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.
Final, Policy framework, Isaac Haseltine
The policy framework I have written is intended to be used in any educational organization. Its main goal is to highlight the complexity of the discriminatory profiling that takes place in educational settings against minority groups and the racially/ethnically diverse people that belong to them. The framework has been written for the teachers, administration, and faculty that work and or interact with students. Furthering their knowledge on the generational issue will help create a more widespread understanding of the position we are in, and the position our society forces people into.
The focus of the framework is based on how our current education system is not adequately addressing the issue of disadvantages based on the racial or ethnic background of the students. The goal was to shine a light on these disadvantages, and to help inform the educational professionals how important their multicultural awareness is for their students. The framework would be a part of a booklet that all staff in the organization must read and discuss, it is not meant to be read by the select few who choose to do so. The booklet would contain general information on the organization and its mission statements, as well as information on the subcategories within the organization that need extra attention. The function behind the framework is to act as the catalyst for discourse in hopes that it will open people up to a serious problem many people ignore.
Final Project
For my final project, I created a magazine graphic to fit into an academic setting. The purpose behind this delivery is to inform university audiences of the significance behind recognizing language diversity. Above is a link to open the issue and read more on my research/ presentation.
Final Reflection Unit 3 – Dominique Van Gilst
When I began my unit 3 final project, I knew that I wanted to somehow talk about inclusion in education. I immediately knew that my project would work best as a powerpoint because I would be the “teacher” presenting to my audience. At first, I thought that it would be good to do my presentation thinking my audience was students. However, I ended up making my audience be the parents of students who are going to be learning in an inclusive education classroom because I thought about all of the back to school night presentation teachers gave to my parents, and how they always came home excited for me about the upcoming school year. Once I decided on my audience, I also thought that it would be good to add a slide about the ways in which parents can talk to their children about inclusive education. Again, I was thinking about how my parents would come home from back to school night and talk to be about each class. I then found sources I thought would work well for my audience to explain inclusion to them, and finished my project. Throughout the time that I was working on this presentation, I thought a lot about what I learned about the audience of a text in this class. I wanted it to be very evident that my audience was the parents of children going into an inclusive setting, so I prioritized that. Once my draft was completed, and some of my classmates commented, I was able to really take their thoughts into consideration and use them for my final draft. The comments I received helped a lot because before I read them I wasn’t sure what to do to improve my project; I was sort of stuck on what I had.
Creating this project has helped me to do google slides in general. I think that doing this presentation virtually actually allowed me to put less words on each slide, and use my voice to explain more about the topic, which is something I have always struggled with since I am so shy. I also think that completing this project will help my future career because I want to be an elementary school teacher, and I will have to give back to school night presentations, and possibly even something like the one that I created for this class. Finally, I was very excited to share what I have learned about inclusion to our WRT 205 class because I think that inclusion is a topic that is important for everyone to understand. This project allowed me to learn more about the field I will be working in while also sharing my findings with the class.
This project was very valuable to me, especially because I was able to learn so much about a topic I love to learn about. Not only was this project extremely relevant to my future career, but it also was helpful for me to do this project to learn about presenting thoroughly, and using research to guide that. Overall, I am really happy that this was one of the assignments for this course because I was able to pick my own topic, audience, and layout which allowed me to be more creative.
Unit 3 Final Project – Dominique Van Gilst
When I did my unit 3 project, I thought of it as a back to school night sort of presentation for parents, but geared towards inclusion. The audience of this google slides presentation would be the “parents” of my “students” that I would be teaching that year. The purpose of this presentation is to explain to parents that their children will be in an inclusive setting, and what that will mean for their child. I decided to do my project in the form of google slides because I wanted it to seem like an in person presentation as much as possible. I also added audio for this reason.
