Using Ethnography in a Campus Change Team

• In Event: Who Is Part of Campus Change? Promoting Equity-Based Teaching and Student Success Through Research-Practice Partnerships

Abstract

Members of the University of Iowa’s Excellence in Teaching & Learning Network will share their experiences using ethnographic methods for campus change. UI is a large, public, R1 with an 86% acceptance rate. Retention gaps between first-generation and Students of Color and their continuing and White peers is significant (10% and 11% respectively); improving teaching has been identified as a primary area of intervention. The Provost’s Office gathered campus stakeholders to coordinate interconnected change projects on curriculum, teaching assessment and incentives, and student support. Additionally, two postdoctoral scholars were hired to study the institutional climate for teaching and learning. Lessons revealed the importance of positionality (of both the work and of scholar-practitioners) and the inseparability of observation from change processes.

Kezar (2018) argues that change agents should think like anthropologists, seeking understanding of the underlying values and assumptions that drive actions across the campus. Tierney and Langford (2018) propose that an understanding of institutional culture is essential for administrators and researchers who wish to encourage innovation and transformative change (see also Kezar & Eckel, 2002). But institutional culture is often fairly invisible, becoming most apparent when people leave to enter a new context (Tierney & Langford, 2018).

How can change agents build this capacity within familiar campus contexts? Developing rich understanding of culture requires both longitudinal perspective (Berriane et al., 2021), triangulation of interconnected sources of meaning (following Geertz’s 2008 conception of culture), and a disentangling of aggregate patterns of discourse and practice from lived local experiences of members of the institution (Schaeffer, 2003). This is why ethnography, or the description of “life as it is lived and experienced, by a people, somewhere, sometime” (Ingold 2017, p. 21) holds great potential for the study of change.

What does this mean in practice? Hammersley (2018) notes ‘ethnography’ has come to encompass a range of meanings and practices that are difficult to pin down with precision. Moreover, the institutional context may work against the depth, breadth, and length of exploration that is a hallmark of this approach; pressures for efficiency and productivity (Kezar & Posselt, 2020) discourage deliberate reflection and may facilitate leadership cultures that punish those who raise questions about why things work the way they do (Dee & Collinsworth, 2023). This prompted the university’s adoption of a cross-discipline and cross-function approach reminiscent of RPPs. Over one year, myriad data were collected: more than 100 interviews and focus groups with faculty, staff, students, and department and college administrators; review of policies, guidelines, and resources; classroom observations; and field notes from meetings, workshops, and countless “in-between” spaces like hallway conversations.

Along the way we also learned about the potentials—and pitfalls—of using ethnography within change efforts, with two overarching findings: Positionality was critical and paradoxical: We needed to be close enough to the ground to ask questions, but removed enough that we could be seen as trustworthy. Additionally, even as we studied change, we were drawn into those efforts and found practices and processes shifting in response. These insights prompt consideration of the best approaches for ethnography as a tool for change.

Authors

• Lindsay Jarratt, University of Iowa

• Casey E. Wright, University of Iowa

• Eva Latterner, University of Iowa