Mapping student days: Measuring library value through exploratory multi-sited ethnography

Purpose: Research on students’ educational experiences demonstrates the importance of a holistic understanding of the complexity of students’ lives to developing library programs, services, and resources that effectively... [ view full abstract ]

Purpose:

Research on students’ educational experiences demonstrates the importance of a holistic understanding of the complexity of students’ lives to developing library programs, services, and resources that effectively address undergraduate needs. Investigating the local expression of student “taskscapes,” or the ensembles of interrelated social activities that take place across space and time, provides critical information about students’ lived experience. The “A Day in the Life Project” sought to understand these taskscapes at eight university campuses across the United States through a multi-sited ethnographic investigation of students everyday activities. By examining these taskscapes, this project was concerned not only with how students conduct work in the library, but also the library’s relationship with other spaces and places of academic work and the broader experiences of student life. While previous studies have examined similar issues at single universities, this study was unique because it was conceived and designed specifically to enable cross-institutional comparison and analysis of data from a cross-section of universities that were chosen to represent different types of higher education institutions and the diversity of the US student body.   

Design, methodology or approach:

The "A Day in the Life Project" developed an innovative mixed-methods approach to data collection that combined text message surveys delivered via students’ mobile telephones, geolocation, and qualitative ethnographic interviews. Participating students were asked to chart the course of their movements during an academic day by responding to periodic text messages with the places they visited and brief description of their purpose for going there or the activity they were participating in. The research team then created a map of each student’s day that was used to guide an interview about the student’s daily tasks and activities, the spaces and locations in which the student conducted academic research and day-to-day work, and the student’s overall educational experience. These interviews enabled the research team to build a grounded perspective about the variety of pressures and motivations that inform the choices students make about when, where, and how they structure and organize their academic lives and balance academic activities with professional, familial and personal needs.  

Findings:

Both the mapping data and the qualitative interviews revealed strong patterns in students’ spatial experiences among the universities. These patterns indicated that a university’s location and setting had a strong effect on students’ educational experiences and practices, with three distinct groups emerging among the eight institutions: residential campuses, non-residential campuses in semi-urban locations, and non-residential campuses in highly urban locations. Nevertheless, students from all eight universities reported very similar distributions of  both educational and non-educational activities. These results suggest that the tasks of student life are quite similar among students at all types of universities, but where and how these tasks get accomplished and the qualitative experience of these tasks vary significantly, and are profoundly affected by external spatial constraints and social obligations. These patterns also indicated the importance of developing library service models that meet student needs in ways that fit within these broader experiences and contexts.   

Conclusions:

Assessment approaches in higher education spaces such as libraries can tend to come from a perspective that frames students only through their identity as students. However, students are never just students, and our performance evaluation approaches need methods and analyses that make this clear and comprehensible. The holistic approach of the "A Day in the Life Project" helped us see the whole person and students’ multiple expressions of identity as they negotiated roles such as as a friend, employee, daughter, grandson, parent, sister, or cousin, in addition to student. All students, but especially commuter students at non-residential institutions, were frequently negotiating and navigating these identities throughout their day. The complexity of these identities meant students were constantly layering tasks: they were studying on the way to work or on the way to pick up their little sister from school. They were completing an assignment as they helped their child do her homework at the kitchen table. They were posting to a discussion on the learning management system while working at their job. They were responding to a text message from their child’s daycare while in class. Understanding the complexities and realities of these taskscapes are critical to understanding the needs and priorities of our students.  

Originality and value:

The "A Day in the Life Project" makes an argument for the importance of open-ended assessment of student experiences and for bringing more holistic pictures of student life into conversations in libraries and higher education about supporting and facilitating student success. For this reason, this study purposefully chose to take an exploratory approach that did not focus on one part of the university, such as the library, but rather the webs of interrelated places and activities that comprise students everyday educational experiences and are both internal and external to their institutions. Moreover, because of its unique design, this study provides a rare opportunity for direct comparison of these experiences across multiple types of universities, allowing us to draw conclusions and make recommendations that might be broadly applied by institutional policy-makers. To this end, this paper will be particularly concerned with discussing next steps, and will address how we move from the results of this type of project to concrete intentions and actions.