- In Mollie West’s article “How To Create a Culture Manifesto for Your Organization (And Why It’s a Good Idea)” she uses her introduction to talk about mission statements and what can be used to build a manifesto for your organization very clearly. From here she uses testimonials from a few different organizations (that we can identify because of their success and popularity). This makes it easy to have a concrete image in our head about these wildly successful companies building their manifestos around the values and views that their employees as a whole care about and strive for. The bullet points that West writes down, capturing the list of what the employees wrote down for what they wanted to outline their workplace culture is sufficient enough to make me feel like I was right there in the meeting room with all of those people while they took part in this exercise. The audience is anybody who is part of a company that is looking to develop their own cultural manifesto, as outlined in her last paragraph that gives us a road map to create this. I think this can be a very productive, healthy activity for businesses to work through.
- In my own research piece, I will be writing about implicit bias in the field of education. The types of sources I am relying on are book chapters from larger volumes dealing with diversity and inclusion, and studies that have been conducted by professors and psychologists. In the broader sense of my subject matter and what i think fellow readers of this topic would look to read, I would have to say they would key in on magazine articles (maybe educational journals and other teaching professional writings), newspaper articles dealing with teachers and their bias against minority students, and other studies that have been documented. Most (but not all) of the people who would be interested in reading this sort of thing are already involved in the fields of education and diversity studies, or are in the process of going into these fields. The studies tend to be a little longer than a normal article, but I think a good length for these readings would be between 5-20 pages in range.
Writing and organizational cultures
Professional/trade journals–i.e. those that are geared toward an audience of classroom teachers and school staff/admin, rather than university researchers–could be a promising option for the kind of work you want to present and would give you a way to reach those you want to have these insights. It’s worth looking at some sample publications of that type within the educational field, so that you can assess length, level of formality, tone, use of research, citation practices, etc. Let me know what questions you have.
(You’re working with last week’s reading, rather than one of the pieces assigned for this week)
I really like the idea for your project and how incorporating other voices and influence can help create a compelling piece. Diversity and inclusion are extremely important matters and targeting a specific audience will really help focus the point you are trying to convey.