research. Nancy suggested that, as an education faculty member studying historical and modern issues involving college students and faculty, I could bring some field-based knowledge to the discussions with which EUI instructors were engaged, especially as most were only for the first time turning their disciplinary lenses onto higher education as a site and actor. (Continued on next page) What is EUI? Based at the U of I, EUI promotes student research on universities and colleges as complex institutions. EUI supports faculty from a wide range of disciplinary and methodological backgrounds to integrate original student research on universities and colleges into their courses through faculty development workshops, customized web environments, Institutional Review Board permissions, and bi-annual student conferences. In EUI-affiliated courses, students use a variety of ethnographic, archival, and multimedia methods to examine the university in the broader context of our social and political times. At the end of each semester, students have the opportunity to contribute their work to the EUI collection in the U of I’s digital repository, Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (IDEALS). 2 Changes in Program Administration (continued from previous page) I accepted Nancy’s offer and spent a year pointing to journals on the topics that EUI courses were exploring, suggesting articles and books that might be of some use to an instructor or student, and otherwise trying to make myself somewhat useful. By 2008, I agreed to join EUI as a co-director. I did so because I was excited about the project, and because I had learned a lot more than I had contributed. For five years, I continued to learn about teaching and course design. I saw passion for undergraduate education, for helping students come to new understandings, and for improving pedagogical practices that I had seen sporadically in individual professors but not before in a community. I saw the willingness for established and successful faculty to take risks with technology, with assignments, and with whole new approaches and content areas. I saw graduate student instructors and non-tenure line faculty welcomed in as full and equal members in ways that the higher education literature tells us is rare. I found a teaching commons that would allow me to explore and improve my own practices, and make me push my own comfort zone. Most importantly, I found a home among colleagues and friends whose values, work ethic, commitment to undergraduate education, and willingness to ask difficult questions about our university I admired greatly. When I decided to leave the University of Illinois for a faculty position at the University of Georgia effective this fall, I was thus saddened to also need to step down from co-directing EUI. But, I knew that EUI would continue to thrive under the leadership of Nancy, Gina, Sharon Irish, and Karen Rodriguez’G, that the lessons I would learn would remain with me, and, as was the case five years ago, that EUI had contributed far more to my development than I had to its program. -Timothy R. Cain- EUI Joins OUR This particular acronym, OUR, spells a good move for the Ethnography of the University Initiative. In January 2014, EUI joined the Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR). OUR, a Provost initiative to increase the visibility of and possibilities for undergraduate research opportunities across campus, opened in 2012. OUR is dedicated to integrating a variety of campus efforts to support hands-on research experience, as well as presentation and publication for undergraduates at the University of Illinois. OUR Director Paul F. Diehl is the Henning Larsen Professor of Political Science as well as the Founding Director Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Teaching Academy. Karen Rodriguez’G is now Associate Director of the Office, juggling new responsibilities as well as continuing her capable management of all things EUI. EUI’s decadelong program to foster course-based primary research is now much more stable financially within OUR. This campus-level home acknowledges the multidisciplinary nature of EUI and the exciting ways in which we have grown over the last ten years. We are, however, pleased that EUI retains an independent identity in OUR, safeguarding our commitment to faculty development, Institutional Review Board approval, student conferences, and archived research and related projects that examine the university as an actor within larger contexts. We are indebted to Anthropology (founding director Nancy Abelmann’s home department) for all their years of support. Anthropology remains a substantial partner and its department head, Dr. Andrew Orta, sits as an ex officio member of EUI’s Advisory Board. Our New Co-Director – Merinda Hensley We welcome Merinda Hensley, Instructional Services Librarian and Assistant