Over the past few weeks, I have really enjoyed working on my creative capstone project for this course. It has served as a means for me to have very meaningful conversations with people at the University. I have decided to focus my project to be specific to the College of Engineering because I think the campaign could have a great impact there since there is a very limited amount of cross-cultural education embedded in the curriculum.
I shared a fascinating conversation with one of my professors of biomedical engineering about her experience as a faculty member who is multilingual. I found the conversation to be important to developing a better understanding of the issue. A few of the lasting takeaways from that conversation were that she believes that "immigrants just have to work harder" because of the inherent difficulties with living in another culture/language, she said that proficiency is more important than accent, and people need to be aware of their own biases towards pronunciation when evaluating others.
I had another conversation with the Assistant Director of Student Affairs in the College of Engineering about the more practical aspects of developing a inclusivity campaign in the college. We talk about how it important to make the language used to be accessible to the intended audience. For people who often study topics of identity and culture, terms that we use in discussions are actually rather confusing for others.
I have also done some academic research into studies on the discrimination of multilingual speakers. I believe that these findings should be useful in constructing the posters for the inclusivity campaign that I am developing.
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