Austin and Pisano’s book on the importance of the employment and potentials of neurodiverse individuals opened another door to the diversity issue that goes beyond gender and race. In the very beginning of the book, the authors used the example of a man who is part of the autism spectrum, with extraordinary skills in the IT department, yet he suffers from lack of employment for a long time due to his behavior not accepted in the communication-normative environment of large corporations. Austin and Pisano also showed how larger tech companies such as Microsoft have already begun neurodiversity hires with great success, and that what they bring to the workplace includes sets of skills that the “neuro-normal” person do not have.
Author: Timothy Tin Yiu Li
Discussion Questions Week 3
Response #1
I will definitely want to look into the lack of diversity in the history department as well as history curriculum. History classes in general are very Eurocentric and while the US is a global player, the historical content on African and Asian history is significantly lacking. The sources that I will pick are journal articles, mainly dealing with education and previous examples of diversity in history. Since the topic is so specific, I will mainly search for articles written by historians. For the tools that I will use, I think that I will try to go for the SU student library.
Response #2
Kaplan and Donovan’s views are that the intention of diversity hire matters, while Austin and Pisano’s writings emphasizes the action itself. Personally, I find that one cannot escape from the other. I believe that the act itself does not come into fruition until the will to act upon it is there. If your intention is to merely look better in terms of equality hire due to pressure or you only hire a very specific minority group because of your assumptions, then the whole idea of diversity hire is not in the right place.
History lessons: inequality, diversity and the national curriculum
The sense of belonging of an individual coming from an ethnic minority background is usually quite complex in their newly adopted country, and Claire Alexander and Debbie Weekes-Bernard present the obstacles that Britain faces with their introduction of their new curriculum. In 2014, the revised history curriculum became a controversial issue due to what many perceived as a nationalistic and ethnocentric take on the long history of Britain. This was mainly reflected by the receivers of this curriculum, the student population, being increasingly diverse. Statistics have shown that in the UK, students from Indian and Chinese backgrounds consistently outperform native White British students academically, and that demographically speaking, around 20% of England and Wales’s population are of non-White British minority backgrounds. When the British government is trying to create a sense of belonging for the younger population, is it the right choice to solely focus on the past of the native population? Over the course of Britain’s history, it went from a Celtic island conquered by continental Germanic-speaking Anglo-Saxons, went through a Latinization process with the Norman Invasion of 1066, and created the largest empire in history encompassing most of North America, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent. This means that when students learn about the legacy of the British Empire, instead of just the minority the native British became in this commonwealth, the students should learn about the contributions and affects the colonized African and Asian populations created for the empire.
Alexander, C., & Weekes-Bernard, D. (2017). History lessons: Inequality, diversity and the national curriculum. Race Ethnicity and Education, 20(4), 478–494. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2017.1294571
5 Rhetorical Moves
- The first paragraph of the article is a personal anecdote about Webb’s life experience at the airport, and already there is a clear narrative. Bogost wishes to use these experience stories to explain his point about diversity in tech, and this is the best way to have the reader sympathize with an issue. In the second paragraph, the reader finds out about Webb’s background, and more information is provided. This serves to give credibility to the identity of the subject in the writing.
- The second is the rhetorical question asked by Charles Isbell, “Are we interested in diversity, or are we interested in integration?”. Readers are forced to reconsider their assumptions about the basic necessity of inclusion or whether there is more to the reasons for having a wider range of talent as well as ethnicities that can benefit the market.
- Another rhetorical move would be idiom, where Kamau Bobb talks about how in Silicon Valley, the primary concern for diversity is so that it fits within the current system and not to upset it, and that if there are any bonuses for social and moral responsibility, that would just be gravy. If only the last part is mentioned, the reader would not understand the wider context.
- Metaphor is used when Webb stated her concern with the idea that every kid has to learn to code, using the term of nuts and bolts to describe the actions of basic coding. The reason for that use is to demonstrate the poor quality with the problem of too many young coders.
- The final rhetorical move that I chose is the oxymoron. Bogost wrote about how the tech industry is improving with its diversity, but that overall it is still terrible. That gives the reader the sense of progress that the tech industry still needs to make even with that small glimmer of hope.
