Author: Aaron Stukey

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Final Reflection, Aaron

In doing my final research project, I decided to focus on the areas of diversity in education and also the bias that teachers/instructors have towards students who are ethnic minorities. There were many different options for sources to pick for this kind of project, but I wanted to key in on what the concept of implicit bias/complicit theories of intelligence were, and how the students are affected (their academic performance) in the classroom. I learned the critical thinking skills to not just take everything that I see as a useful source- that there are some instances where I have to let some things go, because while they may be useful in one context, they didn’t necessarily fit with what I wanted my narrative to be.

In doing this research I learned quite a bit about the whole process: first and foremost was the different styles of writing and using rhetorical situations depending on who my intended audience is and what I wanted my message to be. Using certain words to grab attention, and adjusting the length of my writing (my audience was high school students/young undergrads) to not turn their attention spans off by writing a twenty page essay. Also, keeping my audience in mind, I wanted to try to make this conversational but also academic, so it wasn’t just like me having a casual talk with someone where i’m just spouting things from my mouth. I wanted to have sources and examples that justified why I was writing what I was. The receiving of feedback from my fellow students was important in two ways: one, was to see what they were choosing to focus on while they were doing their work, and what they thought of mine, and also to get a gauge of what people in that population had to say, so I can get an idea of what changes I should make. The feedback I received from my instructor was also really valuable, as she gave me a good outline on how I should craft my final work and not have it be an unorganized mess, she gave me a more concrete idea of what I needed to focus on to make it the best I was able to.

What I am taking away from this assignment is that there are so many options that a writer has when it comes to saying what they want to say- using rhetoric to tinker your message and make it more digestible to your intended audience. Before this, I didn’t really think about this process much at all, I would just write what comes to mind and basically hope for the best. Now that I have these tools to really make any writing I do in the future much more polished I am feeling confident. Another lesson I will take from this in general comes from the assigned text we read in class, the concept of using templates to get an idea going if you are ever stuck in your writing. I will definitely remember to use this as I think it’s a really valuable tool to have.

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Final Project, Aaron

Attached in a link is my .pdf of my final project. In this, my expected audience would be high school (and possibly undergraduate college) students. The attempt of this research paper is to discuss the problems of both bias in education and diversity issues in education (as they’re both very related). The sources I used were book chapters in books dealing with diversity and a study that shows the difference in academic performance in relation to the instructors bias towards black students. My intent with this is not necessarily to give a how-to of how to fix the problems with bias and diversity in education but to get students thinking, and to be aware that these problems do exist.

 

Final_Draft

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Draft, Aaron

*I apologize first off for the quality of my work lately, I have been really sick the last couple of days* My draft is linked at the bottom of this, and I promise that the final project will be much more worthy and complete.

 

My final project is going to be dealing with the effects of bias in education-is it really prevalent, how much of an effect does it have on educational outcomes (student performance)? My intended audience is students in high school and university level who may be enrolled in a course just like this. The sources I am using are academic in style but not too heavy on the language, so a lay person could understand them quite easily. The style of my final project will be a straightforward research article (with the possibility of incorporating a graphic or two) but it will be written in the traditional style that we are all accustomed to.

 

Draft

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Discussion week of 7/27, Aaron

The Making Of The Troubles In Northern Ireland

This link posted above is an example of the style of writing I am doing. It’s a traditional research report that starts just as any research essay would- the introduction asking a thesis question and the body of the work breaking it down with different points per paragraph or per page. The advantage of this kind of writing is that it’s really self explanatory- you read the entire article and come away from it with more understanding on a topic than you did prior to reading this, However, this advantage leads directly into the disadvantage of this style of writing. I know this sounds confusing and maybe a little conflicting but my point is this: a lot of people don’t enjoy reading these kinds of reports unless it is something they are assigned to do or are genuinely very interested in, otherwise it may be boring and not something that many people would be interested in. I may be in. the minority in this, but my style of learning suits these kinds of research reports. I am sincerely into sitting in a three hour lecture where a professor goes on about sectarian divides developed between two groups of people over the years, and can sit there and take notes with a smile on my face the whole time. With that being said, I am going to have to direct my audience to something different than previously thought. My writing about how ethnic and cultural bias is effecting education is better suited for people that are studying the field, and not professors who are already inside the ranks of being educators.

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Project Proposal

For my final project I will be creating a research paper that tackles the question: How common is bias in education, and does it have an effect on students learning outcomes? To do this effectively I am using sources that are vary from citations of books, journal entries (mostly from psychology related publications and education journals, and also trade journals that use the perspective of educators that are active in their profession). My goal is to help show the reader that while they may aware of racial, cultural, gender biases, to peel back the curtain and show them just how widespread this sort of behavior is.

My targeted audience consists of two main groups of people: The first would be educators and school administrators. The second would be university students (just like this class), people who are taking a course in diversity and inclusion studies. I would like this to be part of the canon of a course like this so that students can read this and want to go further with it and develop their own questions and answers about issues in diversity in education, and how it effects different populations of people.

