Unit 3 Reflection

The work for my Unit 2 Project informed the ultimate aim for my final project. After Unit 1, and throughout Unit 2 my research got extremely broad. I was interested in how what we learned from our readings could affect the world at large, and wanted to find out more about that. After researching from that perspective and getting a much larger view of the discussion, I realized I needed to dial in on something more specific. But this wasn’t hard to do necessarily, because the question I theorized in my Unit 2 reflection – could openness and trust in communication be the answer to conflict in diverse settings? – really starts at an early age. The tools discussed in the articles I read about diversity and inclusion trainings at jobs could be done during schooling, and not just revisited once in the workforce.

Once I began to think of my theory in this way – starting at a young age – I realized the answers to my questions were simpler than I thought. Most of the work done to fix racial conflicts is cleanup. It’s fixing wrongly formed habits and opinions that began at a young age. So my findings and implications from my research could be applied to youth, instead of aiming at the whole world, like it felt like I was beginning to do in Unit 2.

Out of doing this work, starting in a small topic, expanding to a larger discussion, and dialing back into a small topic, I learned many useful tools for doing research. One of the newest techniques to me was in the “complicating your research” activity. I never thought to look for what I wasn’t looking for to find what I am looking for, but it proved to be useful in finding holes in my research. I learned how to utilize a counter argument to my advantage. It was interesting to take my research and reword my findings into a way specific for my audience. Doing the steps for this assignment made this process very clear, and I could see what I learned transform into something I could then put into an informative piece for others.

The value this assignment had for me was in my topic. As I discussed in previous blog posts, racial conflict has always been an interest to me and what could possibly help solve it. This interest guided my research and brought me to my ultimate project/idea. It’s interesting because the idea of implementing diversity/cultural classwork into K-12 education has been tossed around in national conversations recently, and actually became a reality for states like New Jersey. I thought of something like this as a huge step for change, but not as impactful as I believe it to be now through my research. The articles I read show a clear solution to conflicts in groups with diversity, and those conflicts can be avoided early-on instead of cleaned up after the fact, like the majority are today. Without the small topic to broader discussion to small topic style of research we did in this class I’m not sure I could have come to the same clear conclusion. The work I did in this class will most definitely inform my work with research moving forward, and I’m happy to have gone through this process.

Week of 7/27 Discussion

This powerpoint is similar to the style of powerpoint I’m doing for my Research Project, with a similar audience. The topic is on how to safely return to schools after closures from coronavirus. It’s an informative powerpoint for students and teachers, with a writing style similar to what mine is for my project. I really like the layout of this powerpoint and its integration into the website. It looks extremely professional and well done, and the writing is all very professional. What I can take from this powerpoint and bring into my own is the layout for how the powerpoint progresses. The slides are simple and ask simple questions and provide simple answers. What’s different about this one from mine is it’s more of an interact style of powerpoint, simply just due to the fact corona would prevent it from actually being presented to anyone. I want to use its simple style, and utilizing single-word slides for my own project like this one, because I think it does a good job of engaging the audience.

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.

Week of 7/20 Discussion

  1. In How To Create A Culture Manifesto for Your Organization (And Why It’s a Good Idea), Mollie West compiles the mission statements from various companies and how they used them, in order to convince readers of the importance of Culture Manifestos. She makes the strengths and uses of the company’s manifestos clear though laying them out in bullet points. She goes back and forth between her own analysis of the manifestos, and information on the manifestos themselves. The companies are laid out in different sections in bold underline and make it easy for readers to scroll through them and read her reasoning why they’re effective. She aims to reach an audience with influence in companies in order to help influence their systems with her recommendations.
  2. In analyzing West’s article for her target audience and her style she uses to reach them, I’ve thought about what type of audience I would like to reach with my research project and why. Because college is the stepping stone into the real world, and college graduates will have a great influence on the world they step into after college, I first believed college students would be a good target audience for the information I’d like to share with my research. But college students already have strongly developed opinions, and this will miss many young adults who choose not to attend college. The type of information I’d like to share will have to do with the trust and openness in communication discussed in my research that has a possibility to help better hone diversity. Learning to do these things in groups may better prepare people for the world beyond their childhood homes. Because of this, and reconsidering, I decided this type of basic communication skill should be something taught to everyone, and at a young age, maybe as young as Elementary school. The research I’ve done, if it ever came to permanent findings for a solution to race conflict, could be developed into programs designed to help young children learn, understand and celebrate other’s differences.