Professor at U of I. She is also the Co-Coordinator of the Scholarly Commons, a library unit that serves the emerging research and technology needs of scholars in data services, digital humanities, digitization, and scholarly communication. Merinda teaches, coordinates, and provides leadership for “The Savvy Researcher,” an open workshop series addressing advanced research and information management needs of graduate students and faculty (http://www.library.illinois.edu/learn/). Merinda has been involved in EUI since 2006, when she began organizing the poster session as part of the bi-annual EUI Student Conference. Merinda’s research focuses on the roles of librarians in teaching undergraduate students about the entire publication process, an essential part of the undergraduate research experience. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Arizona and a Master of Science in Library Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 2 3 Annual Report for AY 2012/13: Major Accomplishments Karen Rodriguez’G – Now a Full-Time Program Coordinator Karen Rodriguez’G is now our full-time Program Coordinator, an academic professional position. Karen, an advanced doctoral candidate in the Department of History, has pioneered technical and teaching innovations for EUI-affiliated courses, developed special projects such as the undergraduate-curated library exhibit on LGBT@UIUC, and presented about EUI as a model of course-based research to various constituencies, locally and nationally. In addition to these innovations, Karen continues to recruit, train, and support faculty and students in the use of Moodle, Institutional Review Board (IRB) protocols, multimedia tools, and curriculum development; she also amends IRB protocols and evaluates and monitors the submission of research documents for IRB approvals. She also organizes the student conference each semester and implements continuing and new U of I cross-campus and inter-university partnerships, such as the multimedia collaboration between U of I and Parkland College. EUI has benefited enormously from Karen’s dedication and leadership! 2014 Special Issue Devoted to EUI in Learning and Teaching: The International Journal of Higher Education in the Social Sciences This special issue emerges from an EUI panel that was organized by Teresa Ramos, the author of the first PhD dissertation to have emerged from EUI, for the 2010 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association. Editors from Learning and Teaching attended the session and invited a special issue on EUI. The issue includes an introductory essay by guest co-editors Gina Hunter and Nancy Abelmann, and seven additional essays by staff and faculty who have taught with the project: Tim Cain, Priscilla Fortier, Soo Ah Kwon, Cathy Prendergast, Junaid Rana, Teresa Ramos, and Siobhan Somerville. This special EUI issue is available online at: http://go.illinois.edu/EuiLatiss A New Publishing Venture: Peer Review We are excited to announce the launch of our new undergraduate research journal, Peer Review: The Undergraduate Research Journal of the Ethnography of the University Initiative. Peer Review will be an open-access, digital journal published once per year, with our inaugural issue slated for May 1, 2014. The journal will publish research-based articles and multimedia projects by current and recent undergraduates who participated in EUI-affiliated courses (this may include independent study/thesis coursework), as well as other undergraduate research on the university. We also will include short commentaries and reflections on the EUI research or teaching experience from former EUI-affiliated students and faculty. Peer Review is part of an initial consortium of undergraduate research journals to be launched in academic year 2013/14 at the U of I with generous support from the University Library. Nancy Abelmann, Merinda Hensley, and Karen Rodriguez’G serve as Advisory Board members. The Peer Review’s editorial team includes T. Jameson Brewer, our graduate student Senior Editor, and 5 undergraduate managing editors: Marc Chua, Katrina Halfaker, Victoria Machen, Hannah Park, and Alanna Smart. Merinda Hensley has organized a partnership between the Writing Center and the University Library to develop training in writing, research, and the editorial process for Peer Review’s new and future undergraduate editors. A Multimedia Exhibit In Fall 2012, Karen worked with the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Resource Center, the Social Sciences, Health and Education Library and two EUI undergraduates, Harrison Hakes and Dominique Moore (from Siobhan Somerville’s GWS 467 course), to mount a University Library Exhibit entitled "It's Not Because I'm LGBT, It's Because I'm Human." This exhibit grew out of a multimedia conference presentation produced by students in an EUI-affiliated course, ART 191/RHET 233 “The Ethnography of Allen Hall: A Documentary Project in Word and Image.” An ongoing project guided by UIUC faculty members Carol Spindel and Brad Hudson, “The Ethnography of Allen Hall” seeks to investigate and understand the culture of student life in Allen Hall through interviews, photography, and the ethnographic technique of participant observation. The exhibit, which ran from December 1, 2012, to January 31, 2013 in the University Library’s Marshall Gallery, was based on several of the photographs from “Q” and documented the history of UIUC's LGBT Center and LGBT issues on this campus. 