Draft of Final (Dan)
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When most people think about discrimination, the first thing that will likely come to mind would be discrimination of race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. However, there is one type of discrimination that is often overlooked. This is something that some people face every single day and have no way of hiding from. The prejudice that I am referring to is accent discrimination. We encounter individuals with different accents all the time living in the United States. Some of the various accents we hear are from native speakers of different regions in the U.S. Other times, the accent may be from individuals who have immigrated here from another country. It is not always the intent of the native lister to discriminate against someone with a foreign accent. Reason being that sometimes this prejudice will rear its head in the form of unconscious bias. Therefore, it is paramount that we learn to identify our own unconscious biases so that we can improve upon them and create a more inclusive society. This blog will seek to explore some of the ways that accent bias is harmful to our society and why we should take action against it.
Before we can explore the reasons behind why accent bias exists, how harmful it can be, and what ways we can mitigate this problem, we must first familiarize ourselves with the concept of unconscious bias. “Unconscious bias or Implicit stereotype is the unconscious attribution of particular qualities by an individual to a member of some social outgroup” (Wikepedia, 2020). If we parse this definition of unconscious bias, we can understand that this type of behavior involves assuming certain characteristics of others without realization based entirely upon judgment. It is significant that the core of the problem comprises of people taking action without seeing the full picture. Our lack of situational awareness and our ignorance of the consequences of our actions is truly alarming to me. If we are going to be able to change behavior that is deeply engrained in us, we must first become aware of the effects that our words and actions have on other people. One way that we can do this is by listening to the stories of people affected by unconscious bias such as Mirela Setkik. Mirela is a Bosnian refugee and founder of a successful marketing agency in St Petersburg, Florida. Mirela conducted a TED Talk at the University of South Florida to create awareness about unconscious accent bias in our society. In her TED Talk, Mirela speaks on how she has felt about the way she was treated based on her accent. Mirela states “I have felt judged, questioned, and put under a microscope. Many times, I could tell that people were confused as they didn’t know where to place me. They were suspicious. And it still happens, its probably happening right now” (Setkic, 2019). Mirela continues on by stating “Actually I think I am asked about my accent on a weekly basis by complete strangers who often think it would be fun to play a game of I bet I can guess where your accent is from” (Setkic, 2019). Her story is the epitome of how inaccurate our assumptions can be about other people. I would go further to say that our assumptions about others are most often incorrect. Through having background knowledge of the tragedy that Mirela escaped in former Yugoslavia, it is a shame that she must live her life feeling unwelcome and discriminated against in the country she fled to for safety.
Another example of someone who has faced this type of discrimination and had the courage to speak out against it is an associate director at Columbia University named Hernan Diaz. Hernan was born in Argentina, grew up in Sweden, spent a few years in London in his twenties, and spent most of his life in the United States. Hernan has therefore developed a very unique “mixed accent” throughout his life. In a PBS special based on accent bias. Hernan speaks about his perplexing feelings after seeing flyers on campus advertising programs of accent reduction and accent elimination. In a concerned manner, Hernan begs the questions “Does my accent need correcting? I don’t think so. To sound like who, exactly? A native speaker? What would that even mean?” (Diaz, 2018). This quote from Hernan is quite gripping as it contains multiple facets. Hernan makes a great point when asking the question what it means to sound like a native speaker. In the United States we have many different regional accents that all differ and contain their own slang. There are also other countries such as Great Britain, Canada, Australia, South Africa and many others that are native speakers of English even though they don’t sound exactly the same. Also, even if English is ones second language, is there something inherently wrong with having slightly different pronunciation and intonations in your speech? I certainly do not think there is myself.
