Hope all is well with you and your family. I wish you luck with your summer goals, and with your course in the “writing for public engagement” minor. From my perspective it sounds like “writing for a specialized audience” (educators)… an audience that is certified (by states, for K-12, and by degree-granting institutions for college teaching) but still astonishingly diverse. I’m sure you will add value.
I am also sure that the value you add to the community of educators will differ greatly from person to person.
You seem to worry about that, or to be at least preparing for different ways to measure success and maybe failure. That’s what inventive, caring educators do. Not all stakeholders, of course, are inventive or caring. The needs of the profession, and thus the tasks, also change with events. My wife, Rachel Ellner, has been blogging for a decade at Fashion Institute if Technology (https://blog.fitnyc.edu/artanddesign/author/rachel_ellner/ ) What she does in this half-time job is best characterized as public relations and she does occasionally teach communications in FIT’s business school. The blog is there to tell prospective students what FIT ‘s School of Art & Design has to offer, to glorify current faculty and students and to recognize alumni. She also tweets daily to keep their attention. A colleague handles Instagram and a few other odds & ends. The school’s external relations folks pick up her stuff because they are too far removed from the individual schools and departments.
But when COVID hit she started documenting how different departments in her school were handling remote teaching in a field that requires enormous amount of hands-on “lab” work. The FIT faculty pivoted well, and Rachel’s approach was touted throughout the SUNY system. Honestly, not rocket science. She started by asking faculty what they would be doing, then kept going back to document how well it was working out and what they had found worked.
The good ideas spread around the system and accomplished the original goals anyway. FIT got a lot of industry support and interest among prospective students. She has not been back to her office since March 13, 2020.
When I taught journalism full-time at Columbia, my admonition to students was always the same: You write for your audience. PR folks and political campaign consultants know this well. Journalists and educators, not so much. One of my daughters is a world-class epidemiologist and also chief writer for a large nonprofit foundation that helps develop COVID mitigation plans. She teaches epidemiology at a well-known university. The foundation is so sick of being attacked by the right wing in social media, and so worried about security, that her work has been confidential for a year. But her staff’s work depends on delivering the right message for each audience, worldwide.
At first glance, the anti-mask, anti-vax screaming on Fox by a former Levi’s brand manager is the same as Rand Paul deliberately mis-reporting COVID science. They are not the same. One is a murderer who knows exactly what he is doing. The other is someone who is good in one field (marketing) and has decided she’s better in medicine than anyone else as well. She is right in that very young kids tend not to get symptomatic COVID, but ignores the fact they can spread it like crazy. Neither individual is fertile ground for being convinced otherwise.
The Obama Administration, faced with an H1N1 flu epidemic (iObama's team won that battle), wrote a 70-page manual (https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6819268/Pandemic-Playbook.pdf) on this. The Trump Administration ignored it. More people have died and will die in the USA as a result – probably 200,000 or more.
Marty,
Hope all is well with you and your family. I wish you luck with your summer goals, and with your course in the “writing for public engagement” minor. From my perspective it sounds like “writing for a specialized audience” (educators)… an audience that is certified (by states, for K-12, and by degree-granting institutions for college teaching) but still astonishingly diverse. I’m sure you will add value.
I am also sure that the value you add to the community of educators will differ greatly from person to person.
You seem to worry about that, or to be at least preparing for different ways to measure success and maybe failure. That’s what inventive, caring educators do. Not all stakeholders, of course, are inventive or caring. The needs of the profession, and thus the tasks, also change with events. My wife, Rachel Ellner, has been blogging for a decade at Fashion Institute if Technology (https://blog.fitnyc.edu/artanddesign/author/rachel_ellner/ ) What she does in this half-time job is best characterized as public relations and she does occasionally teach communications in FIT’s business school. The blog is there to tell prospective students what FIT ‘s School of Art & Design has to offer, to glorify current faculty and students and to recognize alumni. She also tweets daily to keep their attention. A colleague handles Instagram and a few other odds & ends. The school’s external relations folks pick up her stuff because they are too far removed from the individual schools and departments.
But when COVID hit she started documenting how different departments in her school were handling remote teaching in a field that requires enormous amount of hands-on “lab” work. The FIT faculty pivoted well, and Rachel’s approach was touted throughout the SUNY system. Honestly, not rocket science. She started by asking faculty what they would be doing, then kept going back to document how well it was working out and what they had found worked.
The good ideas spread around the system and accomplished the original goals anyway. FIT got a lot of industry support and interest among prospective students. She has not been back to her office since March 13, 2020.
When I taught journalism full-time at Columbia, my admonition to students was always the same: You write for your audience. PR folks and political campaign consultants know this well. Journalists and educators, not so much. One of my daughters is a world-class epidemiologist and also chief writer for a large nonprofit foundation that helps develop COVID mitigation plans. She teaches epidemiology at a well-known university. The foundation is so sick of being attacked by the right wing in social media, and so worried about security, that her work has been confidential for a year. But her staff’s work depends on delivering the right message for each audience, worldwide.
At first glance, the anti-mask, anti-vax screaming on Fox by a former Levi’s brand manager is the same as Rand Paul deliberately mis-reporting COVID science. They are not the same. One is a murderer who knows exactly what he is doing. The other is someone who is good in one field (marketing) and has decided she’s better in medicine than anyone else as well. She is right in that very young kids tend not to get symptomatic COVID, but ignores the fact they can spread it like crazy. Neither individual is fertile ground for being convinced otherwise.
The Obama Administration, faced with an H1N1 flu epidemic (iObama's team won that battle), wrote a 70-page manual (https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6819268/Pandemic-Playbook.pdf) on this. The Trump Administration ignored it. More people have died and will die in the USA as a result – probably 200,000 or more.