Week 10: Post 3

As I went back through my posts from the semester, I remembered how much I enjoyed learning about the Kinesic Code I: Body Movement and Gesture. Chapter 5 (Trenholm, 2008) discussed Nonverbal Communication, focusing on body movements and language expressed through gestures. The section on kinesics “[classified] body movement into five categories: emblems, illustrators, regulators, affect displays, and adaptors” (p. 115). Through this section of the reading, I learned these nonverbal communication cues (from the sender) send messages and information to the receiver about their feelings not expressed verbally. I chose this concept because of its correlation with my position as a conduct officer. Not only have I been trained to respond to and pay acute attention to students’ nonverbal messages when discussing their conduct cases, but the subheading in this section of the chapter provided me with new perspective on my work. After reading this chapter, I decided to put some of it into practice, using the summer to pilot my skills learned from the chapter.

Week 10: Post 2

One of the most important things I learned about this class is that on-line classes CAN be interactive, you CAN learn (SO MUCH), and it’s possible to be successful. I feared on-line courses for years, but I heard about this class from a friend it came with high praise. I remember telling her, “No, no, I can’t do it even if it’s on-line,” and, although I still believe I need more “practice” with on-line courses, organizing myself, timelines, etc. I am far more confident now (and I loved the content too). In addition, this course taught me to “trust the process.” A professor of mine once told me to trust his instruction and to remember he would not let us fail. He helped me to move beyond the numbers and the letters (and the obsession with control and perfection) and simply engage with the course material, to enmesh myself in the learning. From the beginning of this course, with the first blog instructing us how to set up our own blog and learning all the structure (e.g., 12 hours apart per blog post), I challenged myself to release the fear of existing in the unknown and just “roll with it.” I know this isn’t course concept related, and of course I learned so much from the text and my peers, but I had to do so much personal learning and growth too.

I have a few favorite things about the course:

The text: It was easy to read and exciting to engage in with a great balance of theoretical concepts and practical application and examples. The book was challenging enough so I was not bored, but inviting enough for to want to do the reading. I know my knowledge of the course is better because I read.

The instructor’s guidance and communication with the class: I know one of my peers commented on this during the course and I would agree I have not encountered many instructors who take the time to be so intentional about their instruction and invested and excited about the students’ experience. The Blogging Prof’s passion certainly permeated and improved my commitment to the course.

The Cultural Event Paper: I am not a researcher, I am a practitioner so this was a fabulous opportunity to “get my hands dirty” and see the course in action. I had honest fun with this assignment and I am still attending the meetings I wrote about in my paper!

The blogs: This was a great opportunity to engage with my peers and stretch my perspectives. I always felt surrounded by great minds and I valued the experience to engage in a new way with my peers. I felt safe to post my positions and I appreciated people’s care for one another and willingness to reply with an opinion not appeasement.

While it’s not my “LEAST FAVORITE” thing about the course, I would have liked to interact with my classmates (at least once). I guess meeting would defeat the purpose of an on-line course and I support the (somewhat) ambiguity about it, but there’s just something about meeting my peers I would have enjoyed, or maybe finding a way to have us work together one something. In addition, I believe Eleanor Rigby made a comment about the journals due date. I agree with her. Again, responsibility on self completely, but I kept reading “journals are due at the end of the semester,” so, in my head, I was thinking THIS week, not July 29^TH. While I attended, observed, or lived my journals during the assigned times, I was not well structured when writing them. For me, having them due every second or third week would have supported me completing them on time (that’s just how I usually work best).

I do not have any important comments for how to improve the course. I believe the work was enough for a 10-week course to keep me engaged, but it was not overwhelming.

Week 10: Post 1

One of my closest friends told me years ago she does not believe in creating “expectations” because they always lead to either disappointment or failure. While this may seem “pessimistic,” it has actually helped with me with feeling disillusioned in numerous situations. With that said, I had no expectations of coming into this course. I wanted to be stretched in my thinking and my opinions and I wanted to learn concepts I could apply to both my personal and professional life.

SUCCESS!

While not a “concept” and, also, more related to the second question, I have to say I learned more from my peers in this class than most of the courses I have taken. In undergrad, I remember going through courses with students who would NEVER speak. I knew they had to have something to say, but elements in our classroom environment altered and even halted their verbal participation. In my opinion, all of the students lost out on enriching their learning because the space was not conducive for opinions to be expressed without fear of judgment or ridicule. Although it was “required” to participate in our (COMM 105P) discussions, I appreciated the trust each person gave to their peers and responded for themselves, from their experiences, not for the appeasing of the instructor.

Ok, off the remix and back to the prompt, three of the concepts I found most interesting were:

Giving Effective Feedback (p. 166-168)

Barriers to Intercultural Communication (p. 349-355)

Ethnographic Research (p. 379-382)

As a supervisor, improving on my ability to provide my employees with useless feedback for their development is critical to my success as a manager. I have utilized Trenholm’s (2008) “rules” to improve my competence at communicating this information to my staff members. Recently, I had to provide feedback on an employees work performance, not because it was a formal review, but because she was coming in everyday between 8:20am and 8:40am (she is scheduled to begin work at 8:00am). Using these rules as a guideline, I was able to express my concern, discuss her behavior, and most importantly, I “[avoided] apologizing for [my] feelings} (p. 167).

