Author: Justin Orriola

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Final Reflection

From the ongoing research I did for Unit 2, it ultimately led me to continue my focus soon the discrimination and inequality currently in our education system. This is a major topic in todays society however a very broad one. I wanted to focus on a specific issue within this big issue. Adding on to the research already done, I looked at articles surrounding the screening process. I did this because I wanted to write about a way that could potentially help solve this inequality that many students face today and a way for more people to be informed on the topic at hand. It was at first difficult to decide what to actually put in the project because it is such a big issue and there can be many sections to it. However, I wanted to focus on a smaller issue regarding inequality in schools. For me, that included the screening aspect of it, in addition to statistics, and an experience from a student and his perspective on being a minority in a school. The exercises we did really helped me get my thoughts out and helped me understand the reading better. For example the note taking exercises prompted me to annotate and take notes which ultimately helped me obtain the main idea from the article and helped me implement my viewpoints.

I learned a lot during this class surrounding my knowledge of diversity and inclusion, but I would say the most important thing I learned was about audience. A post on the blog that really stuck with me was the one that said how location is the most important factor in real estate, and thats the same effect audience has for writing. When I had a targeted audience in mind, I found it easier to write. I am going to continue to do that in my writing. I noticed how different writing styles can be depending on the audience you are trying to appeal to. In addition to that, I learned a lot about research. What to type in the search bar and the filters are so important. I hadn’t done too much research based writings in college so this class was a big help for that and helped me become more prepared for more writing I will have to do in the future like that.

To me the assignment had many values. First and foremost a better understanding of the issues facing racial injustice in the education system. Racial injustice has been a huge talking point recently and the research I have done for this class, increased my knowledge of the subject which is really beneficial. Looking at the statistics and numbers, minorities are heavily underrepresented in some schools. Knowing this information from my research, along with what I already knew, allowed me to expand my writing to strengthen my argument. In addition, inform the reader who might not know too much about the topic. Focusing on what to include and what to leave out of my writing is something I have struggled with in the past. I feel like this class improved that for me by keeping the audience in mind and considering what is most beneficial for them. Ultimately, I believe the tools I learned in this class increased my skills that I will maintain in my writing in the future.

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FInal Project

WRT 205 Final Article

For my final project I chose. to do a New York Times article about the topic of diversity in education and what schools can do to increase their diversity numbers. I wanted to show how important diversity and inclusion was for students so I included all the benefits of it as well as graphs showing that it does in fact need to be addressed. As I mentioned in my discussion post for the draft, my target audience are students and parents. These are the groups who are most affected by whether screening is in place or not. Next would be teachers and administrators. I mentioned in the article how big of a role teachers play in students education. We have read about decision makers in the workplace and how big of a role they play for everyday lives of the workers, this is no different with the faculty of schools. The purpose of my article is to inform these groups on a topic that is very important in todays society.

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Unit 3 Draft

For my project I chose to replicate a New York Times style article. The target audience are primarily students and parents. I am trying to get the point across to these groups because I feel that these are the groups most affected by whether screening is in place or not. Next is administrators and teachers of the schools. It is beneficial for them to know what is going on in not only their schools, but other schools as well. The purpose of my project is to inform readers on the importance of inclusion in education and how the screening process can help diversify the schools. I still have to include a couple more sections, as well as more info graphs and fix the graphs sizes and format to make it easier to read.

http://docs.google.com/document/d/1S2T1V0CdpbC4XLcvaYwzzOXtJKNJFG32p0ekFfPM5DQ/edit?usp=sharing

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Discussion Post Week of 7/27

Election 2020: 11 Ways to Engage Students From Now Until November

I decided to use this article from the New York Times because it is something very similar to what I want to do for my project. This particular article is about the election coming up and ways to engage students from now until November.  After reading the comments on my discussion post from last week, including infographics and quotes from other sources will be a great addition to the article. This helps the reader visualize what’s being said and with the use of research, creates a more credible source. I am first and foremost looking at the length of the article, the format, and the type of tone being used. I notice that this particular article takes a more neutral approach on the subject and allows the reader to create their own point of view. The format is fairly simple with breaks in the pages for the infographics and the interactive aspects. There is a big headline at the top of the article, with subheadings throughout the rest. I have to figure out how I want to divide the information I am going to present to the reader and where to put the infographics so that it aligns with the reading. Ultimately, the point of my article is to create more awareness and helps the reader develop their own opinion about the screening process with the use of the charts, graphs, and quotes.

