As Donna Haraway posits, knowledge is situated. Knowledge is based on experience: there may be universal truths of a concept, but our understanding of said concept must be based on our experience of it.

Despite starting with a link to a thesis, this (The Michigan Daily, the team, the training material) is not an academic setting. The words we have written are words that we personally take as truths or half-truths. While we certainly have some experience to merit these words, we cannot guarantee that these pages are “objectively” correct.

Although there may be more correct materials elsewhere, we encourage you to read through our materials for context specific to our team. The idiosyncratic products, infrastructures and philosophies that we have developed here cannot easily be found through other sources. That is not to say that our ways of working are perfect (or even good); we definitely have our shortcomings. But, we believe it necessary that you understand our experiential and situated understandings such that you can tweak, change or abolish any or all of our products, infrastructures and philosophies. We attempt to hedge on topics that we do not have expertise on (and topics that don’t need team-specific context) by deferring to external sources. My hope is that these materials changes drastically in the years to come as technologies change, as priorities change, as understandings of pedagogy change.

Learning on the job can be effective for some environments. In theory, it allows people to 1) become more quickly integrated into a team and 2) have a greater sense of purpose by working on publishable content. This is in contrast to forcing a weeks-long, mostly individual training and onboarding regimen that doesn’t directly result in published work. That said, learning on the job puts the burden on the new member to ask questions about what they don’t know. It is always intimidating to ask questions. Imposter syndrome is real and everyone experiences it, especially people from minoritized groups. This means that more knowledge gaps appear within a team.

To at least somewhat prevent knowledge gaps, there must be a standard knowledge base for the team that people can turn towards in case they do not feel comfortable asking questions. Yes, current training materials do exist, but they are frankly not sufficient to effectively contribute to many of the projects we pursue. This is not to put blame on any single person from previous years of leadership. Leadership has been, and continues to be, consistently overburdened by the existing status quo and pace of projects at The Michigan Daily such that time has not been adequately allocated to work on larger scale and more difficult projects such as providing equitable training and onboarding resources for people.

Our hope is that these materials are flexible. It has been our intent that the materials be written in such a way that they can be used both as reference and as training to accommodate both for people who prefer to start by working and people who prefer to start by training.

Materials were primarily written by @Eric Lau, with contributions from @Frank Wang, @Daniel Chuang, @Angela Voit and @June Hyung Kim.