3 4 Annual Report for AY 2012/13: EUI Goes Multimedia! EUI on the Road: High Schools Here We Come! This past summer, EUI co-directors Nancy Abelmann and Gina Hunter participated in the Chicago Humanities Festival’s 17th annual Summer Institute for Teachers (SIT). Over two days, SIT participants worked in small groups, developing their own research questions and producing an "ethnographic toolkit" of cross-disciplinary research methods easily applied to the high school setting. This participation has now led to a collaboration with the Oak Park High School Ethnography Workshop (including multimedia research projects) for teachers, led by EUIers Gina Hunter and Karen Rodriguez’G. More information about SIT and related programs can be seen here. Campus Outreach Nancy Abelmann, Tim Cain, Sharon Irish and Karen Rodriguez’G presented at the UIUC 2013 Annual Faculty Retreat sponsored by the Center for Teaching Excellence, themed “When Teaching and Learning Meet Undergraduate Research.” Their panel, “The Challenges and Possibilities of Course-Based Research: Lessons from the First Decade of the Ethnography of the University Initiative,” centered on EUI’s decadelong sponsorship and facilitation of course-based undergraduate student research. The session considered the approaches, infrastructure, and partnerships (with the Institutional Review Board, the University Library, Student Life and Culture Archival Program, Library/IT Fee Advisory Committee, CITES Academic Technologies and Digital Media Group, etc.) that have allowed EUI to sponsor more than 150 classes from departments both across campus and across the nation, as well as to archive more than 1,000 student projects and presentations in IDEALS. Discussion included the challenges of course-based undergraduate research and some pedagogical and curricular approaches that EUI instructors have undertaken to overcome them. They also discussed how changing technologies, such as multimedia, have affected the EUI course offerings. A New Technology: SCALAR Karen Rodriguez’G is currently working with Kevin Hamilton, Associate Professor in the School of Art + Design and IPRH Coordinator for Digital Scholarly Communication, and Sarah Shreeves, Coordinator/IDEALS, Cocoordinator/Scholarly Commons, and Associate Professor of Library Administration, to link EUI-IDEALS multimedia materials and SCALAR digital books. Both Andrew Moss, Rhetoric 105-Service Learning at UIUC, and Karen Rodriguez’G, History 259/EUI-LLC, will be utilizing SCALAR in their affiliated courses in Spring 2014. Professor and EUI Co-Director Sharon Irish and Professor C.L. Cole are also utilizing SCALAR in their Fall 2013 EUI-affiliated course, Dialogues on Feminism and Technology. A Distributed Open Collaborative Course (DOCC), Dialogues is part of a consortium of 16 institutions, organized collectively by FemTechNet, and offering a feminist rethinking of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). EUI helps Orient New Freshmen to University Life: Summer Academic Achievement Program (SAAP) Pilot In July and August 2013, EUI was invited by the Office of the Provost to take part in the Summer Academic Achievement Program (SAAP) pilot, a five-week residential program at the U of I designed to acquaint select incoming freshmen with tools and resources to manage the challenges of college life. Students met with various academic and student affairs officials, and attended preparatory seminars in composition (Writing Across the Curriculum), STEM, and humanities and social science research. EUI Co-Director Sharon Irish and EUI Program Coordinator Karen Rodriguez'G each taught a cohort of 15 incoming freshmen in the humanities/social science (HSS) sequence. In the HSS seminar, students were able to conduct original, human subject-approved and archival research, present their findings, and publish their work in EUI's archives in IDEALS. EUI Program Coordinator Karen Rodriguez’G – On and Off Campus In Fall 2012, Karen Rodriguez’G presented “Lights! Camera! Research! Building an Infrastructure for Multimedia Student Learning” as part of the Teaching with Technology Brown Bag Series. Her presentation explored the impetus behind EUI, the challenges of building technology infrastructure for student research, and the lessons learned from incorporating technology into