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Project Proposal

For my unit 3 project, I am going to create a news article that highlights both the problems and benefits of the screening process in schools. I want to show how diversity in education is essential I feel like a news article can cover all aspects that I want to address with the use of quotes, pictures, and diagrams. I have a template that I can use which will use subheadings and showcase all different aspects of the educational system and how screening is being used. To do this, I am going to use sources that I have used for my unit 2 assignment, as well as additional primary sources that focus on the students and parents personal experiences with screening. The audience that this kind of writing will appeal to most I believe is the students and the parents who have to apply to schools and will eventually be affected by the selection process . Another group that can benefit from this are school administrators and faculty. Identifying both the problems and solutions this process has, will be very helpful for these educators so they know how to deal with it in the classroom.

Ultimately, the goal of this news article is to show why diversity and inclusion in the classroom is important and what screening. can do to help. I am going to use statistics from certain schools diversity and inclusion numbers, and show how some students have been affected in a major way. This will create more awareness to the process and schools can see whether or not they would want to implement it in some way.

 

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Discussion Posts Week of 7/20

  1. The article I chose to focus on is the article titled ““How to create a culture manifesto for your organization (and why its a good idea).” The author does a great job at conveying her message to the reader. With the use of subheadings, West is able to highlight key companies that had mission statements, but would not necessarily follow them. West begins by explaining how mission statements have been guiding non-profit organizations for a while now. However, instead of focusing on internal ways of working, they often focus on the. external goals. A manifesto is meant to create a a better working environment and create a place where everyone is equal and no one is discriminated against. This article is really informative and people who are in a position of power in the workplace, as well as people who work everyday, will benefit from reading this article. The questions she raises under the subheading “how to create a manifesto,” are questions everyone should ask themselves when going into work. This article is a great addition to the conversation on organizational culture. West does a great job at using certain strategies to appeal to certain audiences to convey her point of view.
  2. For my own research piece, I would like to continue my conversation on the screening process in schools by creating a news article. Websites and news articles, along with scholarly articles, have been at the forefront of my research. I found the most information there and I am going to continue to use those to show why diversity and inclusion is so important in education. I’m going to continue to look at scholarly articles done by professionals in the field as well as websites and news sources as a. format for my own research piece. I feel that there are many audiences that can benefit from this kind of writing. First and foremost students and parents who are going through this process and experiencing some kind of discrimination. In addition, faculty and staff at schools who are the ones admitting and declining students. The News article would be a good way to get this information across because it would be easy to read, yet still showing the importance and the problem with screening. I can incorporate quotes from some of the research I have done before and even add pictures that can be relevant to the topic.
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Discussion Posts Week of 7/13

  1. My linked article under “hold decision makers accountable” is all about how employer practices has a big effect on workplace inequality. It focuses on sensitivity and the article argues that women can evoke more sensitive behavior from others. So much so that men as well as women contribute to an increase in sensitivity in mixed gender interactions. One of the biggest problems facing organizations today according to the article is that there’s currently a lack of interpersonal sensitivity. This can be defined as the act of caring and respectful treatment towards others. Organizations don’t often help themselves when it comes to inequality. When determining pay, employers are the ones at the forefront of that and should be held accountable when there are situations where equal pay is not met. This connects to what Wynn is saying in her article titled “Individual Change Wont Create Gender Equality in Organizations.” She argues that there are many factors that go into this and many steps organizations can take to reduce the inequality that women are facing in the workplace. It is up to the higher ups and employers of these organizations to take the necessary steps to create a safe working environment for women, and less inequality all around.
  2. In the article, the authors are talking about the environment in the workplace initiated by the employers. I feel that first and foremost, the employers of these companies would benefit the most from reading this article seeing how some of them are the reasons for this inequality. In addition, I think that this article appeals to everyone who works and more specifically works with people of the opposite gender in groups. The article talks about sensitivity levels differentiating when in a group with people of the opposite gender. The researchers found that “the willingness to act with interpersonal sensitivity increased in interactions with women.” This is just an interesting fact that I feel people who work in groups would want to know about and read the rest of the article. This quote was in the first paragraph of the article.
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Justin’s Research Portfolio

When we first began the unit and we were tasked with coming up with a topic, I knew I wanted to talk about diversity in the education system and more specifically, the process of screening. As I was doing my research, I noticed that this was a highly debated topic. Many people thought that screening would help schools increase their diversity by picking students from different backgrounds and locations. However, others thought it creates unfair judgement based on the previous school the student went to, along with many other factors, and as a result lessens the diversity in that school.

The main purpose of my research is to find out whether screening results in more or less diversity in schools. I also wanted to show why it is so important to have diversity and inclusion in schools which a lot of the articles I found expand on that idea. The majority of my sources came from Syracuse libraries where I found numerous scholarly articles on my topic. However, I found it difficult to find primary sources throughout the research stage. I wanted to find some kind of an interview or article from the point of view of a student or parent and their experiences with screening and whether or not it helped them get into a certain school. All the articles I found were written by researchers and experts in the field of education specializing in inclusion. All the exercises we were tasked with helped with the annotations especially the note taking exercises. This one really helped me identify the main points of the article and helped add to the conversion we’ve been having all unit on diversity.  In addition, it helped me think more about the sources I used and include my views on the topic.