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Week of 7/20 Discussion, Aaron

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
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Week of 7/13 discussion, Aaron

  1. The link within the article that I had was “50 ways to fight bias”. This was brand new to me, but I found very useful. It is an online card game of sorts that has 4 different sets of cards which each have a “do you know?” section in them which contain diversity and bias related questions such as: “What % of Black women have never had an informal interaction with a senior leader at their company?” The answer for this one is 59%. These questions have pretty dismal answers that prepare you for whats to come in the next section of cards which give you different scenarios, such as: hiring, everyday interactions, reviews and promotions, meeting dynamics, mentorship and sponsorship.
  2. This activity is geared towards professional people in a working environment. It is very useful because the scenarios that are used in this exercise are very relatable and realistic. One scenario in one of the card sets presents us with this problem: “You’re asked to interview candidates for a role on your team and notice none are women.”  The bottom of the card gives an explanation of why this matters. This matters because not interviewing women will surely mean that the company is missing out on good candidates and women will not be afforded the opportunity to advance their careers. The card also gives information that states that women are far less likely to receive an opportunity into entry level professional employment, which further stunts the growth of diversity in the workplace.
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Aaron, Research Portfolio

My research focuses on ethnic and racial diversity in education. The question I am concerned with is: what effect does implicit bias have on academic performance of students? I was lucky enough to find a very interesting topic in the very first source that I looked at while conducting this research. I stumbled upon a chapter of a book (the chapter was titled “Diversity”) and in this piece of writing I was introduced to implicit theories of intelligence. This essentially is where someone has biases towards people and treat them differently depending on what their ethnic background is: for instance a teacher may treat white kids better because they assume they will be “smarter” and do well with classwork, while a group of indigenous kids get overlooked. The indigenous kids may not fare as well on exams, but may have a whole different sphere of knowledge and intelligence, one that the white kids may not have.

Looking for sources (mostly through Syracuse Libraries Summon site, and JSTOR, but also Google Scholar) I found a lot of different chapters, articles and studies about diversity in education. From there I specifically looked for biases within academia and found quite a bit- sources that had to do with university administration and their attempts at installing diversity coalitions at school (and ultimately failing for the most part), professors picking out students to advise (based on their ethnic background), groups of college students and how their grades were while looking at what their classroom environment consisted of racially, and rural school districts dealing with what is known as “white flight” and how their districts are coping with rapidly changing demographics.

What I would like to find more of are peer reviewed studies that are not skewed a certain way: The best study that I found (and am using) makes a really convincing argument that racial diversity has little to no impact whatsoever on how people perform academically. This would be a good piece to use if I was playing devil’s advocate- but when I reread the study, I picked up on the statistics being skewed and not really impartial at all. Most other studies that I have looked through seem to be in the same vein.

The more I look into implicit theories of intelligence and biases that people have, it’s certainly opened my eyes. It’s scary because this almost seems to be an inherently natural behavior that people have and commit subconsciously, and me being someone who plans to go into education and am a white male, I don’t want to fall into this sort of behavior, it seems like systemically there is a disservice being done to women, people of color, disabled people, and people who are part of the LGBTQ community. I plan on digging as deep as I can to find more about this phenomenon.

 

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Rounding out the Conversation

Focus Flowchart

Research Plan, Aaron

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Discussion Post week of 7/6

  1. In the article “Examining Racial Bias in Education: A New Approach”, the concept of implicit bias in regards to education is the focus. In a different book chapter that I came across earlier in this course, the idea of implicit theories of intelligence was introduced to me- where people have an idea that certain ethnic groups have more knowledge than others. This article I am using for my research now uses this but goes further into the field of education and discusses how teachers use this, despite their good intentions and attempts at fostering a diverse climate in their classrooms.

This article is really helpful in my research because I plan on going into education after I complete my BA in History, and this behavior is something that peaks my interests. I was always aware of biases that people had (to include teachers naturally) but never knew that it was such a widespread thing. Finding out more about why a person will predetermine how you are going to perform academically just by the color of your skin is vital for us to understand if we ever want to have an honest discussion about diversity and inclusion and how we can contribute anything of value to help fix this issue.

2. Briggite D. answers the article by giving a little background about her experiences working in office environments, giving us as little personal testimony of how these open environments made her feel. What I feel was important that she brought to the discussion is her introduction of some personal issues that she encountered while working in this type of office environment which is extending the picture for us. Briggite brings up the group mentality of the office as a whole, where she would bring up a complaint to her manager and request to be moved because of noise complaints, breakroom and microwave complaints, etc and she would instantly be singled out for trying to break the group dynamic. This seems like groupthink to me and is very unnerving. The purpose of work (to me) is to get stuff done and be successful, and it seems that she (and i’m sure others like her in other places) would be shut down from trying to do their best because they didn’t have the freedom to work comfortably and were essentially forced into going with the flow.

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Research Plan, Aaron

The readings and assignments in this class have really opened my eyes and made me think about diversity and inclusion in ways I never have before. One area that has stuck out to me is the area of diversity in education. To break it down even further, I am interested in the bias against different races, ethnicities and genders in school. Are there biases that have a strong correlation on academic performance and outcomes? What really sparked me to ask this question was finding out about implicit theories of knowledge and the idea that administrators and educators can have a predetermination on whether you will be successful or not based on what race or culture you belong to.

This question is important to me on a personal level because once I am done with my schooling I plan to become a teacher either in middle school or high school (in social studies), so this idea of how teachers may look at and treat their students before having an honest chance to evaluate their skills, strengths and weaknesses is something that I plan to look into and learn as much as I can about.

My career outside of this school project has dealt with diversity in the sense that I have been around many cultures in jobs I have had in the past, and while my coworkers would more often than not tend to stick to their own kind of people and shy away from helping (or working with) people who have a different ethnic background than them, I’ve always found it easy and natural to do the opposite of that. Now that I plan to go into a different profession in my later years, getting into teaching, it is going to be interesting to find out how people who are already established in this field feel about their students- are they generally fair or exhibit their implicit bias?

In conducting this research, the bulk of my work comes from finding scholarly articles and book chapters that have been written by educators, sociologists, psychologists and administrators in the education system. Seeing what people who are in this field come up with will be important to seeing where the goal posts are in this argument of how diversity effects academic performance, and I have chose to solely rely on this kind of testimony because of the “inside look” at what these authors are contributing.