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).