While I feel like I covered most of what I wanted to, I believe there are some gaps in my research. Like I mentioned before the perspectives of all the articles comes from experts in the field. However it would be good to get articles from the perspective of a student who may have been affected by the screening process or a family member of that student. Overall, the information I found from my research was very intriguing. Reading about the topic and comparing different viewpoints is fascinating, then offering my own input helped me better understand the topic and the main idea the writers were trying to get across. All of the information I got from the sources helped grow my knowledge on this topic and contributed to our discussions on diversity.

Supporting Materials: 

WRT 205 Focusing Flowchart PDF

WRT 205 Complicating Your Research

WRT 205 Rounding out the Conversation Worksheet

WRT 205 Annotations PDF

Research Plan

 

 

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Discussion Prompts Week of 7/6

  1. The first source I’d like to do an annotation on is an article titled “Why some principals say screening students can actually help schools hang on to diversity.”  Throughout the article, the author argues how the entire screening process can actually increase diversity rather than past beliefs that argue how it actually hinders it. Using statistics and quotes from faculty and staff of various schools, the author does a great job at getting his point across to the reader. One principal said it was difficult to ensure diversity through screening because the city doesn’t provide the schools enough information such as the socioeconomic status of the student. However, the process can still be integrated to help diversify schools. I feel that the incorporation of the quotes helped the article flow nicely and the quotes raised interesting questions. One of them being what factors do schools priories the most when trying to diversify schools better?

This article raises the question whether screening is good or bad for schools. I am going to use this source to argue why it can be beneficial and use another source I found to show why it may not be. I feel that it is important to show both sides of it because it is a heavily debated topic. I would also like to show how beliefs may be different across different types of schools and depending on where it is. This article also includes the importance of diversity and why it is so essential in schools. I want to show why diversifying the education system is important so this source helps with that.

2. The section under the subheading “A lack of privacy makes anxiety worse” intrigues me because I feel like I can resonate with it. Just from prior experiences, I tend to feel more comfortable doing work while no one else is watching or judging. When people are, I feel pressured and as a result, makes the work lesser quality because I just want to get it done as fast as possible. When I am by myself, I have the time to think through and hopefully produce better work. The author is doing a great job at explain responses by people to then prove her points. The author is explains how women tend to be more comfortable when they aren’t in a large open spaces and how there are often places they go to settle down a bit and avoid all the eyes on them. The author uses the responses and builds upon her argument which is really effective.

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Research Plan

For this project, I have chosen to focus on diversity in the education system and how public and private school screening processes may have an affect on this. For our unit 1 assignment, I had seen one of my classmates blog post about diversity in education and it really caught my interest. Diversifying the education system is a really important topic in organizational culture. I wanted to specifically look at screening and while I was doing the research, I noticed that it is a highly debated topic with many viewpoints and discussions surrounding this. After reading several articles about this, I have developed a couple questions to guide more of my research. One of them simply being why is diversity in education important? I have found that integrated classroom environments are essential in helping students learn to collaborate and work with people of different backgrounds and cultures. It then creates a safer and more connected workplace.

After reading several articles about this, another question arose which is why aren’t more schools integrating more diversity and does screening have anything to do with it? I want to use the information I find for these questions to really understand the process of screening and whether it ultimately hinders or helps diversify schools. I chose these questions because I was always interested in the process schools went to in order to accept incoming freshman into their schools. Growing up in NYC, I have had to apply to middle and high school and hope to be accepted. However I never really thought about the factors that go into this and how public and private schools may differ. I want to better understand these questions because education is so important in shaping our future, and the process behind it really interests me. Continuing my research, I will continue to looks at articles with authors in the field of education. So far, I have found exactly that and even some who specialize in the diversity programs at certain schools across the country. I am going to continue to look at SU libraries which so far has been successful for me. Primary sources seem to be a little more difficult but I am going to expand my searches in hopes to find one that will connect to the topic.

Lastly, I believe that the experiences and work I have done at previous programs, will help make a significant connection to my topic. For example, a few years ago I volunteered at the JCC who partnered with a school in upper Manhattan for one on one tutoring in both math and reading. The students were all in elementary school and predominantly African American. After my school ended, on Tuesdays I would take the train uptown to this school and see the student I was assigned to tutor. Immediately he saw me and the first thing he said was “oh you’re white.” He was accustomed to teachers of his race helping him through school and wasn’t used to anything different. The reason I gave this story is because even though we had a lot of similarities such as watching and playing basketball, he still found it hard to connect because he wasn’t used to it. I think it is important to have integrated schools so it helps young people how to collaborate and work with people who they may not be used to working with. I believe that screening can be helped to diversify schools if the right information is presented and therefore will allow students to work well with anyone no matter the circumstances.