Research Project
For my research project, I constructed an informative powerpoint meant for Primary School Educators and Administrators. The power point is the product of research based on group work in diverse settings, such as the office or class room. The goal of the powerpoint is to inform my audience of the findings of my research, which indicate a positive relationship in group communication between openness and trust, and successful group outcomes. The theory is that if these two variables promote successful outcomes in diverse settings, the tools to practice these techniques should be taught at a young age, and not at the college or professional level. My research indicated that minority employees have negative experiences with “Inclusion and Diversity” trainings that are common for the workplace in today’s world, because they only singled them out more and put them in uncomfortable positions. The goal with starting students on cultural awareness and group diversity work early, is that the micro-aggressions that come to light in adult life in the workplace can be prevented from happening in the first place. As mentioned in the powerpoint, opinions and communication skills are formulated at a young age. The goal of my powerpoint is to help students grow into healthy contributing members of a diverse society. My powerpoint promotes and outlines the idea of yearly, state-required course learning for students in the grades K-12. With my audience in mind – youth educators and administrators – my powerpoint discusses my research, its findings, implications, and how my suggestions can be implemented into my audience’s work.
Project Proposal
My project will be aimed at Elementary School educators and administrators in order to teach them about the research I’ve done of success with diversity. My research will outline ways in which youth educators can better prepare students for the world as people with good communication skills and understandings for other cultures.
Research Portfolio
For this project, the goal was to start with a small topic and expand it into a greater field of research and perspectives, making the discussion bigger and bigger. We started with the simple definition of organizational culture, and then expanded it to the positives and negatives of it. Through this we found an opposing ideal, which champions diversity as a means for greater success. We discussed all of this within the realm of the workplace, with some readings relating it further. What interested me most was when I first saw the connection of diversity to success made to something extremely different from the workplace realm. This was when in the “Expanding the Canon” assignment, someone included an article of a study which theorized a connection between diversity and success inn international, professional soccer.
From here I wanted to research a theory that diversity inherently means greater success. In stating this theory, I was able to find more avenues of research in looking to disprove it. This was done in the “complicating your research” activity, where I found information that proves diversity doesn’t, in fact, equate to immediate greater success. The article I found conducted a study that showed diverse groups performing equal to or less than less diverse groups. The study then implemented two things into the groups – trust, and openness in communication – and analyzed how that changed their level of success. The result was eye-opening for my research, because implementing these two things made the diverse groups outperform the non-diverse groups significantly. This brought me to my final avenue of research, which I decided would be my focus. I wondered if these two variables could be the connection between diversity and success in any sense, including in the real world, beyond a team or office.
This path of research I took all guided me to this inquiry, which I plan to dive into next to finish off this research project. Can some form of implementation of trust and openness in communication solve a gap between diversity and success in the real world? Meaning could it solve some of the issues with race our country has been plagued with for centuries and up to this day? Or does this relate back to one of my article’s claims that “diversity and inclusion” type of workshops in the office don’t help, but actually make minority employees feel more uncomfortable? Or how could these things be implemented without uncomfortable and useless workshops? These are the questions I will seek answers to as I finish my research.
Research Plan
The question guiding my research is, how do our findings from studies on workplace diversity help us better understand the role of diversity of our world at large? Studies within the workplace show again and again how diversity can have a positive effect on the success of a company. They also have shown what goes wrong when diversity doesn’t have a positive impact. This can be a direct look into why, as a world of many races, we sometimes clash, and sometimes use our differences to our advantage. At a time where issues of race are as prevalent a conversation as any, I think this is an important connection to make.
This question intrigues my personal interests because the dilemma of racial equality has been something I’ve thought about my entire life. Why is it that she corporations can foster diversity successfully while others fail? Why are some countries plagued with constant strife against one or more races, while others live more peacefully? What can turn our differences into advantages rather than things to fear to push us apart. I believe the research on organizational culture and diversity is on the path to answering those questions. My career and personal interests relate to these topics because I play basketball for Syracuse and found the article about Football interesting for what diversity means on a greater level than just the workplace.
The work I do in the world beyond this course will inform this inquiry, as I’m both in a sports environment as well as a diverse environment. It’s easy to see first-hand what works and what doesn’t. I can make connections to the Football study, in that each of my teammate brings a different style of player from their part of the world. The fields that will matter most to my inquiry are studies of diversity in smaller to larger group settings, from classroom/workroom to country. I’ll look for information in sports studies on diversity and relate it to sports on a bigger stage in order to expand to a perspective of the world at large. I’ll look at political studies for information on country’s diversity and compare it to studies on diversity in sports.
Research Portfolio (Dan )
The topic that I chose to study is unconsious accent bias. I was intrigued by the a similar topic that I saw one of our classmates conducted in unit 1. Upon starting my research, I was surprised to see that there is a relatively small amount of research done into this topic compared to other types of discrimination. However, through the use of some of these tools provided in this class I as able to find some quality sources. My main method of finding these sources was through the Syracuse university library. However, I had never heard of SAGE before and was pleasantly surprised with how much it helped me. This topic is one that is meaningful to me as some of my very close friends are not natives of the United States. It was very eye opening read the stories of the discrimination and feeling of loneliness that some people experience all because of their nonnative accent. I would like to continue searching for more articles that explore some of the ways that we can mitigate this problem. I am looking forward to tying all of my research together in unit 3.
