University Culture

This course explores the University of Adelaide as a culture of its own, and places students as ethnographers or anthropologists of this culture through immersion. University is a place where people think, act and communicate differently to how they do in other contexts, and this course makes cultural expectations explicit as well as exploring the processes required to adjust to them. Most students should undertake this course as the first course in their University Preparatory Program.

Students in this course have the opportunity to experience the usual university learning modes of the lecture and tutorial, and reflect upon their own prior and current experiences of learning with a view to establishing the goals they have for their own study. In particular, students undertake an ethnography task whereby they audit classes right across the University, not in order to gather content knowledge but to observe and analyse social interaction and modes of learning. This enables them to become familiar with the processes and expectations of university learning and plan their own learning in alignment with university culture