Week of 7/13 Discussion

  1. “Skillfull,” linked in Alison Wynn’s Individual Change Won’t Create Gender Equality in Organizations, is an organization with the intent of connecting the 70% of Americans without college degrees with employers, educators and lawmakers based on skill sets. The website has resources for employers as well as the unemployed to get involved. What this adds to Wynn’s article is an outlet for the disparities she discussed to be helped. Women, or disadvantaged people can use this resource to pursue their endeavors.
  2. Her target audience in citing this website is women without college degrees. I gather this from the website’s mission statement which says, “Skillful works with employers, educators, policymakers and others to help the nearly 70% of Americans without college degrees get good jobs based on the skills they have or the skills they can learn – creating new opportunities for success in the digital era.” Wynn’s article is about a disparity of women in tech, and this linked article provides a resource for people without college degrees to get jobs in tech. Further, the website’s resources provide a place for women with a desire to get involved in tech to sign up, people who may have come straight from Wynn’s article.

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.

Week of 7/6 Discussion

  1. Heterogeneity and team performance: Evaluating the effect of cultural diversity in the world’s top soccer league

In Heterogeneity and team performance: Evaluating the effect of cultural diversity in the world’s top soccer league, by Keith Ingersoll, Edmond Malesky and Sebastian M. Saiegh, the authors discuss a study in which the success of various professional soccer teams was analyzed on a premise of the level of diversity in each team. What they found was a positive relationship between diversity and performance. Teams with international talent on their roster outperform teams with a motivation towards cultivating “homegrown” (local) talent.

This source is extremely useful to my research because it brings the topic of diversity from within the realms of workplace structure, to the outside world, in the far reaches of professional international sports. This brings the topic from a small to very large scale, and opens up the possibility to relate the topic to other realms. By reaching to sports performance , something very different from office performance, it opens up all the places in between where there is room to look for connections between diversity and success. This article will work as a connection point from the workplace research to the larger world research.

2. In Readers Respond: Open Offices Are Terrible For Women, the women who respond build on the original ideas from the article. One women does this effectively by extending some of the original examples with her own experiences. She describes how she has been meaning to speak with her manager for a while now about a man who stares at her consistently and has caused her to take other routes throughout the office in order to avoid him. By illustrating her own experience she helps validate the original articles claims. I found her input interesting because it shed light on the feelings women have throughout their day while in an open office plan. The nature of many men cause them stress the men don’t ever have to bear. She furthers the point by adding that usually when women bring up issues like this their managers claim there is little they can do to fix it , and it has a negative impact on the worker who reported it and not the man.

Week of 6/29 Discussion

  1. Throughout this course so far we’ve read many contributions on the discussion of diversity, especially in the workplace. People make points for both the business and ethical effects of having more diversity in the workplace. In Wong’s, Culture: Equity and Inclusion, she adds to this conversation with her comparison of “equity vs. equality.” This is in the section titled “Equity vs. Equality.” Equality means everyone is treated the same, but this does not result in equity. Equity means a fair playing field. It is this particular point that Wong adds to the conversation of diversity we haven’t discussed thus far. It’s crucial to talk about how the time of this article’s release affects its contents. As the conversation around diversity progresses, more points like Wong’s are added to change what it means for a safe workplace for everyone.
  2. In chapter 8 of They Say, I Say, the authors employ a variety of techniques to make connections between different parts of a piece of writing. In Cori Wong’s article she uses some of these techniques herself, connecting part to part throughout the article. One example of this is in the following paragraph: “While diversity often refers to representation of difference, inclusion refers to how differences are meaningfully incorporated and integrated into daily practices. As such, a better way to frame the commitment to be more equitable and inclusive would start by asking, ‘Who is not represented at the proverbial table? In what ways have we kept some people out.'” She uses the beginning explaining a definition for diversity and uses the transition “as such,” to begin the next sentence in taking the definition elsewhere, asking a counter on top of it. This technique is effective because it ties two points together seamlessly. It informs the reader the next point is similar but different and will be adding a new thought on top of it.