Unit 3 Reflection
As we began our work in this summer, I believed that most of our work will simply revolve around workplace diversity from reading all the assigned articles. But after some time, as we delved into topics that we are personally interested in, it became more interesting for me since we had to connected all the dots, with all our previous readings, and I had to figure out how I can connect organizational culture, diversity, as well as my area of interest, history, into one presentation. And out of all the readings, the book They Say I Say really showed me a new way of writing. I also thought that university-level writing has to be overly complicated, filled with complex vocabulary only professionals in the field will understand. But the conversational style taught in the reading made me understand that the writer has to connect with the reader and that that is the essential point. It became clear to me that whether your style of writing is formal or casual wasn’t the main problem, but how the reader feels in playing a part in the writing as well. Working on this project, I learned to utilize tools that I haven’t used over the few years in Syracuse, especially the Student Library. Since my major is in industrial design, I rarely used the library site until now, and I was really surprised by the amount of information and educating articles that I found. Because of this, I will continue to use tools such as Google Scholar and Web of Knowledge for my future endeavors of writing.
Writing has never been something that I am particularly good at, and my interest in the area was not especially high since rarely did I have the opportunity to express my viewpoints this way. But over the course of this summer, writing so much about my firm belief in the necessity of history education improvement gave me a new confidence in writing, and it is a preparation for me to get my views across in the future, especially in the workplace. Just like I wrote before, my understanding of TSIS changed my overall style of writing as well, and because of that, presenting my point no longer needs to seem like a lecture on paper, but an invitation for conversation. In industrial design, we often learn about the increasing “democratization” of design among the designer and the target consumers, meaning that the field of design is no longer a strictly exclusive group. The conversational style of writing in TSIS is similar, and maybe we are getting closer to the democratization of writing as well.
Although this writing course is only a few months long, and it is very likely that many of us will forget about this class a few years into the future, I think that the content that I researched for my final project and the book TSIS will be a part of me in the coming future. Once an idea is out of your head and placed in solid form, it will stick with you. As for everyone reading this, I hope you will enjoy this coming fall semester and have a pleasant rest of the year.
Final Project – Tim
The presentation of this final project will be in the forms of posters, easy to spot and easy to read for the student population and history faculty alike. The purpose of this project is to point out the current problem with the lack of diversity within the history department as well as history curriculum as a whole, and through an infographic I wish to spread this information as well as a possible solution.
Final Project Draft – Tim
This is the draft of my final project, and the target audience is members of academia and specifically members of the history community. The current curriculum of historical education is still quite limited and confined very much to the modern nation state. Even when teaching about foreign countries and cultures, many western textbooks will refer to history in Africa, Asia or even Oceania as their national histories, when the modern form of nationhood is very much Eurocentric. I hope that my work will allow individuals interested in bettering historical education to understand the urgent need to diversify the curriculum.
Research Portfolio – Tim
Discussion 7/5
Response #1
I found Caitlin’s focusing on gender diversity in the police force to be intriguing. In the article, several female interviewees from the Canadian police department were asked about their experiences with discrimination, and various factors were noted which made them feel that way (such as the treatment pre- and post-pregnancy, examinations that give advantages to males, and etc.) For years, the female makeup of the Canadian police force stabilized at 13% and does not correlate to the sex ratio in Canada (from figures 1 and 2). In the TED video that came along, a woman that rose in ranks from officer to police chief pointed out the benefits of having women in the police force. This video was interesting to me because I remember many years ago when I read a report about criminal psychology and interrogation within the police department, and that an outstanding amount of criminals are willing to confess if the interrogator is a woman. I don’t know if studies have changed over the years, but if this maintains to be the case then having more women within the force should become a necessity, not out of social obligation but out of the will to increase the efficiency of the police department.
Response #3
Bogost’s article was a great read since it was similar to Austin/Pisano’s style of writing: a storytelling narrative. The audience follows the journey of Amy Webb, and we have the ability to empathize with her after reading through her experiences at the airport and truly understanding her problems. But writing a post simply in a storytelling method does not guarantee success, and Bogost managed to capture the reader’s attention with his transitions. Strong transitions in the article such as “But that’s an aspirational hope” and “Those efforts have merit” easily helps to bring the reader to the author’s next point.
Project Proposal – Tim
My project will be examining why the academic field of history is lacking in ethnic diversity as well as the range of global history taught in secondary education. In terms of the employment of ethnic minorities in academia in the field of history, I wish to understand if the employment today reflect the reality of the population demographics of the West. For example, this project aims to discover the historical education curriculum in places such as Great Britain, and how much of it reflects the nation’s colonial past and the diverse populations that played a major part in the trajectory of the country’s modern history. A closer example would be the United States, and how much of the historic content taught in classes are spent outside of the domestic issues and the Second World War. This study will also look into the benefits of a more diverse employment of ethnic minorities who can shed new light on their experiences as well as their respective ethnic group’s contributions to the history of their adopted homes. Another topic this project will look into is how the history curriculum can change to adapt to a more diverse America today. Perhaps through this project’s research, I can present a better reflection for the field of history.