By Daisy Sanchez Villavicencio

It’s 2:10 pm on a Friday and rather than finding a comfy seat in a lecture hall, I face a panel of rectangular screens with students in varying settings and others’ black/blank. Since the pandemic, I’ve attended countless online lectures and feel myself instinctually take my position as a traceless attendee with my screen and mic off. However, today my attendance as an observer transforms the familiar space of lectures into a sort of initiation ceremony in a foreign country and a language I hardly speak.

My ethnographic research at Student Life (SL) concerned the process of generating the organization’s Strategic Plan and its Annual Reports. During the early days of my research, I learned that my interlocutor, an actor in the launching of the Strategic Plan and in the writing of the Annual Reports, had obtained a Ph.D. in Higher Education. Their dissertation looked at the role of governmental priorities and university structures and cultures in university administrators’ ability to manage institutional change. Interestingly, they were actively lecturing a course for the Higher Education Master’s program at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) about organizational change. I decided to attend course lectures to better understand the topic.

According to the course syllabus, organizational change could be understood as organizational issues faced within colleges and universities and the ways that social actors within such institutions managed to enact a change or resolution. The course’s “learning outcomes,” were for students to learn how to analyze the role of governance on higher education; how to use organizational theories to interpret organizational issues faced by colleges or universities; how to critically analyze the role of leadership in organizational change; how to hypothesize the influence of emerging trends on higher education institutions; and finally, to use a theoretical lens to analyze a change initiative.

Like the course instructor, many of the students in the course were also staff members at a college or university. Through the course, they were trained to efficiently plan and assess organizational change initiatives within colleges and universities, and ultimately become qualified to write Strategic Plans and Annual Reports. Anthropologically, I understand the process of obtaining a master’s degree as a rite of passage where students must succeed in the course learning outcomes in order to be initiated into a new status as an organizational change professional. Further, I found that the course itself represented a transitional or liminal state for the people in attendance, who were transformed from unqualified to qualified and from staff to academic. Course participants were simultaneously students, academics, and employees.

 These overlapping identities and roles blur the traditional boundaries between a learner or student and a professional or professor, and make participants in the course “betwixt and between” their contradictory identities and roles. The liminal state of being “betwixt and between” or simultaneously qualified and unqualified created a unique classroom atmosphere.  I explored course lectures by engaging in participant observation and I documented the instructor’s demeanor, the course content (such as the syllabus, assigned readings, and lecture slides), conversations between the instructor and students, and comments or responses from students. I found that as students, attendees were positioned as learners, expected to demonstrate a form of mastery outlined in the learning outcomes by an authority figure (the professor/my interlocutor). In contrast, as academics, they are expected to assert intellectual confidence, critically engage with theories and contribute original insight. Finally, as employees their practical experience and workplace authority was often summoned in lecture and simultaneously challenged by the presence of formal academic content, which foregrounded strategic methods rather than instincts. Though all three roles are experienced differently by each attendee, I found that the mere act of them intersecting within the classroom created a unique site, one where opposing positions and forms of knowledge cohabited.