Week 3: Post 3

As a Judicial Officer, I found the Kinesic Code I: Body Movement and Gesture (Trenholm, 2008, p. 115) to be especially useful during informal conferences and formal disciplinary hearings with students. When I began working with students who violated the Student Conduct Code (when I was attending school and employed at Ball State University [IN]), my supervisor enrolled me and my colleague in a training focused on the practical application of nonverbal communication/communication theory. Although I was a Communication and Rhetorical Studies major in college, I never comprehensively explored nonverbal messages and their impact on verbal communication and personal relationships. The daylong workshop trained me and Danielle (my colleague) to recognize fallacy in our students’ version of “what happened” during their incident. The presenter, similar to Trenholm (2008), emphasized “the rest of the body … as equally expressive” (p. 117) and to utilize a student’s nonverbal communication to further investigate a case. I have to admit, both the training and refreshing the experience with this reading allows me to “check-in” with myself and reflect on how I am performing in my position. For me, it’s not about finding a student “guilty” or “not guilty,” but figuring out if there’s a larger concern for the student underneath the behavior, which is why the student made the decision to violate the code. If I’m not conscious about observing these behaviors, then I may do the student a disservice by ignoring or neglecting “hidden information about [student’s] emotional states” (p. 118).