Annotation 1 ( Mirela ted talk)
Annotation 3 (short note on accent-bias)
Annotation 4 (Accent bias_forbes)
Annotation 5 ( political skill)
Research Portfolio – Samantha Danylchuk
Unit 2 Research Reflection
At the start of this assignment, I had no clue where I was going or what I wanted to do research on. But as I read more into my classmates’ posts, the generational gap in the workplace stood out to me right away. This is something I know I will be experiencing for myself in a few years after I graduate college, so I focused on looking for sources that covered generational diversity in the work environment. As far as the tools and strategies that I used to locate my sources, I spent time going through the helpful links and handouts tabs on our blackboard and searched on Google Scholars, SAGE, EBSCOhost, GALE, and ted.com. Some of my sources go into depth on the different habits of each current generation in the work force and how the conflicts need to be solved, while others focus on the similarities among the generations and what other initiatives that offices or other working environments can implement to bring a more successful atmosphere. Additionally, some include experiments and data tables focusing on a specific career industry while others explain the broader idea.
I really enjoyed the two note taking techniques I did which included free – writing and organizing a double-entry journal. These two techniques were very different because I felt my thoughts go all over the place when I did a 5-minute free write, but the journal helped me stay organized and on topic. It was really interesting to me how I enjoyed both of them (probably the free-writing a tad more) yet they are completely different approaches at annotating. The research plan has guided my work to search for articles that I think would answer my questions. Having this plan ahead of time really helped me in the whole process of researching because I started typing in keywords that led me to what I was looking for, rather than just any article that would be lacking in information I needed. My plan has begun to evolve based on the data I’ve found, references I’ve read that my sources include, and all the knowledge I have already learned from the entirety of this assignment. Some additional sources I would like to locate are those that challenge my thoughts in some way, making me question and counter the ideas that they demonstrate. I have yet to disagree with anything I’ve found, so this is a gap that I see in my research which I am prioritizing in searching for with my project proposal.
The idea that one day in the next 5 or 10 years, I could be in a work environment filled with people from all different generations is the most intriguing concept about this topic to me. I’ve already had professors of all different ages in just one year at SU, so to think that my topic is even happening around me is so exciting! For a club I belong to at school called The Women’s Network, we visited the headquarters of Bloomberg in New York City early last year, and I spoke to a recent graduate of SU who is working in finance there now and she explained to me how most of her colleagues are older men so she was extremely intimidated when she began her job at first. To actually know of experiences and see my topic be exemplified in the real working world is super intriguing and I can’t wait to go further with my research on this!
Research Portfolio, Bryan
At the end of unit one I had come across an article speaking about the interactions between both native and nonspeakers when they communicate in the workplace. Amidst the research I was doing on office discrimination, I found myself very intrigued by this related topic. Here was where I first heard the term linguistic (or language) diversity being used. With a few quick google searches I began to wrap my head around larger issues that surrounded the subject. As I continued to read more sources and find articles that covered a wide range of perspectives, I slowly began to realize how significant these discussions became for understanding the development of how organizational cultures come to be. Moreover, I wanted to learn why this form of diversity isn’t as commonly discussed when compared to other types of diversity and inclusion efforts such as racial, ethnic, or gender motives.
The development of my research was founded on this groundwork which continued to evolve as we proceeded into unit two. While some sources reiterated similar findings to my first study, one notable article helped me understand these topics applied at a more global scale. This text, along with the others I annotated below, widened my position on the topic by looking at language diversity further in individual, community, and international levels (along with relating past articles we’ve read in the class). Additionally, in order to round out and complicate my work I decided to look at studies in specific environmental settings different from the workplace. This led me to uncover interesting and insightful perspectives from a classroom and governmental context. These sources were accessed off of Google Scholar, TED.com, and a number of Syracuse Library Databases that focused on Linguistic/ Applied Language collections.
To my discovery, I found most authors and professionals consensus that there was not much research on the impact of language diversity out there. Only in recent decades has the public increasingly been made aware of the potential issues and societal benefits language (particularly multilingualism) can have. Given our trends in globalization and increased mobility in transnational countries, however, it makes sense that some areas of research (such as figuring out why linguistic diversity isn’t as openly discussed) can be because of the limited discourse on a relatively new subject.
Despite the gaps within the overall body of research, I still managed to collect a substantial amount of knowledge to develop my portfolio. The oppositional research I did for example changed my one-way view of how I saw language. Instead of all the pubic acclaim language diversity typically receives, the article offered an alternative point of view looking at language diversity not only as a resource but also as a problem. It informed me of areas commonly overlooked thus making it critical for assessing this type of diversity. Overall I found many of our mini writing exercises reinforce my initial writing interests by staying on top of and coming back to main, central ideas. Eventually I’d like to find more potential sources on the oppositional claims I’ve found since it’s an area that is especially underrepresented.
Research Portfolio
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