Communicating and Collaborating

Just as a skilled child care provider will change body position to meet the eye level of a child, and adjusts tone of voice and vocabulary to match what the child understands, so do I adjust my communications with different individuals or groups. This is what other-mindedness is all about, learning what the communication needs of the other person are, and meeting them to better understand and to be better understood. And because all individuals have their own cultural identities, I believe that the most important and the most challenging communication strategy for me to use is to be non-judgemental. Asking questions to clarify my communication partners' intentions will help me to better understand their ideas, and remaining neutral, or non-judgemental, will help me to stay in the conversation without getting lost in my own emotions that could become stirred by what I have heard. I believe that most are skilled at talking about themselves. When I can give another person the opportunity to talk about one's self, I am building a relationship of trust, and the other person reveals more as the communication continues. This is so easily observed with young children. Sit at the lunch table with four year olds and ask them about their lunch or their favorite foods. Soon they will be telling you everything. The topic that people know the most about is themselves, and children will talk about what they know best. After talking and listening during lunch to a child with challenging behavior, I have learned that the child's father has been released from jail and is back at home. Now my communication with this child's parents is not so much about changing the child, but about support for some stressful conditions at home. To communicate more effectively with each culturally different person I encounter, I would like to

• remain non-judgemental
• ask questions to clarify the person's viewpoints, and
• encourage the other person to talk about his or her ideas and experiences, and talk less about my own.

Communiction on TV

Observing the Nickelodeon television show, Digrassi, without sound, non-verbal behavior seemed mostly easy to read. There are several sub-plots on this show about social problems that high school teens encounter and how they solve them. In this episode, a boy was shrink-wrapped, presumably naked, to the school flagpole. As a group of boys were addressed individually by adults in the gym, the perpetrator looked guilty with his face looking to the floor, and speaking to the adults with his head in a low position.  The two male adults seemed bothered by the woman adult who questioned the guilty boy close to him. She smiled as she spoke, but the other adults had perplexed looks on their faces.She left the gym quickly.Without words, she may have been the principal making threats. The spoken lines revealed that she was the bullied child's mother making threats to find out who had hazed her son. Later, when the two boys spoke in the hall, they were physically close, face to face, with serious expressions.The hazed boy put his finger on the chest of the aggressor. They looked directly at each other. The spoken lines revealed a plan for revenge by the hazing victim. In another social dilemma between two girls, the leader of a dance group was challenged by a girl set on showing her up. Both of these girls smiled at each other while speaking. Without sound, they might have been friends in disagreement. The challenger used rapidly changing facial expressions, from smiling to haughty. Both girls communicated at a physical distance. With sound, one girl smiled as she spoke in a conciliatory manner, The challenger spoke insults through her smile.
It was easy to identify the roles of the boys and men during the soundless viewing. The close physical proximity to each other and facial expressions were clear indicators of what they communicated to each other. The girls and women, however, were not so easily read. Smiling is usually an indicator of positive feeling and intentions, yet in the spoken viewing, challenges and insults were communicated through smiles. In contrast to the boys in conflict, the girls were physically positioned as if they stood on either side of an invisible line.
Perhaps these television programs are reinforcing the widely accepted belief that female communication is complicated and is not always as it seems. In addition, they provide a model for young girls, soon to enter adulthood, for communication that is deceitful, as these girls smiled though they were angry and competitive. This viewing affirms my disdain for television, and supports my parenting restrictions on television viewing for my children and grandchildren over the past 25 years.

What is Communication?

    

 A few years ago, Yale University researchers published a report that exposed a shocking number of children expelled from preschool (Gilliam, 2005). I witnessed a spontaneous, bring-down-the-house speech at a local press conference that featured the grant project for which I work. Our agency had invited a few parents and child care center directors to attest to the success of our tax-based grant at retaining children with special and behavioral needs in their preschool programs, contrary to the Yale report. Our child care center director arrived just as the interviews were beginning, and was surprised to learn that she was not a guest, but a guest speaker, and was escorted to her seat behind the table set with microphones. After a series of rather boring speakers, the child care center director rose from her seat, moved out from behind the table, and addressed the cameras and audience in a calm, clearly projected voice. Her hands were clasped in front of her, and she made eye contact around the room, unlike the agency higher-ups who stuttered reading through their notes. She used a slow, evenly paced voice to announce what she would talk about, gave some facts and experiences, and briefly re-stated what she had just presented. I was stunned to hear and see such a smooth impromptu peformance after witnessing a series of CEO's stumble through dry data that they had prepared for the occasion. Joan the Director exuded confidence, used concise, effective speech, spoke slowly enough to be heard, made eye contact with her audience, and smiled slightly while she spoke. She was persuasive in defending the value of the program. The manner in which she communicated her testimony was far more convincing than higher management who did not use these speech techniques. Public speaking is only one form of communication, but the goal is the same for public or personal, that the speaker be heard and understood by the listener(s). Joan the Director attributed her communication skills to practice with a group called Toastmasters.

More can be learned about public speaking and general communication skills at http://www.toastmasters.org .
References:
Gilliam, W.S. (2005). Prekindergarteners left behind:Expulsion rates in state prekindergarten programs. Retrieved from http://childstudycenter.yale.edu/zigler/publications/34775_National%20Prek%20Study_expulsion%20brief.pdf