Simply, I just enjoyed the chapter on Intercultural Communication. In my SJSU work environment, specifically, I live in cross-cultural communication from the moment I enter my building until the time I drive home (and it continues where I live, a primarily Spanish-speaking apartment complex). I appreciate these sections and have utilized them to remind me of the constant practice necessary to be an effective intercultural communicator.

As I discussed in an earlier post, I continue to be fascinated by the potential of knowledge gained through story-telling and ethnographic research. I support it as a methodology and appreciate the opportunity for “conclusions to emerge from observations” (Trenholm, 2008, p. 374).

Week 9: Post 3

As I went back through my initial reading and notes from of Chapter 2, I found numerous comments in the margins of the “Elements of a Psychological Model” and “Improving Faulty Communication” sections. The notes I had made about “communication as a psychological process” (Trenholm, 2008, p. 26) became more useful to me as I considered the concepts in terms of coordination with (and without) coherence when sending and receiving communication messages. As a sender, if you communicate with your receiver and the receiver sends back a cohesive message, you have accomplished communication with coordination and coherence. However, if the sender communicates with the receiver and clarifying questions are asked or the retort does not align with the message of the sender then communicate was coordinated (i.e., went from sender to receiver), but it was not coherent (between the sender and receiver). As Trenholm (2008) offers critique to the psychological model, she states “communication is unsuccessful whenever the meaning intended by the source differ from the meaning interpreted by the receiver” (p. 27). In my margin I wrote “intent vs impact.” This concept helps me to remember the importance of considering your experiences and environment when communicating to others. Often, in the social justice and diversity trainings I’ve attended, someone (usually without fail!) says something “they didn’t mean to come out the way it did” and the messages impacts a person (or a group) negatively (most times opposite of what the sender intended).

Week 9: Post 2

When I reflected on the pragmatic perspective of Chapter 2, I found a personal connection to the statement “[the pragmatic perspective] urges us to look carefully at patterns that emerge as people play the communication game” (Trenholm, 2008, p. 32). From the moment I began to argue (age 3 ;)) with my father, I learned more and more about our patterns of communication in argument and how to “win.” As a child, communication with my father was unequal because he was “the parent” and he often told me “what I say goes because I pay the bills!” As I aged, I learned how I could benefit from our interactions, arguing for compromise or “payoff” for both of us. Still, our relationship remained tense and strained. I honestly don’t think my father realized I’d be able to pick up on his patterns so well or would I learn how to “push his buttons” so well (for my gain). Our fighting became more about competition and I know, as I now have hindsight of those experiences, I barely remember what we were fighting about and the reasons we struggled to find peace in our relationship. As the pragmatic perspective suggests, my father and I reached a point where we recognized no one was benefiting from our arguments. As I matured through college, we found the means to “work out patterns of interaction [to] satisfy both of [us]” (Trenholm, 2008, p. 34). This allowed us to develop a mutual respect for the other and to practice civility when in disagreement.

Week 9: Post 1

So, I had a moment of déjà vu when asked to answer this prompt. Didn’t I already answer this one?! LOL

The social constructionist perspective “emphasizes the relationship between communication and culture” (Trenholm, 2008, p. 25). The social constructionist model of communication explicates the role of communication to be like an adhesive, utilizing it, in practice, to bring together individual experiences and create a shared understanding of reality. For me, a critical understanding of this perspective came after I reread a primary concern with effective communication under the social constructionist model. Trenholm (2008) stated, “it emphasizes that we should take responsibility for the things we talk about and the way we about them” (p. 31). Because an understanding of “reality” is a collection of culture, language, and values, this model reminds us no message we receive through communication comes to us untainted. Therefore, we internalize messages, create stereotypes, and normalize (and perpetrate) oppression(s). Trenholm (2008) reminds us “that symbols have the power to control us” (p. 31) and it’s important to recognize our preconceived notions.

Recently, a colleague of mine, who is Muslim-identified and who was raised until age thirteen in southwest Asia, had a conversation with me about her biases toward Christian denominations. She shared with me how she was raised around an equal distribution of Muslims and Catholics practicing in her home community. In addition, her family consciousness of world religions was enriched by Buddhist teachings and educational trips to monasteries. Although one would think she’d remain neutral and open to differing religious perspectives once she moved to the United States, she felt inundated with billboards, bracelets, bumper stickers, street preachers, and t-shirts promoting Christian denominations as “the way.” In her home country, there are minimal proclamations for one religion over another and there is less persuasion or judgment for one religion over another. It wasn’t until our conversation about how she was struggling to work through her biases that I realized how ubiquitous these messages are, even in San Jose. Since arriving in the U.S. the messages about being a practicing (and proud) Muslim have shifted dramatically for her; she experiences more fear of disclosure and more concern for her safety based on the power and communication messages of symbols.

Week 8: Post 3

A friend of mine who will be beginning the graduate program in COMM Studies this fall has often expressed how his performance studies course as an undergraduate “changed his life!” Because of this course, he realized it was possible to use his passion for performance “as a tool for research” (Trenholm, 2008, p. 392) and continue to study the field of communication. While I understand performance studies and performance as research are not fresh to the profession, I did not have any performance course options at my undergraduate so I find this methodology interesting. Until I learned more from him and read this section of Chapter 13, I rarely considered how often we engage in performance to be evaluated (from a research perspective). Although I am apprehensive to enroll in a performance class, I think, as Trenholm (2008) stated, I would feel more “[liberated ... and] try on new identities and express unfamiliar emotions” (p. 391). I would like to explore what it would be like to stretch myself beyond the “comfortable” through performance.