By Maia de Caro My project is rooted in trying to understand assessment practices in the division of Student Life. To give me a more specific focus, I looked into the Signature Program Assessments (SPAs), a unit-level assessment tool connected to actionable goals outlined in the Strategic Plan. Since there were no SPAs running at … Continue reading
By Maia de Caro The Assessment Cycle is composed of five stages: 1) Assessment Plan Development, 2) Implementation, 3) Analysis & Summary, 4) Storytelling, and 5) Action Planning & Next Steps. This blog post focuses on Storytelling. My project began by trying to understand assessment within the division of Student Life and evolved into a … Continue reading
By Lukey Lu “What is a university?” This may seem like a simple question, but I believe everyone has their own answer — these answers may be diverse and different among individuals. However, if we deeply reflect on this word, we may realize the difficulty in defining it. The ‘university’ can connote many things: the … Continue reading
By Lukey Lu “You belong to English. English belongs to you. There’s nothing wrong with you. You don’t need to apologize for your English. Right? Like so we talked about kind of big picture principles (to the students). But yeah, absolutely, in practice, how do you implement?” This is a quotation from my interviewee Frank … Continue reading
By Hanisha Mistry There is a need for Student Life’s resources, and there is a reason why we have both peer mentors and Learning Strategists. A poignant quote from a conversation I had with a Learning Strategist captures this need: “Students are saying, ‘I need to talk about my learning in not an evaluated space.’” … Continue reading
By Hanisha Mistry Learning Strategist’s days cannot accommodate all of U of T St. George. The University of Toronto’s St. George campus serves approximately 68,454 students, while the Centre for Learning Strategy Support (CLSS) operates with only 22 professional staff and 12 peer mentors. This stark disparity reflects a systemic imbalance between the student population … Continue reading
By Hanisha Mistry When I first imagined going into the field as an ethnographer, I envisioned something akin to Bronisław Malinowski’s arrival in the Trobriand Islands. I pictured myself stepping into a space where ethnography was an unfamiliar word, and my interlocutors, unacquainted with the methods of anthropology, would meet my questions with unfiltered answers. … Continue reading
By Daisy Sanchez Villavicencio From conversations with ANT473 peers, focus groups, and friends, I have concluded that Student Life (SL) has a reputation for offering a complex range of services that can overwhelm students and deter them from accessing the support they were promised. According to an SL staff interlocutor, SL has ten units and … Continue reading
By Daisy Sanchez Villavicencio In the early weeks of ANT473, Professor Li assigned students “Coercive Accountability: the rise of audit culture in higher education” by Cris Shore and Susan Wright (2003), which brought our attention to the effects of technological practices as they interact with social life and cultural change. Audit technologies, which I understand … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
Ethnography Lab 