syllabi, courses, and the broader university culture. In January 2013, representing EUI, Karen served as a fellow with the Digital Humanities Winter Institute at the Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities. As a fellow, she worked with faculty and administrators from national and international universities to develop both pedagogical and curricular models for incorporating multimedia into traditional coursework, and the creation of a central clearinghouse and forum for ongoing discussion. In October 2013, Karen presented “Putting the ‘I’ in Archive” at an Office of Undergraduate Research brown bag for humanities and social sciences faculty, talking about EUI as a unique pedagogical model of course-based research. 4 5 Annual Report for AY 2012/13: New Horizons A Generous Grant In Spring 2012, we applied for and were awarded a second grant ($38,000) from the University of Illinois Student Library/IT Committee for AY 2012-2013 to further support and implement our multimedia course program. Beginning in AY 2011-12, we successfully integrated digital technologies into a cluster of EUI courses. In our second year, we awarded six instructors (including one at Parkland College) an IT Teaching Award, which provided the use of audio, video, and “back pocket” equipment to support student research, and assist with incorporating technology into syllabi design, with up to 100 hours per course of embedded technological training and support. This new award allowed us to expand our pilot program to six courses per semester. Key to our success has been our partnership with CITES Academic Technology Services and Digital Media Group, the new Undergraduate Library Media Commons, and the substantial commitment of Karen Rodriguez’G to designing and implementing the infrastructure of our program, including: presemester meetings with faculty for syllabus design; in-class training on equipment use and post-production editing; creation of user-best practice guides; back-up data storage plans for each course; equipment loan policies; and a central site for draft student collaborative projects and for final project submittal. Karen has worked hard to amend our Institutional Review Board protocols to allow for these new media courses. We have now created an efficient (if evolving) template for future EUI multimedia courses, one that can be of use to other university units interested in fully integrating technology into undergraduate learning environments. New Affiliated Courses Archive Stories We continue to add new affiliated courses to our roster. In Fall 2012, Co-Director Nancy Abelmann took on our multimedia program, offering “The Ethnography of Contemporary East Asia” and writing an essay on her experience teaching that course, “The Intimate University: Researching and Teaching Transnational Korea,” for Antoinette Burton and Mary-Ann Winkelmes, eds., An Illinois Sampler: Talking about Teaching on the Prairie, forthcoming from University of Illinois Press. We plan to add a new cluster of Archives-based courses, namely, thematic courses that feature University-housed archives, among them, for example, the Kolb-Proust Archives, the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music, or the newly acquired Gwendolyn Brooks archive. We imagine courses devoted to the content of particular archives housed at the U of I that focus a portion of the course on students’ examination of the life of our archival collections – e.g., how they have been collected, sustained, used, and published. We will also inaugurate this cluster of courses with a Spring 2015 lecture series in which we bring to campus scholars with longstanding records of research in our archives. Already 14 faculty members have written to express an interest in affiliating their courses with this project in Spring 2015. Spring 2013 was one of our most robust semesters ever, with 14 affiliated courses, six of which were multimedia offerings: EALC 285 – Intro to Korea through Film (also part of our new Living and Learning Communities partnership) History 472 – Greater China in Illinois Anthropology 103 (Parkland College) ARTH 491 – Collecting East Asia LIS 592 – Evolving Archives Initiative Last semester (Fall 2013), we welcomed Andrew Moss’s Rhetoric 105 course on Service Learning, C.L. Cole’s Media and Cinema Studies multimedia freshman Discovery course on sports, and our own Sharon Irish, C.L. Cole, and Sharra Vostral’s graduate seminar on feminism and technology. This semester (Spring 2014) Program Coordinator Karen Rodriguez’G is offering a new EUI/LLC course – History 259: 20th Century World from Midcentury: “Kitchen (En)Counters: Food and Identity in a Postwar World”; our multimedia partnership with Parkland College is continuing; and we hope to offer a new course in collaboration with the U of I’s Living-Learning Communities and the Office of Undergraduate Research. The course