I think I posted this in the wrong spot, so I am posting it again. Sorry for the double posting.
I was wondering if I need to narrow my topic or "organizational problem" for the paper. Here is what I was thinking: The Dean of the College has this philosophy or vision. That philosophy/vision is that the college would have three components 1. Academic, 2. Professional (this includes faculty that are also professionals in the field of fine arts) and 3. Community (this involves integrating the college with the community). The problem being how to get the people in the college to embrace this concept of not just concentrating on the area that they are directly involved in, but to think about the other areas too. Not sure if that makes sense. My questions is- Is the above topic too large or should I try to narrow it to a specific problem? If anyone has any feedback I would appreciate it. Thanks. Kathy
4 comments:
Hey there - to keep your sanity, I would suggest narrowing your focus to one of the vision components - integrating the college with the community sounds like a "juicy" topic; or, getting faculty and staff to think outside their areas of specialization to reach out to the community. Maybe defining "community" will help narrowing your topic more...??? I dunno, one can go kooky thinking in these layers!
I think this is a very interesting problem and I don’t think it is too large. Instituting a new vision or changing an old one is an enormous task. Maybe, if you look at select groups\constituencies\stakeholders to determine buy-in, it would be easier to get your arms around. Because you are looking for specifics (or the lack thereof), it might be easier than you think to limit the scope.
I’ve been associated with a couple of (dysfunctional) organizations that were attempting to institute a new vision or mission statement. The problem is that a lot of these concepts are very ethereal; we are being asked to adopt a new mindset, but there was no way to measure progress because they fail to include accountability.
Hi Kathy- I do not think this topic is too broad. If you wanted to narrow it down, you could always focus more on one of the three areas that you feel people in the department are having the hardest time integrating into their everyday work lives.
I agree with maybe narrowing it to one of the visions..and that integrating the college with the community would be a great! Because it can be hard to get people to think outside their areas, so this can cause conflict between the faculty and administration. Then you could explore this from the different lenses and come up with different understanding of the issue.
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