Unit 2 Research Reflection
The first step I took when approaching my research portfolio was narrowing down my focus. The focusing flowchart was helpful with that because the prompts were so clear it helped me pick key terms that I had learned from Unit 1 and form a topic that I was interested in. Reflecting on each week of readings and discussions helped me pinpoint what I engaged in with classmates and what I was drawn to. Diversity training has been a large focus of this class and each time it was discussed I found the question of how do we implement it in a way that increases diversity and inclusion coming up. What I ended up realizing was that empathy and perspective were two topics that could help solve the question.
My second step was searching for sources that within the guidelines set would help support and challenge my claim. The sources I found were very beneficial to my research and I found that most supported the claim that empathy and perspective were key to understanding diverse individuals and creating more open attitudes, therefore we would benefit through adding them into diversity training strategies. Even the opposing sources that I found through complication my research helped me shape a better argument and figure out how to respond to oppositions surrounding my claim. I often found that many sources believe that it takes more than empathy to change people’s biases due to things such as cognitive dissonance, leading me to want to extend my resources and locate sources that also discuss that topic. The research plan helped me organize my thoughts along with rounding out the conversation, which helped me recognize the specific benefit of each source I found. I appreciated the structure of completing a few pieces of the research portfolio each week, keeping me on track and allowing me to not leave things till the last minute. Finally, the annotation helped me assess each source in-depth and analyze them in a discussion that helped to fully develop my project.