Now that we have heard from multiple individuals about their experience facing accent discrimination, I would like to explore some of the research that is being done into this field. This research is important as it can help us understand why the problem of unconscious bias exists and offer some possible avenues for solving the issue. One individual who has made great contributions to research in accent discrimination is Rahul Chakraborty, a professor at Texas State university. Rahul wrote a great article called “A Short note on Accent-bias, Social Identity and Ethnocentrism” which is full of necessary nomenclature and explanations of social behavior that can lead to accent bias. An important topic to be familiar with when thinking about why unconscious bias exists is Social identity theory (SIT). SIT essentially boils down to the fact that people have a strong tendency to form groups amongst themselves based on common characteristics. Perhaps this gives us the sense of familiarity and belongingness that we crave in our lives. Nevertheless, through forming our “ingroups” (those we share traits with) we subsequently create outgroups (those we differ from) of which we have a stronger probability to compete with and view in a negative manner. The varying degree to which we feel attached to our ingroups is dependent on the varying levels of ethnocentrism amongst people. Ethnocentrism is essentially the belief that our ingroups are the center of everything. In other words, we cannot help but to compare outgroup characteristics to the more familiar ingroup characteristics that we use as reference. Though ethnocentrism is not always a bad thing, take for example patriotism or team spirit, too much of it is shown to create overly high identification with ingroups and subsequent derogation of outgroups. As Rahul states in his article “social identity is the primary construct of ethnocentrism”. Stated another way, our propensity to socially categorize ourselves forms basis of which ethnocentrism can thrive. With this in mind, the different accents that people possess is a very common way that they will organize their social groups in. When confronted by individuals that possess remarkably high levels of ethnocentrism, prejudice may arise in various forms as affirmed by Rahul in the following statement.
“Frequently, speakers with nonnative accent are considered less intelligent, less loyal, less competent and of lower status and face both prejudice and stereotypes” (Chakraborty, 2017)
Implicit stereotype. (2020, August 02). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_stereotype
Setkic, M. (n.d.). Retrieved July 19, 2020, from https://www.ted.com/talks/mirela_setkic_where_is_your_accent_from_the_subtle_aggression_of_accent_guessing
(2018, July 03). Retrieved July 19, 2020, from https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/we-stigmatize-accents-but-language-belongs-to-everyone
Chakraborty, R. (2017). A Short note on Accent–bias, Social Identity and Ethnocentrism. Advances in Language and Literary Studies, 8(4), 57. doi:10.7575/aiac.alls.v.8n.4p.57
Unit 3 Draft
For my project I created a presentation that will provide information to school officials on how to promote inclusivity within public schools. Minority students struggle with finding resources and excelling in gifted programs within large schools. However, In my powerpoint I provide not only information about the gifted programs and how to create a more diverse student body but also resources on how to elevate minority students and ensure their path to success. Within this powerpoint schools will be able to learn new methods of inclusion and incorporate them into future enrichment programs.
Unit 3 draft
My project audience would be college juniors and seniors that are entering workplaces whether that be internships or full time jobs. The goal for my presentation is to be an asset for them as they enter, giving them the tools to make adjusting to the workplace easier. The tools I will be focusing on is how to bring perspective and empathy into the workplace. I will be creating a visual presentation that will be posted on LinkedIn’s platform slideshare. This is a platform where people come to learn and share especially college students, since LinkIn is popular among that demographic. The circumstances that the audience would be in when reading this presentation would be if they are either, looking for resources before entering a workplace, or sent the resource from a teacher or mentor sending them advice. I choose this circumstance because often college students receive information better when they seek it out rather than being forced to read or do something. I hope to achieve my goal along with clear graphics and charts to make the presentation easy to understand and more engaging for the age group.
Unit 3 Draft
The audience of my project include college students (mostly juniors and seniors that are present in a job hunt post – graduation). For my genre, I decided to incorporate social media and pretend to do a series of Facebook posts. Because Instagram has brief captions and seems informative, I chose Facebook as my social media platform because less younger kids and teenagers have it where this information would not apply to them, you can share Facebook posts directly to your profile and it will stay pinned there, and most college students are on it a good amount for a variety of reasons. The attached media is a pdf of what would be a series of posts all belonging to a single profile. My purpose and intention with this project layout is to address students who are headed into the workplace with a bunch of different generations, and advise them on what they should know and expect from employers. This is just my draft so I plan to take feedback I receive to have it updated for the final.
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