will be an undergraduate research practicum for freshman and sophomores focusing on service-learning and community engagement. The first course will be taught in Spring 2015 by Karen Rodriguez’G. Students Participate in Campus Studies: Illinois State Co-Director Gina Hunter's EUI course in ethnographic methods has twice participated in campus-wide research initiatives at Illinois State University. In 2012, Gina's students studied freshman and transfer student experiences in conjunction with the campus' participation in the John D. Gardner Institute’s Foundations of Excellence self-study. In the fall of 2013, students enrolled in the course focused on the international student experience at ISU and presented the results of their investigations at the university’s International Symposium in December 2013. 5 6 Faculty Spotlight: Siobhan Somerville Associate Professor of English/Gender & Women’s Studies I have taught my course “Locating Queer Culture” (GWS 467) twice for EUI, since Spring 2009. This course revolves around two key questions: How might we understand the role of Midwestern public universities like the UIUC – and their surrounding communities -- in the production of queer culture? And how might such knowledge revise our understanding of queer culture and its locations, both in the past and in the present? Students who have taken the course tend to be majoring in Humanities and Social Sciences fields, including Gender and Women’s Studies, English, History, Economics, Spanish, Anthropology, Psychology, and Sociology. They do not all identify as “queer,” “lesbian,” or “gay.” Students are from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds, including Latina/o, African American, Asian American, and white students. Using our own university as both the object and site for primary research on queer culture, the course introduces undergraduate students to two research methods: archival research and ethnography. There is, of course, nothing inherently queer about either method, so the course involves first introducing students to the basic tools of each approach. But we also consider the extent to which taking queer culture as the object of study might require us to adjust these methods. What, in other words, are the possibilities for queering archival and ethnographic research methods? The course is designed to help students see that knowledge does not simply exist “out there” in the world, but that it is actively produced and preserved by people like themselves. This is true for any culture, but is especially relevant for queer culture, because it has historically been overlooked or minimized in scholarship on American culture generally. Thus, the course focuses on a vital but contested element of the university and its surrounding community that is often neglected in “official” university records, narratives, and histories. After reading and studying examples of existing scholarship on queer culture, students do a series of short exercises that culminate in two research assignments: (1) an archival research project on some aspect of EU I Co - Dir e ct or s: local queer history at the UIUC; and (2) an ethnographic research project on Nancy Abelmann, Sharon some aspect of contemporary queer culture at the UIUC. Thus students both Irish, Merinda Hensley, draw upon the existing archives of the university and contribute to these archives Gina Hunter (Illinois State by producing their own original research on queer culture. University) EUI Program Coordinator: Karen Rodriguez’G Internal Advisory Board: Robert Baird, Priscilla Fortier, Lisa Hinchliffe, Joanne Kaczmarek, Lydia Khuri, Soo Ah Kwon, William Maher, Ellen Moodie, Peter Mortensen, Andrew Orta, Catherine Prendergast, Deanna Raineri, Junaid Rana, Bruce Rosenstock, Beth Sandore, Sarah Shreeves, Siobhan Somerville, Ellen Swain, Syndy Sydnor. External Advisory Board: Philip Altbach, Robert Borofsky, Nancy Cantor, Robin L. Chandler, Peter Ewell, George E. Marcus, Ernest T. Pascarella, Ramon Saldivar, Cathy Small, Nancy Somers, Lisa Beth Spanierman, Erica Vogel, and Michael Wesch. Students have tackled an amazing range of subjects, from coming out in fraternities, to the experiences of queer women of color, the history of lesbian student activism, the university’s role as a resource for local queer youth, the experiences of black gay men at the U of I, the intersections of LGBT and Christian communities on campus, lesbian and gay issues in sexual health programs at the U of I, and queering the curriculum. I’m very proud that this course has provided space for students to pursue such impressive original research, which they have all presented publicly at the EUI conference and which is now archived in IDEALS. I’ve learned an incredible amount from my students and look forward to the chance to teach this EUI course again soon. GWS 467 students present at EUI’s biannual conference. 6